Moonlight Water

by Win Blevins

  The four jammed themselves onto picnic benches.

  “What on earth is going on?” said the empress.

  “It’s got nothing to do with us, Clarita,” said Yazzie, “no trouble here.” He sounded comfortable. Red wondered if Yazzie and Winsonfred were the only people Clarita couldn’t intimidate.

  She lit up a joint, maybe thinking Yazzie would see it as a bull sees a red cape.

  “Anything that happens in Moonlight Water affects everyone. For heaven’s sake, you know that.”

  “Clarita, slow down.”

  “It’s a federal issue, you’ll say, Yazzie. But you would have arrested those people, too.”

  “Yes, Grandmother,” said Zahnie, “and I did something very much like it today.”

  “What?” Clarita sounded really alarmed.

  “Wayne Kravin and the Nielsens. But the Nielsens won’t be charged, and Kravin didn’t loot. He assaulted a law officer with a deadly weapon.”

  Clarita studied her face, puzzling her out.

  “The point is,” said Tony, “a lot of local families are going to get hurt.”

  Clarita hammered out the facts. “Yes. If those men go to the federal penitentiary, children will be fatherless. Families may go bankrupt. Others will leave for other towns, other marriages.”

  “I can name three elderly people,” said Tony, “who would end up right here with us within a year, and we don’t have the room.”

  “Maybe they’ll learn to obey the law,” said Zahnie.

  “Excuse us,” said Clarita to the world at large, “for using our tongues sharp like white people.”

  “We’re half-white,” said Tony. “We’re already excused.”

  Very casually, Yazzie said, “We don’t know what the outcome will be. I expect a lot of plea bargains.”

  Now Gianni butted in, “Damn it, this trading has been going on for generations. It’s practically a local tradition.” He hesitated. “Maybe even honorable.”

  Clarita said, “It is. My husband was paid by the Smithsonian Institution to do just what these people are doing. He found artifacts, or bought them from locals who found them, and sold them to the museum.”

  “That’s right. And the government thanked him for it,” said Gianni.

  “Two of my sons did the same,” said Clarita.

  “To hell with a government that acts this way,” said Gianni. His eyes looked rougher than his voice sounded.

  Yazzie held up a hand. “Times change, laws change, thank God.” He took Zahnie’s pad and pen, wrote, tore out the sheet, and handed it to Clarita. “Grandmother,” he said, “I ask you to take your grievances to this man. He’s the head of the federal operation here.”

  Yazzie rose to leave. “Call me in the morning,” he said to Zahnie. “I’ll have news about Kravin and the Nielsens.”

  Red and Zahnie found themselves alone in the warm night.

  “I don’t want to be around any of them right now,” Zahnie said, nodding to the house. “Want to go down to the river?”

  * * *

  She took a thermal pad to sit on and led him to the water’s edge, then along the bank. She was always more at home outside, and at home most of all where she could hear the river running. Running-sliding-whisking.

  She sat on the pad on a bench-like chunk of sandstone, felt him sit next to her. River air felt different from the air of the bluffs, the canyons, the sand flats—gentler, moister, cooler. Feminine. She knew the mountains where this river came from in Colorado, where water fountained everywhere. She found water more a grace here in the desert. Rare and precious, a coral and turquoise gem.

  She looked at the dark waters of the eddy below them. Though she couldn’t see them, she pictured the depths. Waterborne food was drifting to the bottom there, and in the cool darkness catfish fed languidly. She liked to imagine those catfish finning around, shadows in aquamarine darkness.

  “You saved my skin today. I owe you.”

  “No debt,” he said. “It was exhilarating to fight for something, someone. It was real.”

  “Tell me who you are, Red Stuart. Tell me what you’re running away from.”

  “I’m just a guy trying to find his way.”

  “Just a guy. The Navajo way is to say who you are by telling what two clans you come from. That helps you know who you are, what you’ll do.”

  He stared into the flowing waters, and she wondered what his mind was on.

  “Scots both sides. My dad was a tough union guy who drove a cable car in the city. He died when I was ten. My mom, she skipped out after that. Her allegiances, judging by her actions, were the Catholic Church and middle-class respectability. His was the union.”

