Blue Rodeo

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  She hung her head, ashamed. “Joe, you’re too good a man to endure the amount of heartbreak Nori can deal out.”

  “Heartbreak or nothing, she’s good to look at.”

  “And about as fickle as this weather. Trust me. This would not be a healthy idea.”

  “Well, maybe not. But I sure can’t stop thinking about her.”

  “No one can. Nori gets under your skin. Peter has measured every female he’s ever met by his charismatic aunt, and I’ll tell you, his mother can’t win a single argument standing beside that blazing candlepower. I just hope Bonnie can erase a little of that wonder before she moves on.”

  “Oh, him and Bonnie are stuck together for a long while yet. If Verbena’s predictions come true, you might get yourself a Navajo-Ponca mix daughter-in-law sometime.”

  “Well, there better not be any hurry on that.”

  He laughed. “Man, you mothers make a job out of worrying. Your boy’s coming along good. Look how much firewood he split for you. You can probably go into next winter with that pile. Almost had to fall over dead before he could figure out when to stop chopping.”

  “I think he was chopping more than firewood, Joe. Owen’s leaving…” She let the words trail off. “Never mind. You were about to say something about Nori?”

  “Here’s the thing, Maggie. I think you need to make up with your sister. Have her come for another visit.”

  “Nori once a year is about all I can take.”

  “Ah, you probably blame her when you stub your toe.” He paused a minute, then said in a softer voice, “Owen just had to go, Maggie. So he went.”

  “Do you know the real reason he had to leave?”

  Joe frowned. “Well, we been to some meetings. I can’t say nothing because they make you promise you won’t talk about what’s said there outside of it.”

  Frustrated, she wanted to tell Joe that it was stupid, if they both knew, why couldn’t they could talk openly? But to do so would be a betrayal of friendship neither one of them was willing to make, and further, it meant he really was gone. “Tell me he’ll be okay. That’s all I want to know.”

  Joe pushed his plate away and smiled at one of the pretty waitresses, but his smile faded the second the girl passed them. “Got no good old Indian wisdom for you there, Maggie. Wish I did. I think he’ll make it, wherever he is, cause he’s been doing this a long while. Or if he wants to call it in, he’ll do that, deal with whatever happens.”

  “But he’ll never be back, will he?”

  “I don’t know. Time passes different for everyone, don’t it? Especially me—when I don’t take my medicines time don’t follow no clock. You need to get busy, that’s all. Before you know it, it’ll be spring, and you can work on planting a garden to grow some tomatoes. Start them seeds now. Your sister, when she comes to visit, she can help you eat them. Hey, maybe we can put together a glasshouse, for growing ’em in the cold. How’s that sound?”

  It wasn’t the answer she was seeking. But Joe would talk to her when it was the right time. “The subarctics Rabbott’s carries don’t have much taste to them,” she said. “Let’s look through the Burpee catalog at the library.”

  Echo was nowhere in the house when they returned. Joe stayed, helping Margaret search every room, open each closet, listen hard for any telltale sounds that might give her hiding place away.

  “Nowhere,” she said when they met again in the kitchen. “Now what?”

  “Let’s start looking outside.”

  “It’s cold and dark—where would she go?”

  “I don’t know. She likes razzing that old ewe pretty fine. Let’s try looking there.”

  The slushy fence line was quiet, Ruby lying down in the shelter near her feeding trough. RedBow followed them into the barn, hoping a second dinner was in the offing of all this human activity, pestering Joe by sticking his long nose into his back and neck. “Throw that gluepot a quarter flake,” Joe said. “He’s about to drive me to drinking blowing down my shirt like that.”

  Maggie separated the flake into a thin snack that would make the horse happy. In her mind’s eye she was unable to shut out seeing Owen’s hands performing this same task countless times. He was everywhere in this barn, from the tack he’d left behind to the diminishing stacks of baled hay, and that was one reason she’d avoided spending any length of time here. “Looks like I need to order more hay,” she said absently.

