by Gwen Florio
“You know what? I’m not as thirsty as I thought. Would you like it?” She expected another “Hmph,” but Betty sipped in silence.
“Shimá”—Juliana glanced toward Lola, and this time translated—“my mother, can I show Margaret around?”
Lola couldn’t imagine there was much to see, but Betty nodded permission. Lola waited until the girls’ chatter receded. “How many other people live up here?”
Betty’s sigh plumbed depths. “Now? Hardly any. Most left. Some few way over there”—she waved vaguely—“but up here, just me.”
“Isn’t it lonely?”
Betty’s laugh, like her voice, was full and rich, and startling from such a small frame. “Lonely? I have sheep. And every day, birds, hawks, lizards.” The laugh trailed away.
“But?”
“Not so many anymore. They all need water, too.”
Lola held up one of the jugs. “Speaking of water. How do you get it?”
Not a full laugh this time, but a delightful chortle nonetheless. “You bring me!” And others, too, Betty said. “Anybody who drives by, knows to bring me water. If I run out, I fetch from the spring, carry it on my back.” She made sketching motions with her hands, indicating a sort of sling. Lola winced as she recalled the weight of the water as she’d carried the short distance from the truck to the hogan.
“I thought all the springs dried up.”
“Not all. One about five miles that way.” Again, the vague wave.
“Five miles!”
“Nice and close, not like the others.”
Lola couldn’t tell if Betty was serious or having some fun at her expense.
“Juliana knows where. You get her to show you. Nice and cool there. Good spot for a picnic.”
Again, Lola searched Betty’s expression for signs of mischief. Was it possible that the woman had somehow communicated with Naomi, that she knew Lola and the girls were planning a picnic? She banished the thought as absurd. The hogan lacked plumbing and electricity, along with phone lines, and for sure cellphones didn’t work on the mesa; Lola had checked hers repeatedly on the drive. When Betty finished her lemonade, she gathered up the cups and sat them in a plastic basin. Lola wondered if she’d scour them with sand rather than water. She wondered what sorts of things she herself would do if every drop counted. Betty turned toward the door. The visit appeared to be ending.
“We passed the mine on the way here,” Lola said quickly. Clumsy, she chided herself. The only way to the hogan—at least from the road—was past the mine.
But Betty seemed to have anticipated the subject. “You want to know about it.”
“Everyone seems to think the bombings are directed at it.”
Betty’s smile lit up the hogan’s dark interior. “Everybody’s right.”
“But who would do such a thing?”
The question hovered between them like a hummingbird, cheeky and demanding attention, the air around it vibrating with intensity.
“Anybody. Everybody. Maybe even me. Little Betty is big bomber. Boom!” She raised her arms, pantomiming an explosion.
Lola’s laugh was a beat too late. She followed Betty into the sun with relief. “Girls!”
They charged around the side of the hogan. Bub jolted behind them on his three legs, tongue dangling nearly to the ground. “We were under the shade house,” Margaret said. “Mom, come see what Betty does there.”
“No,” said Juliana. “We don’t have time.” She grabbed Lola’s hand and dragged at it, pulling her toward the truck. “Come on, Auntie Lola,” she said, with all the considerable winsomeness a nine-year-old has at her disposal.
“Plenty of time, girl.”
Betty’s rebuke was mild, but Juliana dropped Lola’s hand. “Please,” the girl said. “I want to go.” A trembling lip replaced her smile.
“Just two minutes,” Betty said. “You come see. You’ll like this.”
The shade house backed up to the hogan, a tiny makeshift version of Edgar and Naomi’s lavish patio. Still, it featured the same deep shadows and pleasantly rustling branches. A card table and folding chair sat beneath it, strewn with miniature versions of patterned rugs attached to key rings.
“I make these,” Betty announced. “Sell them at markets and the trading posts.” She selected one. “Here. You take.”