  “Are you Catholic, then?”

  “I ran far from it, and for years was an agnostic. Now I ponder occasionally about the Anonymous Source. That’s what I call it, and it’s as close as I can get.”

  Companionable silence.

  Red broke it. “Know what my most vivid memory of Dad is? He used to take me on the cable car in the afternoon, after school. He had this glass eye, got it gouged out in a bar fight, what else? He loved the tavern life. Anyway, I liked those afternoons ’cause he told stories about the city. He knew everything that happened in San Francisco. He showed me right where the fires went after the earthquake, and how they rolled gondola cars into the burned areas and hauled the rubble away. How he watched the Golden Gate Bridge go up, later, the world’s first successful suspension bridge. He was a big fan of Harry Bridges and the longshoremen, too. The first author I ever saw, my dad pointed him out, Eric Hoffer, wrote The True Believer. Mom’s chorus was ‘Blessed Virgin,’ and Dad’s was ‘the workingman.’

  “Well, this glass eye of his, one day on the cable car it popped out. I was standing just behind him, hanging on to a strap, and I heard this little clunk, and my dad says, ‘Oh hell.’ The eye poised there on the floor, for a moment, unmoving—we were sitting in the middle of a cross street, flat, blocking traffic. Dad had to ease the cable car forward.

  “The eye started rolling. ‘Grab it!’ Dad hollered. He was sensitive about it—I always figured he was afraid he’d get fired if the city officials knew he had only one eye.

  “I started crawling between the passengers’ legs, keeping my real eyes on a sharp lookout for the glass one. The eye would bop off one passenger’s shoe, glance off a lady’s high heel, pause against a man’s briefcase, all like that. I hopped after it, dodging calves, to some considerable protests, but I never could catch up with it. Just as I grabbed, poof! The eye would carom off. I felt like I was playing a crazy game of pinball, and losing.

  “Way at the back of the car, between a Chinaman and an elderly black woman, I dived like a shortstop and got it between my fingers. Desperately, I got my feet half under me. Just then Dad topped the hill and launched the car downward. The Chinaman looked at me like fate, almost smiling. I spilled over onto my shoulder, and the eye flew from my fingers.

  “Back toward the front of the car it rolled, bouncing off shoes like pinball cushions, me right behind it like a frog—Hop! Hop! Hop!—never quite catching up.

  “The cable car swung to the right, around a corner. I swung to the left, into an old gentleman’s lap, or at least against his bony knee. He was wearing a straw boater and a carnation. He was so mad, I thought he was going to stuff that carnation up my nose.

  “I hopped again, and the eye jammed under the arch of a woman’s high heel, and an expensive-looking heel it was. I clamped my hand onto the vagrant eye, and then I looked up. A very elegantly dressed blonde and a looker—a generation earlier and she might have been one of William Randolph Hearst’s mistresses headed for a rendezvous.

  “Now, the painted part of the eye, the iris, had been rotating up and down, up and down. When it jammed, as fate would have it, the sightless iris was pointed straight up her skirt. The blonde looks first at me, like I was something she’d stepped in. I drew my hand back. Then she saw what direction the eye was pointed. She g
ave a high, little yip, like a terrier, and she crossed her legs real tight, like vines wrapping around each other. Then a ‘Shoo!’ as if I were a fly on her nose.

  “Dad stops the cable car. He walks back, and he’s just tall enough to face her chin to chin.

  “I slip the eye out and hand it to him.

  “She does that weird little yip again.

  “He fixes her a glare, a most worthy one-eyed glare.

  “She puts her hand to her face in false, blushing modesty.

  “He musters his most baleful expression. Then, slowly, with an extravagant, grotesque style, like Vincent Price in a horror movie, he rolls the eye around inside his mouth to clean it, and he pops it back in.

  “She breaks into a terrier titter of yip-yaps.

  “‘Milady,’ says Dad, ‘concern yourself not. The eye sees all, but it does not tell.’”

  Zahnie laughed out loud, but she also watched him. “Is any of that true?” she finally said.

  “We Scots tease the best out of a story, but we do not lie.”

