Moonlight Water

by Win Blevins

  She was silent, stalling.

  “I know,” said Yazzie, “it’s boring. These tips rarely lead to anything. Humor me.”

  “Deal.” She called to the room at large, “I gotta go hunt bad guys.”

  Red stepped out from the foyer where Winsonfred reclined. Red said, “And I’m going with you.”

  She studied him.

  “I saved your skin,” Red said.

  It was irregular to take a civilian, but this would only be a long drive in the backcountry. Zahnie said, “Yeah, yeah, okay.” To Gianni she called, “Do not tell me you want in, too.”

  Gianni shook his head. “Closing a mineral rights deal today.” He smiled at Red. “Got to take care of me and my friend.”

  * * *

  She was comfortable out here. True, not many people would call what they were driving on a road. A track, maybe, or a trace. Parallel bare spots through the sand and sometimes across the naked rock. You had to be a longtime local to navigate this part of the planet.

  The country bumped by. There was strange stuff out there, the slickrock, sand blowing and rolling and somehow frozen in place. It was like the Anonymous Source (she had to admit she liked that term) poured it molten and it ran across the land like lava and stiffened into curvy sculptures. The Anonymous Source was definitely being playful when She made this place and when She carved the hoodoos. Playful and in a semi-spooky mood.

  From time to time Zahnie slowed down and eased the four-runner diagonally through soft sand, or across the rocky bottom of a wash, or once through a piddly excuse for a creek.

  She turned onto a dirt road. This was actually a bad road instead of a track.

  “More big rock walls,” said Red.

  “And more,” she said.

  He rested his head on the seat back and closed his eyes. She knew that only a native could tell what direction they were headed, where north and south were, where the river was, anything.

  Then she heard it.

  “Damn it!” she said. The whirlybird machine-gun whap-whap was unmistakable.

  “Who the hell?!” Zahnie again.

  She slammed on the brakes, yanked some binoculars out of the pack. Then she realized she could already see it with the naked eye. Helicopter, one o’clock, low, way out, but moving fast.

  Zahnie jammed the car into gear. “They’re coming hard,” she said. “They spotted us.”

  “Who? Why?”

  “Who knows? Listen, you’ve got to hide.”

  “I’m not a criminal!”

  She ground gravel as she stopped. “Gotta be feds. They’ll say Yazzie and I are ignoring their orders by doing this on our own. I am violating regs by bringing you along and could lose my job. Out! Go! Into those rocks. Now!”

  Red fumbled with the door handle and half-fell out of the car. “Go!”

  He skedaddled.

  Zahnie followed him, intending to create visual confusion. As the sound from the helicopter got louder, she considered. Red was already plunging in between two big slabs of rock shaped like pieces of bread leaning against each other. She needed a distraction so he could get hidden—good luck, with that bulk of his—and she needed a reason for being out of her truck.

  What to do, what will work?

  She put on her uniform hat, as if it would help her think.

  The helicopter whap-whap was nerve-wracking.

  Eureka! She grinned.

  Hands shaking, she reached for her belt and started unfastening her shorts.

  18

  ZAHNIE AND THE COPS

  Don’t wear two hats at once. You’ll get twins.

  —Navajo saying

  Red felt like a giraffe trying to hide in a petunia patch. He pushed his way forward. Hell, anyone could see right through the crack in these slabs of rock, sky at the top and musician in the middle. He had a sudden thought. About twenty feet up, a boulder the size of a VW was jammed like a chock stone, suspended in the air.

  He damn well could turn into a rock climber.

  It wasn’t bad. He found footholds and handholds and reached and struggled and slid into a slice of shade between chock stone and slab. He raised his head and peered over. Beyond the hood of the Bronco he saw Zahnie’s head or, rather, her flat-brimmed uniform hat. Why’d she put her hat back on? From the angle of her head she was staring forward along the road.

  The whap-whap grew crushing overhead. For some reason they weren’t landing yet. On the passenger door of the copter he could see the insignia of some federal agency, eagle wrapped in blue and white.

  Eyes back to Zahnie and he got it. In the red sand of the road she squatted. Her drawers were dropped, hind end exposed.

