by Gwen Florio
Thomas’s mouth twisted downward. “People will be scoring political points all over the place at this meeting. People who like the mine, people who hate it. I’ll be up even later tonight than I was last night. Studying.”
Naomi nodded approval. “It’ll be good practice for you to see how something like that works. The more you learn about tribal government now, the better.”
She’d said Thomas would go to law school. Apparently politics was next on the agenda, Lola thought. Once again, she found herself hoping Thomas was on board with the plan. “Where’s Window Rock?” she asked. She’d studied a map of the reservation during their drive down, but beyond being impressed at its immense size, sprawling into three states and surrounding the Hopi Reservation, she had little concept of what was where.
“It’s on the New Mexico border, a couple of hours away. They’re going to hold the meeting this afternoon to give people from all over the reservation time to get there, and then get home again safe. Window Rock’s near Gallup,” Naomi said, as though that explained something.
Lola lifted a shoulder. “So?”
“Gallup’s off-rez.”
Lola’s shoulder fell. “Oh.”
Naomi didn’t have to say anything else. The Navajo Reservation, like so many, was dry. The outskirts of Gallup, then, would be lined with liquor stores run by people who self-righteously proclaimed that no one forced their customers to overindulge. Lola thought of people going into town to tie one on, and then making the two-hour drive home—or more, depending on where they lived—weaving their way through the blackness on unlit two-lane roads, maybe with kids and elders in the car. The shoulders of rural roads all over the West were dotted with white crosses. Indian reservations, with their disproportionate struggles with alcoholism, too often featured whole forests of the grim markers.
“We’ll want to get on the road early, then.” Lola’s words were a reminder to herself, but she spoke aloud.
Naomi resumed her station at the stove, turning pancakes with renewed assurance. “Gar! Charlie! Girls!” she called. “Lola’s eating your breakfast. Sorry,” she said to Lola as the others entered the kitchen, the girls shouldering their way past their fathers. Juliana went directly to Thomas and wrapped her arms around one of his legs. He reached down and hugged her.
“We’ve all got a long day ahead of us,” Naomi said. “But you won’t have anything to worry about. You’ll be long gone by the time the meeting starts. And besides, your route home doesn’t take you anywhere near Window Rock, so there won’t be any traffic.” She pulled four plates from the cupboard and placed a pancake on each.
Margaret looked from Naomi to Lola. “We’re going home?”
“You’re going home?” echoed Thomas. The closest thing Lola had seen to a smile crossed his face.
“Yes,” Edgar answered for Lola. “They’re going home.”
Lola permitted herself a small smile in return. “No,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Lola tapped into the domestic goddess buried very deeply within, once again taking the spatula from Naomi. She urged her to sit with the others. “After all,” she said, the sweetness dripping from her voice rivaling that of the syrup that Charlie sloshed across his plate, “you’re putting us up. We should be waiting on you.”
“That’s right.” Charlie threw Lola a look that told her he didn’t know what she was up to, but that he was willing to go along. He poured orange juice. “Margaret? Juliana? Big glass or little?”
“Little, please,” said Juliana. Margaret’s eyes narrowed to slits. Like her father, she knew something was up. Unlike him, she’d yet to acquire a poker face.
Lola saw the storm clouds gathering above Margaret, ready to rain questions, and moved quickly to clear them. “We can see that you two are going to be buried with work, at least until somebody catches this guy,” she said to Naomi and Edgar. “It only makes sense that we stay and help you out on the home front.” Margaret’s eyebrows shot skyward. All Lola had done was raise more questions in her daughter’s mind. Lola turned to Naomi and inserted the knife. “And the girls are getting along so well. Juliana is Margaret’s only cousin—only first cousin,” she quickly amended. As far as she could tell, Indian people regarded every other member of their tribe as some sort of cousin. She jiggled the knife. “It seems a shame to rob them of this time together.”
“I don’t know—” Edgar began. He’d yet to tame his hair into its styled pompadour and it stood up in clumps. A few unshaven hairs bristled from his chin. He rubbed the back of his hand against them.
“Our talk last night,” Lola said to him. “That made it easy to stay.”
