Moonlight Water

by Win Blevins

  “Let me guess. Twenty-two. Gorgeous, blonde, and what you might call untroubled by deep thoughts.”

  “That can be appealing in a woman, but it wasn’t Georgia. Thirtyish, seriously spiritual, a seeker. Well, a couple of months ago Georgia and Nora confront me. They’re having an affair—they want to get married.”

  Zahnie whooped. “This is too good.”

  He clenched his fists.

  “Sorry.” It wasn’t friendly to whoop at a guy’s catastrophes. And she knew the story had to be true. Only real life could throw you that kind of curveball. Your business manager steals your wife, and then his daughter, your next business manager, steals your next wife. Winsonfred would question Red’s harmony.

  “Of course, no one needed to tell me Nora had been burning the midnight oil, arranging my finances so Georgia’s name was on absolutely everything. Wouldn’t want to miss a dime in the property settlement.”

  Zahnie lolled her head and crooned, “Even The Enquirer wouldn’t believe this.”

  “Some guys blow theirs on cocaine. I blew mine on business managers who stole my wives.”

  She concentrated, rowed them into the tongue of a riffle, and they splashed through.

  “So, Red Stuart, who’s this new guy going to be?”

  “I don’t know yet. He’s set out to make a new life.”

  “With the safety net of a nice nest egg.”

  “Very small nest egg. The money’s gone. I walked out on the whole shebang. No more Robert, just Red. Just me.”

  “Whoever you are.”

  “When I hatch, we’ll see.”

  Time not to tease. “That takes guts. To start all over and figure it’ll be okay.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’ve been listening for the rhythm, you know, the rhythm. I haven’t caught it yet.”

  Nizhoni, Zahnie thought, what her people called walking in harmony with yourself, your family, and the world. Though in some ways she wasn’t a traditional Navajo, she paid attention to Nizhoni in herself.

  Suddenly she saw it and pointed the Navajo way, a kissing motion. A giant blue bird floated gracefully across the river, neck and head curved back on its own body. At the far bank it spread its wings to slow down, landed, and perched at the water’s edge. Suddenly it was as still as an aged cottonwood branch, a time-shaped sculpture of the eternal winds.

  “Great blue heron,” she said.

  The expression on his face said he’d never seen one before, and now he was in love with great blue herons.

  Strange man, who are you?

  He moved his eyes away from the heron to her. “You have kids?”

  Sneak attack. She felt wary again. “One boy, Damon, seventeen.” She didn’t want to talk about Damon.

  “He doesn’t live at home?”

  She shook her head. “He lives in Santa Fe, doesn’t do much but a few drugs and play music day and night.” She tried not to let her bitterness show, couldn’t quite pull it off. “I screwed up.”

  “Never been lucky enough to be a parent, but I have plenty of friends who are. Sometimes hard things just happen. No matter what you do as a parent.”

  “Nice of you to say, but no, I screwed up mothering royally.”

  She knew what Damon was doing was commonplace, but that didn’t make it easier to swallow.

  She looked across to where Wilcox Wash came in. She shipped the oars and checked out the petroglyphs, barely visible in the desert varnish from this distance—and no time to stop today. “There’s a special panel of rock art over there. Make this trip when you can take time to really look at all the nooks and crannies along the river. You could spend a lifetime doing that, actually, and it would be worth it.”

  The current took them close to the far bank. She eased her mind by taking a couple of unnecessary strokes. This was the Navajo side of the river, her side. Now she worked for the U.S. government and enforced its laws. She’d learned white people’s customs—not only their spoken language but their body language and their social ways. Give people a peppy hello (which feels like an assault to Navajos), look them right in the eye (which feels like an invasion of privacy), worry a lot about whether things are getting done fast enough, do that paperwork, meet those deadlines. She’d spent her teenage years in Albuquerque and then spent more years going to their university. She’d even learned to push like a white person—mouthy as a Jewish American princess, her boss called her.