  Whap-whap-whap-whap!

  Zahnie stared at the horizon out from under the brim of her hat with a peculiar concentration familiar to everyone.

  The copter’s shadow flicked over Red and then stopped in midair above Zahnie. He pictured the guys’ faces

  Leisurely, she took something white out of her shirt pocket, made a swiping motion in her nether region, pulled up her underwear, wriggling her bottom the way women do, stood up, raised and buttoned her shorts, and cocked her head up toward the copter. Casually, she tossed the white whatever onto the floor of the Bronco and looked up at the feds.

  Red pulled his head back down. Goddamn! What a woman!

  Red had a clear view of Zahnie and the copter. He figured there were two advantages to being this close. (Though he would have preferred farther away. Like Nebraska.) Advantage One: If the guys stood near Zahnie, he might hear what they said. Two: He could sure tell if she was in the kind of trouble that would require a quick assist from a hidden friend. Not that jumping in between over-amped cops felt healthy. Especially when you’re carrying a concealed .45 auto without a permit.

  Zahnie stood and squared her shoulders. She’s calming herself down, he thought. He watched her like observing an actress from backstage. She pulled out her Attitude makeup, applied it to her face, and spoke her lines.

  “You buncha dripnoses,” she shouted. She shook her fist at the descending helicopter.

  They probably couldn’t hear her over the rotors, but she was letting them see she was going to be in their faces big-time. The copter sidled sideways and teetered gently to earth. They cut the engine. Two men wearing camos with sidearms jumped to the ground, a little white guy and a big Mexican.

  When the rotors stopped, the Mexican grinned and started out, “Chiquita—”

  “That’s Officer Kee to you,” she interrupted. Zahnie stuck her ID toward him.

  He took it. His lips smiled faintly as he read.

  “I’m Lieutenant Roberts.” This was the little white guy, younger than her but with just a ring of hair, like a monk. He double-checked the name on the ID. “Zahnie Kee,” he called to the copter pilot, spelling both names. “BLM. Check her out, McFay.”

  “Chiquita,” began the Mexican

  “Again, it’s Officer Kee. And I’m Navajo, not Mexican.”

  “Okay. I am Agent Hernandez,” the Mexican went on, “Officer Kee.” His tongue nearly licked the words. “Don’t worry, we ain’t after you for a public indecency rap. We wanna know what the hell you’re doing out here.”

  “My job. And you’re interfering with it.” Zahnie kicked a little sand on the ground between her legs to cover the fluid that wasn’t there.

  Attitude. Go, Zahnie.

  “And just what would your job be,” said Roberts, “forty miles from freaking nowhere?”

  “When did you get into my chain of command?”

  Hernandez twisted a corner of his smile. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  Red’s mind spun like a clothes dryer, thoughts tumbling. He wondered what story she would come up with.

  “We got a report of possible looting in Lukas Gulch, I’m checking it out,” she said.

  Whoops, she told the truth.

  “We got the same report, Officer, this is our sting, and you locals are getting in the wa
y.” This was Roberts. “Albuquerque office told your boss and the sheriff, all local law, to stay out of this, all the way out.”

  “We thought you’d gone back to your air-conditioned offices. Besides, we get reports like this all the time.” Red figured she was whistling “Dixie” now. Her mind was probably more on whether the feds would spot him.

  McFay called from the copter, “The head guy at Moonlight BLM, Yazzie Goldman, says she’s out of his headquarters and following his orders.” He jumped to the ground, which was surprising. He must have weighed three hundred pounds. He had a pasty face that read smiley-but-dumb.

  “He lying to cover for you?” said Roberts.

  “What’s going on, Officer?” said Hernandez. “You trying to get in on the action? Or are you trying to protect some friend or relative from what’s coming down?”

  “You don’t know up from down in this country. Go home,” Zahnie snapped.

  Jeez, Zahnie.

  Roberts pulled out a handheld GPS and said, “Latitude thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes north, longitude one hundred nine degrees, thirty-eight point zero four minutes west.”

  “That’s what I mean. This country is not a map, and this place is not a GPS number. It’s a real spot in a hostile desert, where mean critters live, and city boys die.”