Lola tried to thank her, glad when Betty brushed her words away before she could utter them, leaving nothing in her own tone or choice of words to raise Betty’s suspicions as she folded her hand about the woolen key chain Betty pressed into her palm—the same sort of key chain that Juliana had filched from the backpack in the ruins.
TWENTY-ONE
Lola had braced herself for quick, suspicious interest when Naomi found out about the visit to Betty. She hadn’t expected approval.
“That’s wonderful!” The inevitable pitcher appeared, filled with a rosy liquid, tall glasses for herself and Lola, short ones for the girls. Pink lemonade, Lola thought.
“Pomegranate juice,” Naomi announced. “I poured your glass and mine separately.”
Lola forced a smile that threatened to turn into a grimace at the bite of vodka. She took tiny sips and contemplated the possibility that Naomi stayed pleasantly sloshed all the time. Maybe she kept a Nalgene bottle of innocuous-looking juice at her desk at work to get through the days. She wondered what necessitated Naomi’s habit. Just another statistic in the woeful tally of reservation alcoholism? On-the-job stress? Self-administered therapy for the trauma of her family’s eviction from their land? Problems with Gar? Lola could imagine herself driven to drink—at least a few stiff ones, if not a chronic problem—if Charlie had announced such a pompous nickname.
“Why is seeing Betty so wonderful?”
Naomi spoke past a dry cough. “If you want to know about the mine, Betty’s the one.”
Lola started to explain that they’d just happened across Betty when they were out exploring, then considered that Naomi didn’t seem to care. “We ended up at one of the trading posts after we saw her.” At the trading post, she’d longingly fingered a rug whose deep red coloring reminded her of the similar garnet strands in carpets from the Baloch region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Then she’d read the five-figure price tag and contented herself with buying a postcard for Jan. “I thought maybe we could visit the mine, but it doesn’t look like they let people in.”
Though Lola had barely touched her juice, Naomi’s glass was nearly empty. Her eyes glittered. “Good thing. What if something else blew up while you and the girls were there?”
Lola remembered her own involuntary reaction when she’d seen the truck. She shivered. Had Naomi divined her own unease and tweaked it? And if so, to what end?
But Naomi’s face was all concern. “Are you cold? Would you like a sweater?” She wore another silk shirt, this one sleeveless. Her biceps shifted, a quick strain against taut skin as she lifted her glass and drained it.
Lola blinked. “Are you a climber?”
“How’d you know?”
Lola ducked her head to hide a blush. There’d been a dalliance in Wyoming, one that had come entirely too close to full-blown infidelity. He’d been a climber. She’d been an idiot. Still, those arms …
She held her own arm next to Naomi’s and flexed. Nothing happened. “My muscles are like overcooked pasta. You’ve got guns. But I thought climbing wasn’t allowed on the reservation.” Signs at the cliff houses had announced as much.
“It’s not. Too many people clambering all over sacred sites.” Naomi poured another glass. “I learned to climb in college, of all places. Dartmouth had a mountaineering club.”
College was a long time ago, Lola thought. Obviously Naomi had kept up. “Where do you go now?”
“Oh, Flagstaff, Sedona, Hualapai Wall. Arizona’s lousy with good spots. Thomas comes with me sometimes.
I taught him. You know how it goes—get kids doing something physical, something that they like, and they stay away from drugs. It his case, it worked. That’s how he got that scar, though, taking a bad tumble early on. Now he’s probably better than I am. You can see that he’s in great shape.”
Lola, awash in guilty memories, didn’t want to think any more about climbers and how good they were and what great shape they were in. “Did you hear anything about that note?” she said. “Do they have any idea about who might have sent it?”
Naomi took another sip of juice and choked. Long spasms wracked her body. “Sorry. Went down the wrong way. Anyway, no idea as to the sender.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance it was some sort of prank.” Even to herself, the idea was ridiculous. Lola wished she’d never suggested Charlie as some sort of undercover bodyguard. “How’s it working out?” she asked. “With Charlie.”
