by Win Blevins
Ahead Red could see the desert country, red and buff-colored, rippled into ridges, mesas, buttes, spires, and towers. Gianni had described this place as the epicenter of nowhere, maybe what Red needed. And with Gianni it would be full.
9
MOONLIGHT WATER, A FEATHERED SPY, AND THE LAW
Don’t throw rocks at a whirlwind. It will chase you.
—Navajo saying
There it was down below, a single man-creature.
“Something’s going to happen.” That’s what Winsonfred told Ed, and he’d asked Ed to watch for the something, maybe for trouble. It was the something, all right, but Ed couldn’t tell if it was trouble. Not yet.
Ed wheeled out of the thermal, adjusting his wingtips, and made a wide circle clockwise. He took in the dried-blood color of the sun on the huge, red-rock monoliths of Mythic Valley to the southwest. That red was his favorite color, low-pitched and primal, the fundamental color of this country. He looked at the river that oozed like a glorious green snake across the desert floor. Then he felt the cool air rising from the water and used it to lose a little altitude. He eyed and sniffed Moonlight Water Canyon, the ancients’ highway to the Azure Mountains in the north. Ed’s eyes and nose were primo.
He angled easily downward toward the strip of concrete through the slender green canyon that sloped into the village. Ed kept everything in his life easy. It wasn’t smart to work hard in the heat of the desert, and besides, ease was his style. He feathered his wingtips just right and cruised toward the man-creature.
He was standing in the graveled area alongside one of the automobiles that human beings traveled in, taking a piss and looking at the cliff drawings. That was okay with Ed. He understood pissing just fine, along with all other means of getting rid of unwanted baggage—he didn’t carry any extra weight himself. Ed didn’t care for the contraptions people traveled in. Why not get rid of them and walk, so you can see and smell and touch the whole country? Now, cliff drawings, Ed had never figured out what people wanted with them. The creatures in those weren’t merely dead, which would suit Ed’s appetite, they were way, way dead.
The creature lifted a soda pop can, and Ed feared he would give it a heave. But the creature drank and held on. Good. Of all the humans’ bad habits, Ed had the least tolerance for littering. He often passed judgment on litterers from above with a glob of guano. His aim was excellent.
Ed passed over the creature and banked into a turn for another gander and a good whiff. In Ed’s previous life he’d been a human being, more or less like the creature down there, and a lover of the Canyonlands of the Four Corners region. This had given him a good beak for trouble. Ed was the self-appointed guardian angel of this piece of the gods’ good earth.
He swooped over the creature’s head. The creature walked toward the drawings, and in a flash Ed knew. This was a lost soul tinged with a hint of desperation and a wild spirit. Well, he’d be right at home in Moonlight Water. The place was full of souls searching for something. Some of them felt the call of the Four Corners and stayed. After a few months they got their rhythm back—the country had something good for them.
The creature tilted the soda pop and drank deep. Ed himself had loved such cans, his were full of beer, but now he preferred the taste of water and judged that no drink was worth the trouble of bottles and cans.
Ed watched. Scores of man-creatures and woman-creatures turned their mechanical contraptions into this spot every day and got out, and Ed felt zilch about most of them. Some, mostly locals, gave him a good feeling. A few troubled him. This one felt like Winsonfred’s something, maybe good, maybe trouble. Ed would tell the old man about it tonight.
The stranger was still staring at the wall of cliff drawings.
Ed watched and waited. Of course, he didn’t have any word like love to describe what he felt for this piece of earth. He didn’t need words to have awareness. Not needing words, he would have thought that was funny if he’d remembered that in his human form he’d been a man of many words—books full of them, good books that people still read. The local trader had made more money off Desert Solitaire than Ed ever had.
All that was gone. He was 100 percent buzzard and crazy about being one. The best views going. Big wings that carried you miles and miles real easy. Never a need to buy gas. You could ride the thermals up high and beat the heat. Eyes so gonzo you could see flies from five thousand feet up. A nose that led you to hidden flesh. Because of that nose, you could get your dinner fresh and your water cool. Plus, you always had friends to cruise with.
