Moonlight Water

by Win Blevins

  “I’ll ride with the lost soul,” said Gianni, and he climbed in next to Red.

  10

  MADHOUSE AND REFUGE

  Don’t look into a mirror at night. Your shadow might leave you and you’ll die.

  —Navajo saying

  Zahnie’s Bronco spat gravel. Red and Gianni trailed her in the van, north out of town and onto a dirt road leading up a wash. Red had already learned that a wash was a wide creek bed without a creek when he’d blown a tire exploring New Mexico.

  “I haven’t slipped up and called you Robbie once.”

  “You better not.” They bumped along. The road was probably no smoother than the creek bed. “So this is the loneliest, most remote place in the lower foty-eight.”

  “You better believe it.”

  “Looks like the freaking edge of the planet. The creeks aren’t even on speaking terms with water.”

  “The water speaks in the spring, when the snow melts.” Granni pointed to the mountains spiking high at the head of the wash.

  Red looked down at Zahnie Kee’s taillights and had a vivid thought—maybe he’d give up intriguing women. He’d learned long ago that the interesting ones were a lot of work and the uncomplicated ones bored him.

  She made a hard, skidding right turn onto a dirt road, and they bounced along for a while. “So what’s this old folks’ home?”

  “Assisted living center, and they’ve got a room set up for you there. I help support them.”

  “What about staying at your place? A motel? Gianni, this is pretty weird, and that woman doesn’t like me at all.”

  Gianni unclenched his teeth and took a deep breath. “This is my place. You wanted adventure. Open your door to this part of it.”

  Red felt like a kid being dropped off for the first day of school.

  “Zahnie’s good people, a little rough around the edges, but we’ve all got edges.” Gianni looked sideways at Red, smiled like the Cheshire Cat, and thonked him on the knee. “This is Moonlight Water Canyon we’re driving through. Stick your head out the window and smell the desert.”

  Red did. The evening air was full of hints he couldn’t catch. His eyes gave him rimrock walls on either side of the dirt road, the last of the sunlight making them glow red, the treed tops of the bluffs high and dark. On the canyon floor were the voodoo shapes of desert plants and rock formations, each one a goblin or leprechaun or space alien. The quiet was steep and layered, just like the ancient canyon walls. Dense, dark folds of silence held unknown civilizations and strange worlds of time, frightening, enchanting, enticing. Eerie, he thought, maybe okay, maybe not. Adventure, I guess.

  They pulled into a dirt driveway that circled in front of a big stone-masoned building, almost a mansion. Zahnie beat them up the stairs and shouldered open the sticky front door, its solid wood warped by time and solitude. They stood in an anteroom. The air swirled around Red, carrying a flood of memories and feelings.

  He shuddered. There was a two-story living room, Victorian in style, with a balcony. Smells drew him to, to …

  “Ya-teh-eh,” said a whispery voice behind them. Red jumped and whirled to meet the voice. A very old Navajo man sat in the shadows, deep in a battered recliner.

  “Ya-teh-eh,” the old man repeated. His smile was Buddha with a pinch of chile.

  Winsonfred crooked his finger at Red. The younger man bent down and put an ear near the elderly mouth.

  “Ya-teh-eh means ‘hello’!” His smile was big and his cloudy eyes sparkled with delight. “You’re supposed to answer, ‘Ya-teh-eh, hosteen,’ which is a term of respect, such as you owe your elders.” He pronounced it more like hah-steen.

  “I’m sorry, hosteen.”

  “Grandfather,” said Zahnie, “this is Red. A longtime friend of Gianni’s.” The old man extended a hand. When Red took it, the man gave him the faintest touch. “Red, this is Hosteen Winsonfred Manygoats, my great-grandfather.”

  The old man added formally, “Welcome, friend of my friend. If you were a Navajo, I would tell you that I am born to the Folded Arms People and born for the Red Running into Water People, and from my grandparents the Bitter Water People and the Badlands People.”

  “He always does that,” Zahnie said, “in his dotage.”

  “Zahnie!” This was a musical baritone from beyond the living room, perhaps the kitchen. A potato-bodied Indian man of about forty came bouncing toward them.

  “Tony,” Zahnie said, “this is Red.”