  It’s a disguise, a white mask. If you don’t see through it, that’s your problem. I am Navajo.

  She wondered how much this man in the stern of her raft knew, what he understood. She decided to speak up. “Red Stuart, the big reason we’re going to this effort, trying to protect my nieces and maybe help them grow up, too, is that we’re all a big family, us human beings. You understand that?” She didn’t look him in the eye when she said it. Just let her words float above the water. Her eyes followed a lovely green dragonfly, floating above her voice.

  Red looked at her. “I don’t have family anywhere, and I sure don’t feel related to everyone in the great big world. Whatever connections I had like that, I’ve lost them. I’ve almost forgotten how they work.”

  He reached for a reed floating on the surface, picked it up high, and let the sun make the drops sparkle. Red-brown water ran down to his wrist and off onto his lap.

  “How come you live here in the boonies? Must get pretty lonely.”

  “Albuquerque didn’t cut it for me. More lonely in a big city than here. I came back home. My family’s from across the river, Mythic Valley.”

  Red cast his eyes around. “And then there is all this.…”

  “Red-rock country? Yes, born to the Red House Clan, born for the Bitter Water Clan. My ancestors were born here. I’m Navajo.” She wondered what that meant to him. Who could blame him? Sometimes she wondered what it meant to her. Exactly.

  Just then she looked up, and Red followed her eyes. High, high, two of them cruised.

  “Buzzards?”

  “Just one of them is,” she said. “Unusual. One buzzard, they’re common as fleas, and a golden eagle—they’re not so common. They’re circling in different arcs, but this angle makes it look like they’re actually together.”

  Red grunted, and squirmed a little.

  Zahnie asked herself, Did Grandfather Winsonfred fill Red with stories of Ed last night, make him wonder if he was under a buzzard’s watchful eye?

  “What’re you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Hosteen Winsonfred. The Ancient One told me to breathe this country and feel it. I’m trying.” She saw him let his eyes roam the skies again.

  He’s thinking about Ed, all right.

  She turned the boat fast, the current picked up, the roar started, and big waves rocked the boat. “Sand waves,” she called out. A whole row of them lined up. She hit them head-on.

  “Ride ’em, cowboy,” Red hooted.

  They both got soaked.

  She slewed sideways and splashed him. They laughed and laughed more. Then the boat shooshed out into easy water.

  “Why don’t you take a swim? Just float along in your life jacket?”

  Up, a quick cannonball, a big splash, and she was alone. She rowed hard, picked up the thrust of the current, got ahead of him, beached on a sandbar, got out a couple of sandwiches and two bottles of frozen water, and took a seat under a big cottonwood.

  He dripped his way toward her and they ate in silence, a good-enough silence.

  “Okay, enough. Time to get back on the water and find those nieces of mine. We can only go as fast as the river flows.”

  * * *

  When he pushed them off and clambered from the river into the boat, he took a risk. “You mind if I ask you some personal questions? I don’t want to get in the way of finding the girls.”

  “Depends on the questions. Talk won’t slow us down.”

  “Winsonfred is a traditional Navajo, right? Clarita is Navajo and Mormon. Are you a traditional Navajo?”r />
  He watched her hesitate, but her words were firm. “My people don’t consider me traditional. I think some of the old stuff is just superstition. Watch out for the river—Water Boy is down there and will get you. Don’t go near a dead body, or a place of death, or say a dead person’s name—their spirits may be hanging around and jump inside you. That one would keep me from going into the Anasazi ruins, which is part of my job, and I like it. I don’t like the traditional white stuff either.

  “There’s a lot about Anglo culture that I’m not crazy about, mainly the rush, the push, the greed, not caring about other people, forgetting about your relatives. Sure, I’ve adjusted to it—I operate on the Anglo system of time, which Navajos don’t take to at all—but I don’t get swept up in it.”

  She took three big pulls on the oars. He waited.

  “Navajo tradition for me is believing in Nizhoni. Harmony. I like the inner beauty of the path better than Anglo technology.”