She waited for Naomi’s return to her earlier insistence that the precaution was unnecessary. Naomi didn’t oblige.
“Not nearly as bad as I expected. He’s very good at being unobtrusive—he’s there all the time, but not hovering over my shoulder. He’s in his element, of course, in the courts. And the police are in and out of the building all the time, what with various cases, so he chats them up. Watching him work, it made me think of the immense amount of good he could do if only he were working for the Blackfeet.”
Slash.
Lola checked an impulse to pat herself down, to see whether Naomi’s latest jab had drawn actual blood. She tried to come up with a suitable response, one that didn’t involve profanity. Rescue came in the form of a glimpse of motion through the window. It was Valentine, moving faster than Lola would have thought possible given his wide belly and short legs. Bub and the girls trailed behind. They’d braided the horse’s mane and tail and tied off their efforts with bright scraps of fabric from Naomi’s sewing room, which fluttered merrily as Valentine made his escape.
“The pony’s running away,” Lola said.
Naomi’s shrug indicated routine. “He’ll come back. He always does. This is where he gets fed.”
“Will you still climb with Thomas?” Lola couldn’t stop herself from poking back at Naomi. Climbing involved absolute trust in one’s partner. Naomi had bristled when Lola implied Thomas might have written the note, but Lola wondered whether she, too, might harbor doubts about her ward.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Naomi’s words dared a response.
Reminding herself that her husband would be spending the next several days with Naomi, Lola tried yet another change of subject. “Speaking of Dartmouth.” She reached for an orange in a fruit bowl so artfully arranged that she felt guilty disturbing it. She dug a thumbnail into the skin and circled the orange, pulling the peel away and tugging the fruit into sections. She wanted something in her stomach to counteract the alcohol. “Your family was still living on the mesa when you went to college, yes?”
Naomi nodded, and Lola thought of Betty’s hogan. Even if Naomi’s parents had lived in a standard BIA bungalow, life on the mesa would have been isolated, spartan. “College must have been quite a change.”
“You mean running water? Electricity? Yeah, I even had to wear shoes to class.”
Every time Lola thought she could relax around her sister-in-law, Naomi took another slice out of her with that verbal knife. The hell with this, Lola thought. She was tired of being nice for Charlie’s sake. “I just don’t know how you square it all.”
“Square what?”
Lola took a defiant swig of her juice and held out her glass for more. “This.” She ran her hand over the granite countertop and waggled her glass, which matched all the other glassware in the cupboard, nothing like the collection of jelly glasses she and Charlie had amassed over the years.
“That.” She pointed through the window toward the shade house with its stonework fireplace. “The new Silverado. The Prius. All of it.” Let Naomi take all the potshots she wanted. It was time for Lola to establish her willingness to fire back with a howitzer.
Naomi’s lips thinned. “Gar and I have worked hard for what we have. We’re not ostentatious about it.”
No, Lola thought. They weren’t. From the outside, the hogan looked modest. Their luxuries—the top-of-the-line kitchen, the fancy sewing machine, the central AC rather than a rattling window unit—were hidden indoors or otherwise disguised.
“And,” said Naomi, “we give back.”
“How, exactly?” She wanted to hear how Naomi would explain it.
“We look out for the people’s interests. Me, in the court system, ensuring our people get a fair shake, not like in the whiteman courts. And Gar’s work at the mine. The tribe deserves its fair share of the profits made from our land. We’re role models. You know how it is. So many kids end up pregnant, drugging, dropping out. Or if they avoid those things and make it through college, they leave their people and work in cities. Or”—the invisible knife carved away another chunk of Lola’s psyche—“even towns nearby. But we came back.”
Lola bit into a section of orange, welcoming the spray of bitterness against the lingering sweetness of pomegranate, and swallowed. “Edgar didn’t come back. He left his reservation and came to yours instead.”