“What talk?” Naomi and Charlie said together.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Lola said. “So I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Eddie—Gar—was up, too. Somehow we got into the importance of family. It made me realize how crazy it would be to squander this time, even if we adults don’t get to see much of one another.” Lola turned back to the stove so Edgar wouldn’t see the way her saccharine smile kept twitching toward a wolfish grin. Nothing like a giant unspoken fuck you to start the day, she thought.
Quickly, while the room was still awash in good feeling, however feigned, Lola gave the knife a last twist. “And we’d like to go to the meeting today, too.”
“What was that about?”
Charlie stood next to Lola at the sink, his arms deep in soapy water. Beside him, Lola wielded a towel on the clean dishes. Naomi had urged them to use the dishwasher, but Charlie insisted upon washing them by hand. “Cleaner that way,” he said, casually insulting Naomi’s Miele.
“You won’t believe what your brother said to me last night,” Lola whispered. Quickly, with an eye on the door, she recounted her conversation with Edgar. “There’s something weird going on here. Everything all nicey-nice by day, and then we get the bum’s rush.”
There was that business with Juliana and the key chain, too. Lola started to say something, then thought better of it. Somehow, it felt like a betrayal to the girl. She’d wait until the subject of the bookbag came up on its own.
Charlie dunked another dish in the rinse water and handed it to Lola. “Eddie can be full of himself. I remember him before he was a jerk. He and I need to get back to that place. So I’m glad you want to stay. Maybe we can work things out.”
Lola polished the dish until it shone. “I thought maybe you were jealous.”
A plate slipped from Charlie’s hands and fell back into the water with a splash. “Of what?”
“His law degree. This.” Lola flapped the towel at the kitchen—the polished stone countertops, Mexican-tile backsplash, and stainless appliances insistently bringing to mind their own kitchen, stuck in the linoleum and avocado-appliance era of Charlie’s parents. “Her.”
Charlie withdrew his arms from the water, shook off the soapsuds, and wrapped them around Lola. Damp seeped through her shirt. “What good would fancy degrees do me in Magpie? They’d just price me out of the one place where I want to live. And what would you do with a kitchen like this? Cook? I don’t think so.” Lola, her face buried in his chest, let a laugh escape. “As to her—if you ever start running around in makeup and designer jeans, I’ll know you’ve taken up with some other guy. Because this one likes you the way you are. Well, except for the fact that you are a little pale.”
Lola pulled free, gave the dishtowel a twirl, and popped it against his butt. She danced away laughing as he came after her with a pan of soapy water, threatening to dump it over that curly head of hers if he could only catch her.
“Whoa,” Charlie said, behind her. “We’ve got company.”
Margaret and Juliana stood in the doorway, Margaret shaking her head at her parents’ antics with the resigned patience of one entirely too familiar with the scenario. Juliana looked baffled.
“It’s okay,” Lola reassu
red her. “Your Uncle Charlie is a bit of a goofball, that’s all.”
“Auntie Lola is the one who’s the goofball,” Charlie said.
Something swelled up within Lola. Auntie. A term much in use on the reservation, applied to the women who occupied the indeterminate range between young marrieds and elders, Auntie was a term of respect, one that Lola had never thought of as applying to herself.
Apparently she wasn’t the only one.
Juliana’s faced smoothed as she returned to more surefooted ground. “Daddy says I don’t have to call you Aunt. I can just call you Lola.” A remark that somehow stung more than all the other insults Lola had endured since her arrival in Arizona.
Apparently unaware of the effect of her words, Juliana prattled on. “Mom and Dad are leaving early for the meeting. Can I go later with you? We can stop and see the dinosaur tracks on the way. I know where they are.”
“I don’t know—” Lola began. What if the crime scene tape was still up? Or the rocks still bloodstained?
“Canyon de Chelly’s on the way, too.” Juliana rushed on, undeterred. “We can stop and look for a few minutes. But if you want to go down into it, you need a guide, just like yesterday. Only it’s bigger, way bigger. We should go back there another day.”