  She studied the current a moment and took one stroke across.

  “Relatives,” he went on, pushing. “You mentioned your son. I met Winsonfred and Clarita. We’re going after your nieces.” His eyebrows made question marks.

  “Lots more. Other sisters, other nieces and nephews, my whole clan—”

  She interrupted herself. “Look!” Red followed her eyes.

  At the bottom of the sheer red face of the cliff, in white rock, stood what looked like an apartment building that had been pushed forward or backward in time from some other world.

  “Whoa!”

  “Leaning Bird Ruin,” she said.

  “Ruin? I’d give a million bucks for that place.”

  “Except you no longer have big bucks.”

  “It’s probably not for sale, anyway.” He laughed.

  It made a long, curving line against the cliff wall. In some places the ancient architecture stood twice the height of a man’s head, and in others the stone walls had crumbled to knee-high. The sun lit the stone bright and made deep shadows inside, shadows where human beings once made their lives.

  He made a strange sound in his chest, and he felt as if the air was being sucked out of him.

  “It’s a nice one, Leaning Bird,” she said.

  She could see that her words jolted him. He inhaled deeply and let his breath out. It sounded like years of breath and secrets withheld.

  She went on impersonally, “Leaning Bird. Single family, dating from about eleven hundred A.D., lots of potsherds and corncobs still in it because it’s on the Navajo side and it’s hard to land there. If you take the time…”

  He struggled not to get sucked into the magnetism that sang to him from Leaning Bird. He grabbed Zahnie’s words as a lifeline to the present and held on.

  “I mentioned time. You’ve heard about Navajo time?”

  “Kind of, yes.”

  “It’s similar to what Anglos call mañana land—it’ll get done when it gets done. Maybe. Makes them very impatient. Navajos, we think it’s what whites don’t know, what they don’t hear. Leaning Bird reminds people of that rhythm. That things happen when they happen, no rush, give everything the attention it needs, get to the next thing whenever you get there. Which will piss off an employer who is expecting you at nine o’clock.”

  He paid attention to the ebb and flow of her words.

  She said, “This is amazing country, ruins and rivers and red-rock walls. You want the short, white-man version of where you are?”

  “Sure.”

  “These rock walls date to more than two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs were roaming around. Further downriver, the walls rise higher. The whole area was pushed up by a collision between oceanic and continental plates. When they collided, the rock layers were folded up, just like when you push on a rug. The river has since cut its way down the crevices into the fold.

  “This place is a map of time on the earth, geologic time. The river cuts a giant slice and lays it bare so you can see it, where the ocean once was, where all the layers were formed, fossils from sea creatures. A million years here, a million there. You understand time passing, shaping the earth, how things changed and how they keep changing, going on forever. You don’t feel it with head knowledge. It’s bone knowledge.”

  “And there were people here.”

  “Lots of them, Desert Archaic, then Basket Makers, then Anasazi. The rock art is their message, what they wrote down, not for us, but for themselves and their children, to describe their world. We’re part of that chain going back in time, forward in time, one link as important as another.”

  “I saw rock art yesterday. It vibrated.”

  He saw her look at him strangely, and felt a little embarrassed. “I’m not sure what the Anasazi story is,” she went on, “the real story, beyond the facts. New Agers imagine them as an ideal society, farmers who lived in tune with the earth.

  “Some archeological evidence says the Anasazi had the same troubles we have, including war.

  “Whatever we can know of the truth, it’s in the rocks. Rock is what lasts, so that’s where the story is told, the rock of the cliffs and the rock of the ruins.”

  Red gazed down into the water as it rolled by. I’m doing it, Winsonfred, he thought. I’m listening to the stories.

  He grinned to himself.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “It’s smart-ass.”

  “Just like you. What are you thinking?”

  “About that old Bill Haley and the Comets song, ‘Rock Around the Clock.’” He sang out the first line smart and sassy.

  “I give you all that great stuff, hand you mysteries, and you’re reeling old rock and roll through your head!”