  “Except when you’re horny.”

  “There’s that, too.” To his credit, he grinned.

  “What else do you want to know?”

  What to ask? I even bewilder myself. So she asked the obvious. “Why did you come here, here of all places, Red Stuart?”

  “I came to Moonlight Water because Gianni asked me to meet him here, and because he said it’s the uttermost end of the earth. What’s more important is why I went away from there.”

  “So tell me.”

  “I want to be more like my Grandpa Stuart, the one who told me the old stories of the Highlands and the west of Scotland, where our family came from. He spoke of magic and pookahs and monsters like a poet, and he seemed to walk a wiser way. He enjoyed his life more than I do. And that was from a wheelchair.

  “You know the last thing he said to me? I poured him a single-malt Scotch as I left for rehearsal that evening—he liked the really peaty ones. He raised the glass and said, Slainte!, meaning in Gaelic, Health to you!, with a sly grin. That was Grandpa, a poem, a toast, a sly grin. He died in his sleep that night, and I’ve always been sure he knew he was going.”

  Zahnie let his words fade into the evening. She looked into the sky and imagined multi-colored figures against the darkness, figures moving ever so slowly horizon to horizon, dancing ever so slowly, a reflection of our lives on the earth, one line of melody in the dance of the vast harmony of life on the planet. Maybe since these figures were spirits, they danced forever, never had to stop to sleep or wake or laugh or cry or make babies. Always dancing forth their energy, whirling the great fandango to the music of time.

  Zahnie looked into his face, starlit, almost magical. Putting on a light Scots accent, she said, “And is that exactly why you’ve come to Moonlight Water, Red Stuart? To learn to enjoy it all? To be like your grandpa, with a poem, a nip of whiskey, and a sly grin?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “I think you want more.”

  But Red didn’t want to talk about his recurring dream and “T’ain’t What You Do” and his setting forth, not yet. He turned slowly and searched for her eyes. “Turnabout,” he said, “is fair play. Your time to answer questions.”

  Zahnie didn’t like that. She bit her lip until she thought of an excuse. “I have a better idea.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “Let’s make music together.” She reached across and tapped his shirt pocket. “My voice and your harmonica. Don’t deny it. I’ve seen it there all day.”

  He showed the good sense to say nothing, just plucked his mouth organ out of the pocket and put it to his lips. She saw him hesitate, and then he began to play. A slow, sad tune, one she didn’t recognize for a moment. Then she knew— You are telling me something. When the four-bar intro closed, she sang the familiar words in her throaty alto. Though the loneliness was hers, too, and everyone’s, the way he played it … She knew, at least at that moment, he had the notes written on his heart.

  “I am a poor wayfaring stranger,

  A-travelin’ through this world of woe.

  But there’s no trouble, no toil or danger,

  In that bright land to which I go.”

  The harmonica felt rich, the minor chords sucked in and blown out like the soul’s sweet air. She opened her throat and sang the words fuller, opened her heart and sang them truer.

  “I’m going home to see my father.

  I’m going home no more to roam.

  I’m just a-goin’ over Jordan.

  I’m just a-goin’ over home.”

  She looked at him. The moon gleamed on the dark river now and threw a silvery light on his face. Regardless, she thought she saw a spark in his eyes. He said he didn’t believe in anything. She believed in Nizhoni. She hoped she could walk in it every day, and she hoped he would find it.

  She’d imagined an evening of playing music together, a much longer evening. But she reached over and put her hand on his cheek. She caressed it a little. Then she leaned across and kissed him, lightly, on the lips. Red returned the kiss. His lips felt full and good, and they were leading somewhere she was surprised to go. Didn’t really want to go, when it came down to it.

  Zahnie slammed on the brakes. She took his face in both hands, looked with feeling into his eyes, and said, “Sorry. It’s not going to happen.”

  She could see Red was not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. “Maybe you can just enjoy my company.”

  17

  TROUBLES TO THE LEFT OF US, TROUBLES TO THE RIGHT

  Don’t hate anyone of the opposite sex, especially if he’s ugly. You might end up marrying him.