  “I can get you better price calling my cousin Lester,” Joe said. “Them guys down to Feed and Tack see you walk in, the price’ll skyrocket.” He shook his head. “Sorry, don’t see skinny girl dog nowhere in this barn. Maybe she run off.”

  “Don’t say that. Peter will kill me. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to her.”

  “Well, we ain’t looked in the bunkhouse yet.”

  “How could she get inside the bunkhouse?”

  “I don’t know. Dogs are relative to Trickster, and that’s one coyote sure don’t follow the rules. I can go look by myself if you don’t want to.”

  “No, two pair of eyes are better than one.” Margaret came into the barn each night, tunneling her vision down to the task before her: hay into hungry horse. After a fashion that kind of vision worked. However, it wouldn’t function so smoothly where he’d slept, played cards, or where he’d kissed her.

  Joe was already cracking the door, and switching on the light, making brightness out of what had been totally dark for months. It was cold in here. When she heard the shuffling and mewing, Margaret understood that here was the one spot Echo felt peaceful enough to give birth to her babies—in the room where their father had lived. She and Joe listened hard and began searching anyplace that looked likely. They pulled the stripped bed away from the wall, opened the cupboard underneath the tiny sink. He’d left behind some clothing in the cardboard box—but then, traveling light, you didn’t need much. Stacked against the wall was that thrift-shop painting, and next to it, a low box of clean rags he used for cleaning tack. A few had spilled out onto the floor, and that was where they found her—curled up into a nest of clean rags, just the tip of her brown tail visible behind the painting. Margaret tilted the frame back and Echo looked up at her, traces of bewilderment apparent beneath the instinctive pull of motherhood.

  “Joe,” she called softly. “Over here.”

  She’d managed by herself. Two white puppies with crimped ears lay at her side. One, sturdy and fat, already nursed. The other pup was much smaller, skinnier—a runt—still squirming around, trying blindly to find its way to the milk. With one finger Joe pushed it, an inch at a time, until it found Echo’s teat. In the bloody toweling to the left of the dogs, Margaret found a third puppy, its protective sac torn open, but the body inside unmoving. “Oh, Echo,” she said, feeling her own memory of that same kind of stillness revive. She touched the dead pup, its perfect little body, all that promise, wasted. Would feeding Echo more food earlier have helped it survive? Covering it with one of the clean rags, she turned her attention back to the living.

  “Good girl,” she said to Echo. Her tail thumped in response. “What a wonderful mother you are. You found the safest place for your babies. You are such a brave girl.”

  Joe squatted down on his heels. “Same way some lambs are born dark, them heeler dogs are born white. Later they turn a color, but you can’t tell for awhile yet whether they’ll be red or blue. I sure like the look of that big one. Hope it’s a female. I sure do need me some female company.”

  Oblivious to their words, exhausted from her efforts, Margaret saw that Echo had decided it was safe now to go to sleep.

  Blue Rodeo

  The moon has her porches turned to face the light, but the deep part of her house is in darkness.

  AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  19

  SUMMER WAS ON ITS WAY OUT AGAIN, THE DAYS GROWING shorter, the wind growing more teeth with every gust that blew through. During the two years she’d lived in the Starr farmhouse, Margaret Yearwood had learned seve
ral lessons. If you wanted to grow summer tomatoes, you’d best do it under fine-gauge screen, or all you ended up accomplishing was feeding the grasshoppers. By September you’d better have five cords of dry firewood stacked within walking distance of the front door, unless you wanted to pay ten times what it was worth after the first snow fell. And snow didn’t know the names of the seasons, it was just as likely to surprise you in the fall as it was in late spring.