  “We’ve been expecting you. You’re welcome here as long as you want to stay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My cousin, Tony Begay,” Zahnie finished.

  Right off the bat, Red liked Tony. Judging from his body language, the name Begay suited him. Almost made Red homesick for the Bay Area.

  Tony led Red by the elbow into the living room, Zahnie and Gianni alongside and … Winsonfred?… trailing behind.

  “This house,” Tony spat, playacting disgust. “It was built—can you believe this?—by the town’s patriarch, the leader of the Mormon pioneers, also the first bishop and first local polygamist. Which is the reason we have a big upstairs and so many bedrooms.”

  “Neville, my enemy,” said Winsonfred in his papery voice.

  “My ancestor on my Anglo side,” Tony plunged ahead. “Thank God I’m not all Anglo. This house, it still feels like his—so masculine it makes me wiggy. Look at that fireplace, petrified logs. Like this was a hunting lodge or something! I want more color and light in here, but we don’t have the time or the money.”

  “What’s that?” Red nodded toward a wall hanging.

  Tony smiled. “A rubbing of some rock art—Kokopelli, a big-time god of fertility. You see his back? That’s not a hump, it’s a sack. He travels from village to village carrying seeds for plants and babies. Unmarried women, like Zahnie here, are afraid of him because he’ll plant a baby inside them.”

  “Cool it, Tony,” said Zahnie. Clearly he was enjoying his role as tour guide.

  “And he plays the flute,” said Red.

  “Dancing and playing the flute, that’s how he comes to the village. He’s also a god of music.”

  Right below the flute-playing god stood a baby grand piano that seemed to be in good shape—hey, a Steinway, no less. Red chuckled. Strange world here.

  “That rubbing shouldn’t have been made,” said Tony. “That’s what the archeologists say now, but it belongs to Miss Clarita and she’s going to keep it. It’s her personal angel, and she is ours.”

  In the dining room, Red recognized the smells that had hit him when he walked in the front door. His grandparents’ house was filled with scents like this, decades of beeswax rubbed on furniture, rosewater, the satisfying odor of frying foods, hot bread with butter. Tony led them through the wide entrance to the kitchen, where two women worked, one very young and white, the other very old and red.

  “Ya-teh-eh, Zahnie,” sang the ancient woman. She came toward them with a spry step, then quickly hid something behind her back.

  “It’s okay, Clarita,” said Zahnie.

  Clarita drew her hand into view. Red recognized the aroma, even among the delicious kitchen smells. The old lady held a fat joint. She outwrinkled Methuselah, and under a big apron she wore the traditional purple velveteen skirt and plum blouse, plus a load of turquoise jewelry.

  “Clarita Begay-Shumway,” said Tony, “Red Stuart.”

  “Ya-teh-eh,” said Clarita. Without repeating the “born to, born for” ritual, she offered him the hand without the joint. Red considered kissing it but shook it instead. Close up, she smelled like Pond’s cream and Pears soap, just like Red’s grandmother.

  “Red is Gianni’s friend,” Tony went on, “and he’ll be staying with us, too.”

  “Don’t worry about the joint,” Tony said to Red. “We use it medicinally. Only thing that helps certain kinds of pain.”

  Red put his hands up. “Hey, it’s cool.”

  Tony led him to the young white woman. �
��Jolo, this is Red Stuart.”

  She stuck out a hand before she realized it held a serving spoon gobbed with mashed potatoes. She laughed at herself and drew it back. She was about nineteen or twenty and looked sweet as creamed corn.

  “Clarita instructs, Jolo cooks,” Tony added. “Especially when Clarita’s having pain, like tonight, until she got that toke. She’s a ninety-year-old miracle.”

  “Sit down,” rang Clarita’s voice, a soft, clear bell. “We’re about to serve.”

  People flocked toward a huge, circular oak dining table, a handsome antique.

  “Virgil, come to dinner!” Tony called toward the living room.

  A wavering shape, made ghost-like by the blue light of the TV, began to rise. Very slowly, as Clarita and Jolo put big bowls and platters on the table, Virgil shuffled forward and materialized from shadow into a bathrobed figure encased in a walker.