  —Navajo saying

  Wrapped around her pillow, Zahnie felt sensuous. Dreams drifted sweetly by. She indulged herself.

  What are you doing, Zahnie Rae?

  She woke up hard and fast and gawked around her cabin. Unmistakably, that was her grandmother’s voice rattling around the walls. You crazy coyote, the voice went on. Calling a Navajo a coyote was rude—coyotes always got things wrong.

  Thank God, her grandmother was long gone and couldn’t carp forever about Zahnie and Red Stuart or anything else.

  She pictured Red at the main house sleeping in Winsonfred’s bed. Though Red was no prince on a white horse, he was attractive and fun and intelligent, a warrior with heart. She saw world-weariness around the eyes, which felt to her like character.

  She sat up and put her feet on the floor. At least I didn’t invite him to my cabin.

  Don’t walk into a dust devil! It will affect your heart.

  Yes, Grandma, I did flirt with him.

  You almost got carried away. And you were the one who started it!

  Amazing how Grandma could make her voice real in the room.

  Zahnie grumbled at herself silently. At my age flirting with a two-time loser at marriage, a man dedicated to nothing, running from everything.

  Her grandmother chimed in, Some way to act, Zahnie.

  Grandma, why do you wake me up with your griping?

  Zahnie Rae, you act degees [like a madwoman] around this bilaganna [white man].

  Zahnie didn’t need Flora Kee’s sharp tongue this morning. She was irritated with herself, irritated enough for both of them. She told her grandmother, “Shut up!”

  Don’t stare at the moon, came the voice again, another Navajo proverb. It will follow you.

  Carefully and quietly, Zahnie stood up and slipped some clothes on. The ceiling and walls feel too close.

  She stepped out onto her front stairs, pulled on her river sandals, and looked up to see Gianni sitting on the back steps of the main house, smoking. He gave her a big smile. She wasn’t up to a smile. She walked past him without acknowledgment and went straight to clanking pots and pans in the kitchen. She wanted waffles, and she intended to have them.

  In moments Red and Gianni were sitting at the table, trading talk she paid no attention to. Her mad was a hard-chargin
g train, and nobody had better get in its way.

  Winsonfred soft-padded to the table, sat down, and whispered something to Gianni. In a moment Gianni was standing next to her, mashing out sausage patties and throwing them into a hot skillet. She ignored him.

  Breakfast passed in sweet, syrup-soaked silence. All three men looked a little tickled. If one of them said she was cute when she was mad, she’d clang him with her iron skillet.

  The phone brr-rang across the room. Zahnie jumped to answer it.

  “Oh, hi, Yazzie. Are the Nielsens and Kravin back okay?”

  “Yes. Now get ready. Your name among the feds currently is, get this, Heroine.”

  “What?”

  “You did really good yesterday. They’re impressed.”

  “They don’t say I was interfering?”

  “Uh, Wayne Kravin and the Nielsens were the last warrants the feds had, but they couldn’t find them. They appreciated you.”

  “Coincidence, you suppose? Any chance the Nielsens and Kravin got tipped off? To save them from the federal bust?”

  “Hell, even we didn’t know. Listen, I have something for you, something good, and we’ll rub the feds’ noses in it.”

  He paused and she heard paper crinkling. “I got a report last night from two hikers. They saw a flatbed truck loaded with heavy equipment on the trailer heading up Lukas Gulch. The women couldn’t say what kind of equipment. They don’t know a bulldozer from a backhoe from another.”

  “Heavy equipment,” she murmured. Lukas Gulch was a roadless area. It would be hard to get anything wheeled in there. Besides, no one but Travis Kravin, as far as she knew, had been jackass enough to take yellow iron to get at a ruin.

  “Yeah,” said Yazzie. “Yesterday a big sting and today this.”

  “The timing is weird, Yazzie.”

  “Definitely. Look, as far we know, no way the fed bust has anything to do with Lukas Gulch. The government yo-yos are probably pulling out this morning anyway. You’re a heroine, and this is our job. Go take a look.”

  She thought. “Are you sure the feds are leaving?”

  “That’s the way I’ll remember it. No charges of obstruction.”