Never mind being human—this incarnation was the gift. The universe thought he’d been a good man and had brought him back in a higher form.
* * *
The buzzard made Red want to climb into the van. The bird gave him the willies, flying low over him, like it was watching him, waiting for him to croak.
Red spent a last moment with the carvings. They were the damnedest things. He’d read the sign a couple of times and got the facts, how they were made nine hundred to one thousand years ago by the Ancestral Puebloans, whoever they were. But what intrigued Red had nothing to do with facts. What were the carvings trying to say? Some were chipped into the rock, some painted in color. Human handprints, hundreds of them, large and small. Animals, maybe deer or antelope or bighorn sheep. Spirals. A hunched god playing a flute and dancing. And still more shapes that felt like bursts of unconsidered creation from a place far distant.
It was okay with him if people got messages from another world. He’d gotten his music from the sub-conscious world, hadn’t he? He’d learned during the last month that new tunes didn’t just jump into your body and dance you around when you asked for them. They snuck up on you, as if from a time-warp galaxy.
One set of carvings really grabbed him. In the center was a spiral. On each side of the spiral was a line of people, dancing slowly toward the center. Or were they dancing out from the circle? He looked and looked and wasn’t sure. He was damn sorry they were frozen in stone. He’d like to have swayed their thousand-year-old dance inside his bones.
He started to get out his sketch pad but looked up.
That damn buzzard was still there, circling.
Red slid into the van and looked at his watch. For the first time in a month he needed to think about clock time. Half an hour to meet Gianni, buzzard in tow.
The predator followed Red through the canyon. He ignored the bird, concentrating on the world around him. Surreal. The curving canyon was sweet and fine, red bluffs harmonizing with fluttering green leaves on the trees. He rolled down his window, half-expecting to hear the melody of the leaves, but it was drowned out by the whir-wind of the van.
When the canyon opened wide, the world was huge and mind-blowing. He’d seen shots of this desertscape in dozens of TV commercials and movies. The place where Forrest Gump stopped running. The cliffs where Thelma and Louise sailed their convertible into that huge chasm. A land Anglos found awesome and Native people revered.
After another mile, he entered the town of Moonlight Water. He remembered what Gianni had told him. “My friend, it is the edge of the epicenter of nowhere and everywhere. No doctor, no drugstore, no bar—hell, no grocery store. The nearest movie’s over a hundred miles away. Hippies, hosteens, rez dogs, sagebrush, and sand. The clock ticks Navajo time, which is mañana land only more so. For all that, it’s the most solid place in the world—as long as your definition of solid includes impossible shapes in stone and a strong creative vibe. Oh, and these people, half of them Navajos and half Anglos, call themselves Moonlighters.”
“What?”
“They call themselves Moonlighters, after the town of the first trading post. Translation from Navajo: Moonlight Reflected on the Water. So pretty Mormons kept the name when they got here.”
What Red saw first was a filling station–convenience store–restaurant named the Squash Blossom. Beyond that was a run-down Laundromat with an army of kids milling around middle-aged women who looked lik
e Navajo grandmas. They were dark-skinned and gray-haired, talking and laughing, keeping the kids together like hens with their chicks. Some wore velveteen blouses, huge turquoise necklaces, and full skirts above pink Walmart sneakers. Way down was a bridge, then supposedly a café called the Locomotive Rock Café and Trading Post, the place he was meeting Gianni.
Red stuck his head out the window and gawked upward. Damn buzzard was still circling overhead. Red muttered, “Probably the state bird.”
He drained the rest of the can of soda pop and threw it on the floor of the passenger seat. He kept a can of Foster’s in the cup holder, unopened, to remind himself that he’d banned booze from his life.
Instantly, he heard a siren. A county sheriff’s car in the other lane swung into a U-turn. Red and blue lights flashed in Red’s rearview mirror.
Red slammed his fist against the steering wheel. He’d flashed the pop can. Damn it, pop’s legal. And I can’t chance getting busted.
Red angled into the parking lot of the convenience store, his stomach roiling, and opened the door of the van.