  Red’s skin crawled. Easy!

  “We think you need to learn to be a team player,” said Roberts.

  “We could overlook it, maybe, for a little better look at—”

  That was it. Red started to launch himself out of the rocks and realized his foot was caught in the crevice below the chock stone.

  “Shut up, Hernandez,” said Roberts. Then Roberts’s eyes turned to Zahnie and bored in on her. “Get in the copter.”

  Red heard Roberts’s tone, saw the effect it had on Hernandez. Some kind of power struggle was going on between those two. Roberts’s barked order had the effect of a slap—Hernandez seemed to shrink several sizes.

  “What about my vehicle?” said Zahnie.

  “Not my problem.”

  “What about—?”

  “Get in the copter.”

  Zahnie hesitated. “No.”

  “Cuff her, Hernandez.”

  The big Mexican strode two steps and grabbed her elbow.

  She jerked away. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll go easy.” She turned her head sideways to glance toward Red. Her eyes said, I’m sorry!

  Roberts smirked, mistaking her expression. “Smart choice.”

  Hernandez added, “Chiquita.”

  Zahnie looked at Hernandez like she was queen of the desert, her chin in the air. “Now I understand why generations of Navajos have disliked Mexicans.”

  She walked to the helicopter like it was her idea. Clarita in training. With Zahnie’s lip and her attitude, she could probably stand the assholes off. Or was that himself, whistling in the dark?

  People climbed up, the rotors whirled, and the bird carried Zahnie away.

  19

  STRANDED

  Don’t pretend to pray or cry. It’s asking for someone in your family to die.

  —Navajo saying

  And now what about Red Stuart, previously Robbie Macgregor and Rob Roy—what would he do out in this desert?

  He smiled at himself. I set out to get lost, and this is about as far as lost goes.

  He looked at the sky, a perfect azure, innocent of a tuft of cloud or even a speck of dust. “Grandpa,” he whispered, “I don’t see any messages written up there.”

  As the last hint of sound of the copter faded, Red mulled over the spot he was in. He wouldn’t worry about Zahnie, he told himself. She was a cop in the custody of cops, headed to face the questions of more cops—probably just bureaucratic bullshit. Might be smart to keep his mind on his own circumstances. His hands had just stopped shaking. What could he do to send the last of his over-pumped adrenaline out and away?

  He said aloud in a mock-musical voice, “Let’s find out if the keys to that Bronco are in the ignition.” He pictured driving into town, finding that guy Hernandez, and—

  Red clambered down the crack and out into the sunlight. He swallowed hard. What if?

  He tiptoed to the passenger side and stuck his head in the window. No keys in the ignition. Check the floor—no keys. Check under the front seats—no keys. No spare keys in the glove box or above the visor, either. None in any of the four wheel wells in a magnetic box. None under or in back of the bumpers. None on the frame. None, none, nada.

  He got the gallon plastic bottle off the back floor and swigged some water down. He thought word by word, I will act cool. Be cool. Sit and eat lunch and enjoy and not worry about being stranded in the middle of the freaking desert with no idea which way is home and no way to get there anyway.

  The word home stumped him for a minute. I don’t have a home. He cackled. Then he yelled, “This is my destination, this Epicenter of Nothing at All. This is my heart, the holy chamber of Nothingness. This is my home, vista upon vista of emptiness!”

  He heard Zahnie’s voice. She was right. He needed to get over himself. He should start with dumping the theatrics so that he could think straight. If he didn’t pull it together, he wouldn’t be on the planet long enough to get over himself.

  He took his pack and two sack lunches out of the backseat. A banana in each and a sandwich of braunschweiger, over-heated and slimy. The water bottle.

  He didn’t feel safe in the Bronco. If the assholes came back, he wanted to have a choice about meeting them.

  He decided to go for a new hiding place. He filled a pack, tromped some scrub desert, scrambled up a shaley slope, and sat against a boulder that offered shade and a good angle for his back. He splayed his legs and ate all of what he had.