  In California fall had been a kind of idealistic agreement you entered into: The stores set out clothing it was still too hot to wear; you bought them anyway. The beach traffic let up a little, so you could walk along the shore to get some exercise, turn your dog loose to play in the waves when no one was looking, maybe not even get a ticket. You knew fall had arrived when your teenager started sleeping through his alarm and had to be kicked in the butt to make his bus, and, like most things in life, you took it on faith that his destination was the bus, then school, and not some Tijuana fiasco that would reorder his future with a permanent, swift jolt. But it seemed like as soon as you found a shelf on which to set your faith, things changed; wasn’t that true, and then you had to work harder at believing what you took for granted than you did at anything, which was not unlike trudging through a Blue Dog winter with only two dogs for company.

  Here in this high country, you could smell winter coming, the sheer freight-train determinedness of it, not the same as in Margaret’s childhood Massachusetts, where a shiver now and then caught her unaware, and damp red-and-yellowing leaves underfoot revealed the first ice crystals when kicked away. The smell of snow from the north blew in the kitchen window one day, and as you shut the window, you knew fall would be gone in another heartbeat. In Blue Dog the change was gradual, but honest if you paid attention. One day the yellow flowers dropped their petals all at once, scattering pollen to the wind in the belief that come next summer, they would find a field. Insects spun cocoons, farmers baled hay after harvest—and weather was at the root of everything, as irrepressibly responsible for comfort and pain as human desire, or at least that was how she remembered it, those late summer days leading into winter, back when she believed she was loved by Owen Garrett.

  She remembered that first swim they’d taken together, a long time before he’d left. The aspens were turning, the leaves shimmering silver and gold in the late sun. How afraid she was to let him touch her, and how, once he had touched her, he never pushed or expected it was his right. There was never any hurry to making love, yet it seemed like whenever they did, she felt as desperate and rushed as a teenager. The pleasure they mined from each other’s bodies now seemed solemn. Just recalling it held the power to make her feel ageless. Owen had been the gentle half of their lovemaking; it was she who grasped a little too tightly, pushed for more, couldn’t seem to ever get enough of him to feel full and satisfied, as if the physical part of her sensed the transient in him. Every time Owen seemed to linger deliberately, taking great pains to make sure there wasn’t an inch left to her skin that wasn’t singing. But sex aside, their collective laughter was the best part of their relationship. In the river that night, hers had been a nervous laughter, in her marrow still a good Catholic girl at forty, afraid of being caught outside without her clothes. Then it turned damp and chilly. No matter how close they hugged, they couldn’t get comfortable and reluctantly agreed to go for their clothes. But before they left the water, made that long dash from the river to the bunkhouse, Owen had looked up at the darkening sky and said, “Fall’s coming.”

  Maybe from the first moment she’d seen him, deep down, she’d known he was already traveling a path heading away from her life, that her iron bedstead and kitchen were only the briefest interlude, some kind of proving ground where she could learn whatever she needed—how to make peace with Peter, forgive her sister, make the final break free from Ray before she returned to her California life. In a way it had almost worked. Peter came home his first summer after Riverwall. He never would be easy at making friends, but he cut the grass back where it was long, ate dinner with her the nights he could bear to be apart from Bonnie, and was kind enough not to ask when she was going to start painting again. He also got up each morning to feed and ride the horse Owen had left behind. He looked great on that horse.

  Dr. Kennedy from Riverwall had talked the powers that be into bending the rules for Peter and Bonnie to take summer classes at San Juan College in Farmington. It was only a humanities survey, but Peter was holding his own. After his year with the Hidalgos, he boarded full-time at Riverwall. He claimed his roommate wasn’t “total geek”: He seemed to be getting along.

  These days there was nothing coming out of her paintbrush except stray sable hairs. When she finally picked up her drawing things, it was to put them into a box and to get them out of the way. Sometimes she drove out to Shiprock and sat in the shadows of Tse Bida’hi, seeing the art there, and trying to resolve the giant bird the Diné believed had deliberately grounded itself with cooling rock that had plugged an ancient volcano’s throat, sparing this land. For all her education, theory, and research, she knew Verbena was right—painting came from those twin pockets of light and dark found in the heart or it came not at all. When a part-time job in the Blue Dog library became available, Margaret shut her heart’s eyes, shelved books, and ignored the bristles altogether.

