by Win Blevins
In that moment on the porch he stood transfixed, rigid with a desire to have words with her. Mose Goldman opened the door and stood behind the latched screen, glaring at him. Then, without making a sound, he slowly closed the heavy door in the face of the discarded husband.
Zopilote had left his belongings, rode over a low rise, tied the pony, and walked back. Though he was sober, he wove and stumbled like a drunk, feeling for the first time the stirring of the Darkness Rolling that Holy Wind had breathed into him.
He hid in some rocks and watched the post. Not that he damn well couldn’t guess what had already happened. What was going to happen.
It didn’t take long. A Mexican was hovering around his wife, a friend of the big Jew from Santa Fe. This man had come out the previous autumn with some rich white men who brought big cameras and wanted to be packed into Rainbow Bridge for an exploration. Mose had accommodated them as packer and guide.
And now his wife, Nizhoni, had surely accommodated the Mexican in bed. Their bed.
When the three went to the dinner table that night, Zopilote crept to a window and listened. Everything he needed to hear was in one word. The Mexican called Zopilote’s wife by the fond name Novia. Betrothed. Zopilote knew the odd Mexican custom of a couple’s declaration of plans to wed—becoming novia and novio to each other—and then a ceremony in one of their fancy churches. Very holy, getting permission from the gods to bed another man’s woman. My woman.
That evening the Mexican did not even come out and pretend to go to his sleeping place in the barn loft. The lanterns went dark in the main part of the house, but not in the bedrooms. Zopilote flew like a raptor outside the bedroom he’d shared with his wife, screwed his eyes into a corner of the window, and saw what he trembled to see. The novia and novio stripped off every stitch and got into bed together. Then, madly, she straddled him.
Rage exploded inside Zopilote. He crept to one side of the outhouse and waited. By chance, they walked out of the house together, carrying a single lantern. The Mexican waited while his wife—wife!—went inside. As the door closed, Zopilote struck.
His blade dug deep and hard into the chest. The Mexican roared with pain. So did Zopilote. That rage and agony, bullhorned, was the most satisfying moment of his life.
His wife burst out of the outhouse screaming. While she watched—he wanted her to see him, he wanted her to know who had burned her new life to ashes—he grabbed the Mexican’s head from behind and pulled it back. Fixing his eyes on his wife’s face, he slit the Mexican’s throat.
Her screams brought her father running with a shotgun. Zopilote threw the knife at him. As the Jew dodged, Zopilote dashed behind the outhouse and sprinted into the darkness. He heard the bang of the weapon but felt not a single pellet touch him. He ran laughing into the darkness, his personal darkness.
On that terrible and magnificent night, Zopilote gloried in the thought of the Mexican’s death. If the Mexican’s spirit was still nearby, if the Mexican wanted him … Come to me! He shouted in his mind. This is the beginning.
Now, at the climax of those years, stoking his fire of hatred in the heat of prison, he yearned to see them. He decided to sneak close. He wanted to taste a thin slice of the life stolen from him. He found a crack in the curtains and peered through.
His son sat on the familiar leather sofa, holding a book. His wife, the boy’s mother, Nizhoni, chattered at him like a bird. Women.
Zopilote’s eyes recorded the details of the room. Scores of photos, probably displays of all the happiness these three had enjoyed and taken from him, this family that should have been his, all of their doings. The old man’s shotgun, there where it had always been, a relic. Family smiles inside picture frames. Jokes. Remembrances. The sight of gold sunsets, turning to red and purple. The smell of dawn air. The feel of monsoon rains on parched skin. The rhythm of a good horse sprinting. The touch of a woman. The deep tang of whiskey. Hints of what could have been. Perhaps more children.
During those years his own spirit thirsted, and the Holy Wind parched his soul.
One day, after they had been punished, when her body lay violated nearby, Zopilote would walk around that room, study those photos at his leisure, and rejoice.
His soul reveled. He was home.