“Still. He’s working for Indian people, not white people.” A swing of machete, no finesse at all.
Lola had had just enough alcohol to refuse to concede the point. “If he’s working with the corporations, he’s dancing cheek-to-cheek with white people. Especially if the mine’s involved. That kind of money has a way of being seductive.”
Naomi’s glass hit the countertop so hard it shattered. Shards of glass sparkled amid the spreading pool of pink. Lola reached for a towel. Footsteps sounded outside.
“Are you accusing my husband of cheating the people? He’d do anything for them,” Naomi hissed just before the girls burst into the kitchen, hot and dusty and bursting with the news that they’d recaptured Valentine.
Lola threw the towel atop the mess on the counter and slid everything into the trash can while Naomi tended to the girls. She thought of how, the first night they’d met, Naomi had mentioned the possibility of a provocateur, someone on the inside, as the bomber. Edgar would do anything for the people, she’d said.
Lola hadn’t accused Edgar of anything. But she wondered if she should.
TWENTY-TWO
Shizhé’é comes to me again that night, as he has every night since he died. Since he was murdered. Despite the reassurance I’d been given: That one. That was an accident.
This time, he’s got company, their outlines wavering, merging and then parting, like smoke from two cigarettes. The truck driver. You think one is bad? Try two. It should have been twice as bad, but it seemed four or even five times worse. Before, with Shizhé’é working on me, it felt like I had something lodged in my throat. It wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I coughed. Now I barely have any air at all. It’s as though each one has reached a ghostly hand down my windpipe and taken hold of a lung, squeezing, squeezing.
I gasp for breath as Shizhé‘é drifts around the guest room in Edgar and Naomi’s house, walking in that bent-kneed way that made him look like an old man long before his time. Korea, was all he ever said about it. Grenade. That blast didn’t kill him. But mine did. Now he takes hold of the sheet that covers my trembling body, rubs it between thumb and forefinger. It takes all of my will not to look toward the nightstand, topped by the legal pad that holds my instructions for the next action. Not that he’d understand them. They’re in English, not Navajo, and although Shizhé’é spoke a broken English well enough when he wanted to, I’m not sure he ever learned to write much beyond grade-school level. Besides, they’re in a sort of code. The words when I received them echoed in my head: Everybody honors the Code Talkers, calls them heroes, even though all of their service was on behalf of a government that
hadn’t yet given them the right to vote. And everybody laments the fact that they’re dying out. But they’re not disappearing, not at all. What we’re doing here, we’re the new Code Talkers. And we’re not doing this for the whiteman government. It’s for our people. We’re the true heroes.
Words that might have heartened Shizhé‘é. He’d been willing to die for a government that never respected him. Maybe if he’d known our aims, he’d have thought his own death worth it, accidental though it was. So why don’t I want him to see what we’re doing?
He comes closer still, somehow whole again, even though I know there wasn’t nearly enough of him left to half-fill the best casket the funeral home had to offer.
“Fancy,” he says. “How you like sleeping on silk sheets?”
“I don’t think they’re silk.” Somehow, I force the words. I stretch my neck, gulp at air gone syrupy. A molecule or two of oxygen finds its way to me. “Cotton. They’ve got what they call a high thread count. Makes them feel really smooth.” Gar and Naomi tell me about things like this. Around the rez, the fact that they know this shit gets them called apples—red on the outside, white inside. Don’t think they don’t know it. Both of them went to some Ivy League school. I didn’t even know what Ivy League was before they explained it to me.
“Money,” Edgar said over Naomi’s burbling laugh. “It means money.”
It was hell, they said. Sitting side by side with kids who spent their summer vacations backpacking across Europe, the gear they carried on their backs worth the equivalent of a few months’ salary on the rez. Kids who said things like Are you a real Indian? And Do you have a horse? Who called Gar Chief and Naomi that most disgusting of sexual insults, Squaw.