  Tony pointed with his lips, Navajo-style. “This is Virgil Rats. He always watches the old programs, especially I Love Lucy, no sound. He is well down the road of Alzheimer’s, but he recognizes Lucy and Ricky. Maybe he thinks they’re his kids.” Tony put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Virgil, this is Gianni’s friend, Red.”

  Virgil roared at Red, “Lucy, you got some ’splainin’ to do!”

  Red smiled politely and sat at the table. Winsonfred eased back toward his recliner.

  “Virgil eats like an elephant, Winsonfred seldom eats,” Tony said, “and our other permanent guests take their meals in bed, two upstairs, two down.” Jolo was going in and out of bedrooms off the kitchen. “Those ladies back there, every day Virgil plunks his walker up to each of their doors, looks in, and starts cackling, ‘Sex-sex-sex-sex-sex. Sex-sex-sex-sex-sex.’ The ladies are used to it, but we have to move him along.”

  Clarita passed the food. Red discovered that, after four weeks of coffee shop meals, he was starved for real food.

  “Harmony House is an unconventional society,” Tony said. “Grandmother Clarita came from Navajo Mountain, over to the west. She was raised traditional and later she added Mormon to her mix. Us kids were raised traditional Navajo and Mormon, going to squaw dances and getting our endowment ceremonies, both.”

  Since he had been a casual agnostic for twenty years, Red shunned all forms of religion. But Navajo combined with Mormon? The thought pained him, and that must have shown on his face.

  “A problem in your mind but not in mine, I assure you,” said Clarita. She flashed a radiant smile.

  My grandmother would have looked so beautiful, thought Red, if she’d lived to great age.

  “I live in two cultures,” Clarita went on. She held herself like a Navajo Katharine Hepburn with a scepter of cannabis.

  “Would you care to hear the story of my family and the Mormons in Moonlight Water?” Clarita asked. She lit her joint again. Apparently it was her custom to toke at the table.

  Red would have listened to any story the queen wanted to tell.

  “I am, as Tony said, two creatures in one, a Mormon and a traditional Navajo. The Mormons colonized Moonlight Water in 1900 exactly. Neville the patriarch was the bishop. There’s a big portrait of him hanging above the landing on the stairs. In those days the LDS Church had a policy called placement. It was to help the Indians, they thought, by adopting them right into Mormon families and teaching them white ways. As a matter of fact, the Church still does placement. Tony’s great-grandfather on the other side, Albert Begay, was adopted by Neville. I was adopted by the Allreds, but that’s another story.

  “This house”—she gestured broadly with gracious ninety-year-old energy—“is where I raised my family. I married Brigham Neville Shumway, who inherited the house when the patriarch died. The family attitude was that Brigham was a wild hair—and a wild heir—marrying a Navajo.” She smiled faintly at her own pun. “Our children are gone, so I gave the house to the foundation that Tony created to give old people a home. Tony has a big, big heart.”

  “A disgrace,” said Tony, wiping his mouth on a linen napkin, “to send old folks up to the nursing home in Montezuma City. I can’t stand how this country treats its elderly.”

  Clarita proceeded to her conclusion. “So, I created a haven for my own old age, and a few other guests. Their monthly Social Security checks help us all.”

  “The state didn’t like licensing Navajos,” Tony said, “but I dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s in a stack of papers three inches thick. They were afraid of a lawsuit if they turned us down.”

  “Dessert,” said Jolo, sliding dishes in front us. It was tapioca pudding. Red hadn’t seen that in years. When he was a kid, he loved it.

  “I want chocolate pudding,” Virgil demanded of the world.

  Jolo looked chagrined.

  “Chocolate pudding one night,” Clarita reminded him, “and tapioca the next.”

  “I want chocolate pudding.”

  Virgil kept his tone exactly the same, like a movie actor doing take after take after take. “I want chocolate pudding.”

  Tony looked at Clarita, who looked at Gianni. They rolled their eyes in unison.

  Virgil changed his line. “You people are mean. I’m getting outta here.” He rose and leaned heavily on a chair while he inched into his walker.

  He piddled his walker toward the kitchen door that led outside. No one made a move to stop him.

  “You people are mean.”

  Red watched from somewhere between horror and fascination. After three or four more choruses of mean and outta here, Virgil reached the kitchen door.