Maybe, Lola thought as her niece basked in her own expertise, Juliana was just trying to curry favor after their middle-of-the-night standoff. She decided to follow the girl’s lead. “Probably not today. We’ll be leaving Bub home long enough as is. But I’d love for you to show us another time.” At least Juliana seemed to have no qualms about spending the rest of the day with her. She wished Juliana’s parents felt the same way.
SIXTEEN
The truck sailed along in the stream of vehicles flowing toward Window Rock, their roofs glinting like sun-swept wavelets. Lola drove, steering around the battered pickups and elderly sedans listing on busted shocks. An occasional Subaru or SUV bespoke a family of tourists, probably wondering how they ended up in the middle of what appeared to be the entire Navajo Nation on the move.
The landscape changed from red to dun and back again, the rocky surface improbably dotted with junipers, the colors reminiscent of Lola’s little-used spice shelf—the dull gold of turmeric, the russet of cinnamon, the faded green of oregano.
Lola wondered how the trees’ roots found enough soil for purchase. Small houses and trailers sat back from the road at miles-apart intervals, most accompanied by hogans. Lola marveled at the variety of the latter—everything from modern stucco or prefab, complete with windows, to makeshift tarpaper-covered frames to old-school log or even, rarely, earth.
An occasional band of sheep foraged among the slim pickings. Most were of the fluffy modern variety that children depicted as cotton balls on legs, but every so often Lola saw a few churro sheep, elegant with their silky long hair, the rams sporting four extravagantly curved horns.
Charlie pointed his chin at the sheep. “It’s a miracle any are left.” He recounted a story Naomi had told him, about how, back in the day, the federal government had deemed the Navajo Nation overgrazed. Their solution—to eliminate the majority of the sheep that were very nearly as important to the Diné as the bison had been to the Plains tribes.
“Sometimes they killed the sheep right in front of the people’s homes. She said the elders told her it was like watching their family being slaughtered. But anybody who objected was arrested.”
Just once, Lola thought, she’d like to hear a story about the tribes that didn’t involve betrayal and death. She knew better than to hold her breath. Such stories always provoked an urge to pull Margaret close, to shield her from the inevitabilities of doubt and prejudice that awaited her. At least, Lola thought, they were a century past the killing years of the Navajo Long March and Cherokee Trail of Tears and Potawatomi Trail of Death, and all the massacres, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee and the Marias and the others. Yet the poverty and substance abuse that arose from the reservations’ isolation and chronic lack of resources took nearly as deadly a toll, albeit one slower-moving and less in the public eye.
“Hey. Lola. Careful. Here’s the turn for Window Rock.”
Lola jerked her attention from the bloody past to the bloody present. The bombings’ death toll was minuscule by comparison to those events chiseled into collective Indian memory, but their outsize effect was evident in the near-traffic jam approaching the Navajo Nation’s capital.
A long coppery bluff sheltered one end of the town. The iconic rock, an upended shelf with a circular opening, overlooked the complex that housed the nation’s headquarters. Lola braked as they passed the Council Chambers and gaped, oblivious to the vehicles backing up behind her. Naomi and Edgar’s house might have been modeled on a traditional hogan, but the chambers upped the ante by several degrees. Inside, Charlie told her, reading from information on his phone, seats for the council’s eighty-eight members were arranged in semicircular rows. Above them, massive logs spoked from a center circle that mimicked a smoke hole.
The meeting was in the local high school, a few miles outside town in the smaller community of Fort Defiance. Lola fell back on her years of reporting and parked as far from the entrance as possible, backing into a space. “Quicker getaway,” she explained when the girls grumbled. “We’ll have to walk farther, but at least we won’t be stuck in traffic.” The high school’s gym, one of the largest in the country, could hold as many as seven thousand people—Charlie, still reading from his phone, supplied the facts as they hurried toward the doors—and appeared to be fast filling to capacity.
“Over there.” Charlie looked across the vast space toward Edgar and Naomi and Thomas, who’d driven together in the Prius. He and Lola each took a girl’s hand and eased through the crowd.
“We saved you seats,” Edgar said. “Good thing you got here when you did. I don’t think we could have held on to these much longer.”
Juliana squeezed in next to Thomas. His whispered “Ya’at’eeh” came at the end of a long, wheezing breath. Lola wondered if he had asthma.