  He shrugged. “It’s a funny head.”

  * * *

  First he heard it. A blast of sound loud as a Tchaikovsky symphony with all 120 instruments blaring full bore, except that this sound was chaos—slams, sucks, swooshes, gushes, every sound water makes, fighting its way between boulders.

  She pulled for the left bank, where the current was strong. “Echo Rapids is just around that bend. Serpent House is right there beyond those tammies, in the cliff face,” she said, “but you can’t see it from here.” She worked hard for several strokes.

  “They’ve gone on,” she said, a little breathless. “If they were at the ruin, the boat would be tied somewhere right along there.” It looked like just another stretch of bushes to Red. “Let’s get into the eddy.”

  She muscled them there, and the eddy actually eased them back upstream. Zahnie jumped out, painter in hand. “Help me!”

  He plunged in and helped pull the boat most of the way out of the water. Grabbing the painter, he threw a clove hitch around a stub on a downed cottonwood, grinned, and said nothing about being a sailor.

  They climbed a sandy hillock and she glassed the rapids with her binocs. A hundred fifty to two hundred feet long, he guessed. She took her time, sliding the binocs slowly downriver. “They’re not here. Not at the ruin.” Her voice was tight, low. “They made it downriver.”

  “Easy from here?”

  “Easy enough.” Her voice relaxed a little. “C’mon, let’s scrub our way through these tammies, see Serpent House. Just a couple of hundred yards.”

  “Tammies?”

  “Tamarisks, those big bushes that line the bank.”

  In a couple of minutes they were bushwhacking across a flat.

  “Up there is Neville Canyon,” she said, pointing off to the right to a break in the rock wall.

  They hand-fought their way through tammies. Suddenly they were in a clearing and the ancient Serpent House ruin gazed down upon them.

  12

  SERPENT HOUSE MAGIC

  Don’t cross a snake’s path unless you slide or shuffle your feet.

  —Navajo saying

  In one breath he lost his heart.

  He gasped, drawing his life back in.

  It was higher up the wall than the other ruin, and bigger, maybe three stories hig
h. It had a couple of round towers that blew harmonicas through his skin. From the high buildings in the center small structures rambled sideways along the cliff, like flowering vines. It had the magic of paintings in fairy-tale books.

  Then he saw. A huge snake was painted bloodred on the wall above the ruin.

  He wandered forward, toward Serpent House, enchanted, and came to the base of the rock. Odd steps led upward, cut into the stone, now smoothed by wind, water, and time.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Higher up they’re worn too smooth. You have to be a daredevil or use a rope.” She handed him the binoculars. “These aren’t the same as being there, but they’re better than nothing.”

  Red glassed from building to building like a sleepwalker. He knew he could make it up there, touch the rock, smell the musty air.

  “Check out that snake,” she said softly.

  He trained the glasses on it. Spectacular, as thick as a man’s thigh and undulating about twenty-five feet across the wall above the buildings. The color was a red that probably was once bold, but now faded with age. In form it was a wave, perfectly regular in the way of no earth-born snake. Mysteriously, it had neither head nor tail.

  He noticed Zahnie eyeing him peculiarly, but he had no time for that, only for the strange new feelings lifting his chest and spinning his head.

  Red felt her touch his shoulder. “Let’s have another swig,” she said. “You’re probably dehydrated.”

  They sat on a rock in the shade of a giant sagebrush. Red pulled deep on the water bottle.

  “The big snake,” she said to him, “how do we know it’s not a painting of the river?”

  “Don’t know. How do we?”

  “We ask the descendants of the Anasazi, the modern pueblo people, the Hopi, the Laguna, all those tribes.”

  “And what do they say?”

  “That’s the problem. One tribe says snake. Another may say river, another maybe something else.”

  Red gazed up at the big … whatever it was … and wondered whether it mattered to him what it was supposed to represent. He couldn’t decide.

  “Look over there.”

  A low boulder ten feet away was covered with shards of pottery, arrow points, and miniature corncobs.