  To Red’s astonishment, Zahnie got up and opened the door for him with a flourish. Old Virgil bumped his walker over the sill and disappeared into the night.

  Zahnie closed the door and sat down, smiling.

  Clarita looked equally amused.

  “Watch,” said Tony. “He does this every time.”

  “Every night that we don’t fix chocolate pudding,” Jolo corrected.

  Tony led the way into the living room, and they circled the piano to the bay window.

  Red felt, hell, he didn’t know what. Here at the end of the earth they let old people walk off the edge!

  Outside, under the exterior floodlights, old Virgil pushed his walker along a cement walkway with rabid determination, one inch at a time. Pipe railings kept him in line.

  Jolo crossed to Winsonfred’s recliner and put a dish of tapioca in the old man’s hands. He made no move to eat it, but stared up at the portrait hanging above the landing on the stairs.

  “Winsonfred,” said Clarita, “was actually born the same year the Mormons came to Moonlight Water, 1900, or believes he was. If it’s true, he’s a hundred and three years old. Winsonfred thinks the whole history of Moonlight Water is the story of a spiritual struggle between him and Neville.”

  Red’s mind was fixed on Virgil. The old guy could take a left turn and roam out among the spiky cactus and hungry coyotes. God knows what else.

  “Winsonfred doesn’t talk much,” said Tony, “but he’s perfectly lucid.”

  Red looked hard out the side and front windows, but he saw no Virgil.

  “Don’t worry,” said Zahnie.

  The doorbell rang. “Come on,” said Tony. As they gathered in Winsonfred’s foyer, Jolo waltzed forward and opened the door.

  Outside stood Virgil. “Them people were mean,” he said.

  “Hello, Virgil,” Jolo said. “Would you like to come in?”

  “I ain’t staying over there anymore,” he rasped at her, bumping his walker over the doorsill.

  “We’d be happy for you to stay with us,” she said, a sweet melody in her voice. Tony and Zahnie beamed at Red. Gianni kept a straight face.

  Virgil moved slow and stately, like an ocean liner.

  “Here’s a nice sofa to sit on,” said Tony. “Look, I Love Lucy’s on TV.”

  “I like I Love Lucy.”

  Virgil crept sofa-ward.

  “You heard that joke,” said Zahnie, “one of
the benefits of Alzheimer’s is that you meet new people every day. Virgil really takes it to the limit.”

  “I love it,” said Tony, “every single time. I love it.”

  Virgil plopped onto the sofa, happy and safe among his new friends.

  “We’d better arrange the sleeping,” said Zahnie. “Red, you get Winsonfred’s room.”

  Red looked down at the Ancient One, and noticed that he was following their conversation with glittering eyes. “Don’t you need your room?”

  “I like this recliner.”

  To Zahnie: “What about Gianni?”

  “He has a semi-permanent bedroom upstairs.”

  “And you?”

  “I live out back, in what we call the Granary.”

  “You live in a grain shed?” His voice suppressed laughter.

  “It’s got plumbing and electricity and it’s mine.” She hesitated and said, “Winsonfred’s room is free and available for as long as you want it.”

  She did an about-face and headed into the kitchen. Thinking delightful thoughts, he watched her move. They were only somewhat spoiled by the hard edge of the reality of Zahnie.

  The Ancient One grinned at him.

  * * *

  Mumbled words.

  Red started awake on the sofa. He looked around the room, dark except for the faint glare of a muted TV. Everyone seemed to be in bed. Even the house felt as if it were asleep

  “I want to talk to you,” came the words again.

  “Who’s that?” Red craned his head around and fingered his head. Damn, that new buzz cut still didn’t feel right.

  An arm waved, lit eerily by a boob tube. Hosteen Winsonfred, sitting in his recliner.

  “Let’s go outside and talk,” said the Ancient One. His slow speech didn’t seem like feebleness, rather a high degree of attention. He polished the words and set them out one by one.

  Red offered Winsonfred a hand, suspecting what the old fellow really wanted was help walking outside.

  He stood sturdily without help. “I want to talk to Ed, too, while we’re out there.” he said. He scooped up his dish of pudding with one hand. They walked to the back door and into the pleasant, shimmery night air. The old man went down the back porch stairs nimbly enough and sat on a wooden bench.