She turned her attention to the people around her. The younger people were in the universal uniform of T-shirts and jeans, the boys’ baggy and drooping, the girls’ tight across high young butts that made Lola sigh in envious remembrance. Elders clustered in the front seats, the grandmothers wearing the long flounced shirts and velveteen tunics that Lola had thought were the stuff of coffee-table books and postcards featuring scenes of long ago. Nearly everyone in the room was brown save for a skinny disheveled guy a couple of rows ahead, whom Lola pegged for an activist, and the reporters corralled in a far corner. Naomi pointed out a group of Hopi sitting together on one side of the room. “The mine affects them, too,” she explained. “The tribes share in the profits.”
Earlier in the day, Lola had shoved her long sleeves up above the elbow because of the heat. Now she unrolled them and tugged them over her wrists, hiding her pale arms. She ducked her head. Not much she could do about the chestnut tangles that fell to her shoulders, an anomaly in a sea of gleaming black hair. She was used to being the lone white person in the room on the Blackfeet Reservation, but there she knew most people. The sting of difference had long since eased. Now it flared anew. Something else, too. Around her, older people chatted easily in Diné.
“The whole meeting will be in our language,” Naomi said. “It’s a rule. But they’ll translate. They’ll have to. Because of him.” She lifted her chin toward a whiteman who sat with several tribal members at the dais. Like them, he wore an open-collared shirt and jeans, but he’d added a blazer. Lola wondered if he took it off when he went outdoors. Studying him more closely, she doubted it. He had the smooth, well-fed look of executives the world over, men who’d reached a stature where the everyday aggravations of mere mortals—heat and hunger, for
example—dared not trouble them. She remembered the herds of young studs from white-shoe firms who roamed Baltimo
re’s streets at lunchtime and after work, in full suits with ties tightly knotted even in the wet-washcloth humidity of a Charm City summer. Or Kabul, where humidity was removed from the equation but the mercury climbed even higher and the sun shone more viciously. Even there, the higher-ups at the UN offices flaunted their suits like uniforms, somehow retaining their starched stiffness, shoes gleaming despite the film of dust that clung to everything else.
The guy on the dais would have fit right in, his incipient paunch kept in check by regular workouts, hair cropped almost close enough to have qualified for shaved, a far better solution to male-pattern baldness than a comb-over. Another white guy sat next to him. No trendy cut for him, just a classic crew. No paunch, either. Even from a distance, Lola could tell that his blue shirt buttoned over a toned abdomen. He likewise wore a blazer, its seams straining across a commanding breadth of shoulder, its hem hiding the gun that almost certainly rode at his hip. Lola pegged him as a cop, probably FBI.
“Who’s he?” Lola indicated the first man.
“Jeff Kerns. Mine manager.” Naomi’s voice retained its same low musicality. And nothing changed in her face, not so much as a twitch in her cheek or a tightening of the skin at the corners of her eyes.
Those eyes, though. Lola hoped she’d never see a tarantula, but she imagined it might have the same sort of gaze, flat and focused and deadly. She was glad she’d pulled her sleeves down so her sudden goose bumps wouldn’t show. She looked away, toward the reporters aiming long lenses at the elders, theirs cameras sounding a dry-leaf rustle of constant clicks.
The story, with its irresistible elements of downtrodden tribe versus big bad corporation, had attracted a scrum of journalists from national organizations and even, if Lola guessed correctly, contingents from France and Germany, countries with a long fascination with all things Native American. The elders in their turquoise jewelry and traditional dress made for irresistible images. Lola studied the reporters, hoping to see a familiar face. There was none. She’d been gone too long from the big-story world, the one that attracted the same predictable group to every unfolding tragedy of sufficient magnitude. The Vultures, they’d called themselves, defiantly adopting the sobriquet sometimes hurled at them by unappreciative subjects. Her own tribe, she thought. Among them, she’d known the rules. Crack relentlessly wise. Be quick with a question and sharp with an elbow when the flock swerved as one toward a particularly interesting subject. Even now, after so many years away from that world, she missed that feeling of surefootedness, of belonging.