  Then he lifted the gallon bottle and drank deep of the water. Better mete out the water wisely, he lectured himself. You can die in the desert without water. He thought of the headline:

  ROB ROY DIES OF THIRST IN DESERT

  Contrast with First Death by Drowning

  He splashed water over his head, wiped his eyes, and ran his fingers through his sopping hair. Then he capped the bottle, stepped into the sunlight, and eyeballed the ultra-blue emptiness of sky. He scanned the red emptiness of desert. Well, the thing about emptiness, there ain’t nothin’ to see, nothing at all.

  Vigorously, he launched into his own version of an old song:

  “Oh, I got plenty of nada,

  And nada’s plenty for me.”

  “Bleak,” he whispered.

  On that note he turned onto his side and propped his head on the pack. He let his mind drift back to last night, a wild night of dreams and fantasies about Zahnie Kee, all unmentionable. Maybe sometime he’d be allowed to touch the real woman again. He then exercised one choice that hadn’t abandoned him. He went to sleep.

  * * *

  Through the late afternoon Red dreamt of shadows flitting across his sky, boiling into black clouds. Or were the shadows giant black buzzards that had gobbled up all brightness?

  “Ed?” he called in his sleep. “Ed?” But the bird, the one enormous bird, it wasn’t Ed. Red could tell.

  Lightning flashed and turned into thunder.

  Red shuddered and started and sat up, half-awake. He was shivering, in a drizzle. Holy shit, San Francisco weather in the June desert.

  He looked up higher and saw an overhang that sheltered a small ruin. “Hey,” he said out loud to cheer himself up, “Heartbreak Hotel.”

  The slope felt a little slick, but a fraction of an inch below the gooey surface the earth was parched. He muscled himself up twenty steps and into the alcove. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the overhang. Then he took in the white walls and ancient mud mortar and—incredible!—on the wall above there were dozens of figures drawn on the red rock. They danced around the stone corner and into the twilight.

  He lay down and dozed off again. The last twenty years had been pretty exhausting.

&
nbsp; * * *

  Later Red woke up restless and wondered, Where the hell am I?

  Oh yeah, the rock figures. They’d been pecked or chipped into the walls. There were animals—goats or mountain sheep, from their horns. Also antelope and one gigantic bird. Oddly, the sheep and antelope looked real, but the bird looked mythic, a creature risen from the eye of the imagination, not the eyes of the head.

  Red wondered what he’d been doing in his dream. Well, goofus, maybe you’ve been dancing with these old guys. He missed dancing. His body missed dancing.

  Red creaked to his feet and meandered in and out of the four rooms of the little ruin. He snuffled the air and tasted it on his tongue. He watched out of the corners of his eyes, on the chance he might see something. He chuckled at himself.

  There was figure after figure here—what seemed to be a waving rope but might have been a snake. Zigzags of mysterious purpose. A sun, with beams radiating out. Two spirals of different sizes. Then there were lots of handprints and a score of human figures. In one group three human stick figures lined up, each with one knee raised, dancing.

  Wait, around one corner was the humpbacked trader who played a flute. Miss Clarita’s personal angel. Name…? Kokopelli.

  Red shook his body like a dancer. Do they still step to your tune, Old Koko?

  The main thing to Red was that Kokopelli was a musician. When you play it, will I get to hear it? If I stay long enough, if I listen hard enough? If I catch your rhythm, can I sing along with you? Are you playing the music of the spheres?

  He looked at the big stone flutist. For now he couldn’t hear what Old Koko was playing. Red went close and put his ear on the stone just below the end of the flute.

  Oh, spirit trapped in stone—do you want to dance?

  That tickled Red. You do. You want to bust out of the rock and step lively.

  Here’s an idea. You pipe your tune, I’ll back you on the guitar, and you’ll be set free for the first time in a thousand years. You’ll boogie.

  * * *

  In the last of the light Red pulled the sweater on and he rolled up in the poncho. Though he thought of using one of the rooms in the ruin, he made his bed outside. Wide awake, he propped his head on his pack and looked around at the desert. A tough environment it was, even hostile, but it was intriguing. Both the desert and Zahnie Kee were intriguing. And forbidding.