The cop had the bulk of Arnold Schwarzenegger squeezed onto a frame maybe five and a half feet high, a comical effect, like a clothes dryer with wooden posts for legs.
As Red stepped out, the cop stopped and shot him the standard cop look: Who the hell are you and are you gonna make trouble in my jurisdiction?
The cop’s mouth snap-crackle-popped out words: “Get back in your vehicle, sir.”
Red felt himself flush. Dumb to get out. Cops were big on the drill. Really dumb to have a van with California plates.
This cop, his nameplate said Officer Lyman, moved upward straight into Red’s face. Red put his hands up defensively, and—whooee, the cop was fast for a man built like an appliance. Lyman stepped quick to the side, boosted Red’s arm behind him with one hand, and shoved him ferociously on the back with the other. His face crashed onto the hot hood of the cop’s car.
Lyman whumped the other arm way up behind Red and clamped his wrists together hard with a sinister snick.
The officer tightened the cuffs enough to make them hurt. Letting go, he stood back and smirked at Red.
“Show me some ID—now!”
Red’s brain sprang to life: Get smart. This guy would love an excuse to beat the shit out of you and take you to jail.
Trembling with fury, fumbling, hurting his own wrists with the cuffs, Red fished out his wallet and fake driver’s license.
The cop snatched it. “Red Stuart,” he said. He strutted in a tight circle, a banty rooster with too many hens. “Mr. Stuart, we have a fine list of charges here. Speeding, open container, DUI, failure to obey the direct order of an officer, and attempted assault on an officer.”
Red squeezed out his protest. “I wasn’t speeding, I wasn’t drinking alcohol, and you assaulted me.”
The cop slammed Red’s head back down onto the hood.
Rage. Red reminded himself of what mattered: Don’t let them make you.
“Charlie, what the hell are you doing?”
Gianni’s voice. Running footsteps.
Then a female voice. “Charlie, back off! I mean it. Now!”
Red craned his head to the side. Gianni and a uniformed woman, a Native American cop.
Officer Lyman answered her with a tone of disdain. “Zahnie, you back off. I have a prisoner in custody. We’re taking a little trip to jail.”
The Indian woman said sharply, “What are the charges? We saw everything that happened.”
“Speeding, open container, DUI, failure to obey the direct order of an officer, attempted assault on an officer.”
Gianni said, “Picking on a white man this time? This guy’s my friend.”
The woman jumped back in. “You haven’t done a field test, and we both saw you assault him.” She looked in the window of the van and grabbed the Foster’s can and pop can and held them up. “Not even open. You saw this empty pop can. Throw out the container charge. Both of us will testify to your assault.”
She gave him a satisfied, twisted grin.
“Charlie, I’ve known you as a liar for thirty years,” said Gianni, “and a bad cop for twenty.”
Charlie gave him a look that could chop the head off a snake. “I’m giving him a field sobriety test.”
Charlie Lyman gave her a long look, took Red’s cuffs off, and then Red went through the routine, demonstrating—nine steps forward, heel to toe, thirty seconds standing on one leg, the whole shebang—that he was sober.
Red hadn’t touched booze in a month, and he could have passed the test drunk. Born agile. When he finished, he grinned at Officer Lyman.
“No probable cause to hold him,” the woman said. “You’re lucky this wasn’t another Navajo woman. I’d have you doing time.”
“You lousy bitch!” snapped Lyman. “I’m sick to death of you.”
“Consider me a permanent boil on your behind,” said the woman officer. “Get out of here.”
Lyman did.
Gianni bear-hugged Red. “Some welcome to Moonlight Water,” he said, grinning. “Zahnie, this is my best buddy, Red Stuart. Red, Officer Zahnie Kee.”
“Glad to meet you,” said Red. “You guys came along just at the right time.”
“Watching for you,” said Gianni.
Officer Kee didn’t say anything, didn’t smile, didn’t offer her hand. Her eyes were on Officer Lyman’s cruiser, speeding up Moonlight Canyon. Red noticed that her shirt patch read: Bureau of Land Management.
Suddenly, she remembered her manners. “Glad to meet you.”