  Several times a day she found herself swiping at her eyes, but tears were for other women. Like a river, Owen had said, strong and treacherous in places, still and murky in others, the good Lord alone knows what grows on those river bottoms.

  Maybe Owen Garrett was the only surviving true gentleman left on the face of the planet, and the only way he knew to exit his complicated life here gracefully was to simply tip his hat and go. In the back of her mind one sliver of doubt remained. What if she hadn’t mattered? Well, the seasoned Margaret Yearwood had to admit that wallowing in what-ifs was too comfortable, like baking cookies on the pretense that they were all for Peter, chocolate smells hooking their perfume into your nostrils, knowing it was just a matter of time before you gave in to self-pity and gorged.

  Through those ridiculous faxes her sister thought made better sense than letters, she and Nori had butted their heads together enough times that they’d made a kind of mutual peace. She loved her sister but had come to recognize that what she felt was love only in the oddest way. They didn’t go about teaching each other female wisdom, as came naturally to Verbena Youngcloud, or helping each other out over hard times the way Margaret could depend on Joe Yazzi to find her a decent price on hay midwinter. As sister she and Nori had never been easy with any of their emotions, least of all with loving each other. But that went way back—from her mother on down to the baby girl Margaret had birthed stillborn. These tall females were suspicious of the world around them, lacking balance, yet determined to grit their teeth and endure. They never wanted to let anyone see them in other than their Sunday best, but neither of them went to church anymore—unlike Peter, who would sit through an hour of anything if it meant a chance to rub thighs with Bonnie Tsosie.

  Margaret had gotten sick this spring. A bad cough she couldn’t shake. With each new prescription of antibiotics, the doctor kept warning her if she didn’t rest and take care of herself it could go into pneumonia. In the bottom lobe of her left lung, it felt like there was a tiny balled-up wad of cellophane, a rustling that crinkled like leftover Christmas wrapping paper with every breath. Finally she drove out to Joe Yazzi’s and let him make her tea.

  “This thing in your lungs, Maggie. Better find a way to let them tears come on out or you won’t get well, I’m telling you.”

  But how did you let go when you had no clue where the knots began?

  Joe had asked to fill in at Rabbott’s, and this week anyway, his truck was running. “Let me tell you a story,” he said as he mixed the herbs for her drink. “That legend of Blue Dog Owen told you? I heard different. In this story Blue Dog was a regular mutt, living out near Great Kiva in Aztec. You been there?�
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  “I’ve driven by.”

  “We’ll go sometime. It’s a holy place. Nobody’s lived there for hundreds of years, so they turn it into a big tourist thing to make a few dollars the Indians sure won’t never see. And the way the story goes, right around the twenties this skinny dog shows up, won’t leave for nothing, all the tourist people coming in wanting to adopt him. A few even take him home. Dog run back to the Kiva every time, just waiting there outside the ruins, waiting on something. There’s this young ranger kind of dude working there, fairly handsome for a white man, taking money, telling them tourists how Anasazi used to live, showing them grinding stones, walking ’em through rooms they used to live in. Ranger dude brings some dog food, kind of partners up with old Blue Dog.

  “Then one night he meets this woman in a bar, and she’s just moved to town. Good-looking woman, maybe even a little bit like your bullheaded sister. They have few beers or whatever, and he take this woman out with him to Kiva, figures he’ll get her down in the great room, out of the heat, on account of summer’s extra warm, she’ll be feeling cool and holy, and think taking off her clothes, doing what comes natural will be a real good idea. So he takes her there, and it’s one of them nights when the moon’s face is full up in Father Sky, you can see it shining through hole in the ceiling, moonlight all over the place, big helping medicine when it comes to making love.

  “But before he can get this woman to let him touch her in the right places, this big old shaft of light falls on her body and Sha! Before you know it, she ain’t a woman no more, she’s a dog, and she leaps out of the Kiva through that ceiling hole and runs off with the other one.”

  Margaret took the packet of herbs Joe offered. “Is that the end of the story?”