“You saved my ass.”
“Sorry, but I’m not interested in your ass. I’m after Charlie Lyman’s.”
Gianni said, “He stops Navajo women for traffic violations and gives them a choice—get a ticket or service him in the bushes.”
“His father did the same thing,” said Zahnie Kee. “The two sons of bitches did half the Navajo women in this county.”
“Zahnie went to college,” said Gianni, “and picked up bad Anglo habits like cussing.”
“Nobody but Charlie Lyman can make me cuss.”
Gianni said, “Let’s get out of the east side of town. It can get a little edgy around here.”
Red gave Gianni a quizzical look.
“Moonlight Water is divided by a wash,” said Gianni, nodding toward the bridge. “East half is all Mormon, west half is Navajos and misfit whites. Paisan, give us a ride to the Locomotive Café.”
Red drove them across the wash in his van.
“All of Redrock County,” Zahnie said, “is officially ten thousand Navajo people, five thousand Anglos, and only half a dozen federal officers to police the biggest county in the U.S.”
A vigorous-looking blond fellow about nineteen or twenty came out of the café, stripping off his shirt as he walked. He looked at Red, registered surprise, gave him a big grin, and said, “Yo, dude! What’s it like to be dead?”
Red quelled his panic and brushed the kid off with a wave. The kid waved back and moved on.
“What was that about?” asked Zahnie.
“Don’t know,” said Red. “He’s probably stoned.”
“Eric doesn’t get stoned,” she said.
Red watched the young blond. He talked like a cool kid, but with his hair cut into a burr and his toned body, he could have been an advertisement for “our finest Mormon youth.” Red just hoped the guy wouldn’t come back and call him Rob Roy.
On the porch of the Locomotive Café they found a comfy table outside with iron seats painted dark green. After a moment he realized Zahnie was studying his face instead of the menu. She was wearing a cop look. “Why is your face familiar? You’re not tacked on the post office wall, are you?”
He lied with perfect glibness, “I am Red Stuart, late of California, now a wanderer and seeker.”
She ordered a Dr Pepper, and so did the other two. “I think you’re full of it.” Her dark eyes nailed him to a cross of cuckoo truth.
&
nbsp; “You got that right.” Red grinned at her.
Gianni squirmed and made a worried face.
She said to Red, “You’ve spent the last month, according to your buddy, wandering from state to state, looking for something. Find out what you want?”
“To live my life large, very large.”
“Oh my.” Zahnie kept her eyes on him and sucked on her straw until the last sip of Dr Pepper was gone. “Well, this place has enough room, and it’s a magnet for lost souls.” One last slurp of bubbles made enough noise to turn the heads of the people at the next table.
Red turned his head away and grinned. “Might be a good place for me to spend a little time,” he said.
“Amendment: lost souls who are honest,” she said.
“I vouch for him,” said Gianni, easing the conversation into a different parking spot. “Red, this is the only place in town you want to eat. It’s also the trading post, where Navajos go to pawn stuff, the general store, and the post office.”
“Not to mention,” said Zahnie, “where my vehicle is.” She motioned to the stone and beam building behind the trading post. “The far end is the BLM office, where I work. It used to be the jail.” The other buildings were a string of railroad cars set on uneven foundations, like tumbled dominos.
“The café is named after that huge rock.” Gianni pointed at a formation about a half mile away. “See that monument charging out of the rock wall, sort of the shape of a locomotive with an engineer at the controls? It’s speeding forward at ten feet per eon. The trader here is the owner of the restaurant and the river ranger. I mean, the other ranger, along with Zahnie.”
“Let’s go,” Zahnie said. “It’s getting toward dark and we’re having supper at home.”
Red walked with Zahnie to her BLM Bronco, opened the door for her, enjoyed the rear view of her bottom, and then climbed into his van. Zahnie stuck her head out the window and said with a grin, “By the way, Red, you’re in luck. Because you’re Gianni’s pal, you have a free hotel—the old folks’ home.”
Red raised an eyebrow.
“Consider this treat a preview of hospitality to come,” she said. “Follow me.”