* * *
Mom interrupted my reading, sat down on the sofa close to me. “The stew needs just a few more minutes.”
She looked at me for a long while. Her mind turned to fretting, the other side of my mother’s coin. She rattled on about the problems of the trading post. We sold very little. We did trade, Navajo to Navajo, even when we knew we couldn’t resell the items for a decent price. The post was barely afloat. Then the worst: In the last few months, when Grandpa was sick and then in rehab, she had to close down and lose their customers to Goulding’s. Mike Goulding, Harry Goulding’s wife, had done everything possible to help them out, and sometimes she’d paid them more than their stock was worth.
“We were okay in Santa Fe,” Mom said. Though Grandpa’s relatives had mostly scattered, his sister Frieda still lived in the old family house, which was said to be grand at one time, and no one went hungry there. Mom had spent a fortune on Grandpa’s medical bills, sold off treasures at half of their value, and still she would have a hard time paying off the rest without my help.
“When we got back from Santa Fe, your Grandpa and I would have wasted away except that my family and our neighbors brought us quarters of deer meat.” Mom looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “Very tough time.”
Her family’s tribute to their legendary benefactor, Mose Goldman.
From time to time she glanced out the window, probably watching for truck lights.
“But a new year came, and what a difference,” she said. “That call from you saying you were headed home? What a blessing.”
“Then,” I teased her, “the news about John Ford that you kept from me.”
“A giant boost for us. For the whole valley.”
My mother wrote to storekeepers and traders we knew in Flagstaff, promised them good discounts on our wool, our rugs, our everything. Our necks stuck out on the chopping block farther yet.
“We’ve never lived high on the hog, but we weren’t in debt. Now…?”
Lights flicked across the living room windows. YouKnowWho was turning the pickup toward the hitching post. The mystery woman.
Mom jumped up. “Good that Mr. Ford is back,” she said, her eyes dancing. “And you’ve come home just in time. Just in time.”
The back door scraped open a few inches and got stuck.
“Yazzie, help her with that.” Mom ran into the kitchen, and I followed after. Grandpa sat at the pine table, using his weak arm to lift a can of beans over his head. Back down on the table. Up over his head again. His barbell, a can of beans.
Looked like I would have to rehang that door. A lift up from inside and there stood …
Who’s this?
A young woman slipped by, olive-skinned, with crinkly black hair down to her waist. She could have been a Navajo, except that she was wearing pants and had a kitten on one shoulder.
“Hi, Grandpa,” she called. “Hi, Nizhoni, hi…” She noticed me standing behind the door. “You must be Yazzie.”
A good face. Never mind the almond shape, pert mouth, and bowed nose. She had eyes big as dinner plates and the blue-violet color of forget-me-nots.
She stuck out her hand. “I’m Iris.” I shook, and she gripped like a white man.
Then she smiled big and her face turned a funny corner. One of her two upper front teeth twisted half-sideways like a door ajar. I smiled, and I stared right at the open door in her mouth. Rude, but it caught me off guard. “I came out with your Grandma Frieda. Oh. I know. Very original teeth!” She touched the tooth with the tip of a finger. And then she laughed.
Perky beauty with a kitten friend.
I wondered how Grandma Frieda got into this picture. Then I remembered—she’d mentioned a daughter, her daugh
ter, in some of her letters to us from New York. Those letters that came, regular as clockwork, even before she’d moved back to Santa Fe. Frieda was Grandpa’s baby sister.
Iris sat down next to Grandpa and kissed him on the cheek. He didn’t miss a beat with that can of beans.
“Wait,” I said, “you’re my aunt?” My head started to pound. This Navajo family relations business could give a person a headache.
She cocked her head.
I said, “I call you Aunt Iris?”
“You want a black eye? It’s Iris,” she said. “But I get it. Navajos call their mother’s sister ‘mother,’ and you call our grandmother’s sisters ‘grandmother.’”
She was kind of an exotic wise-ass. Good-looking, probably a couple of years older than me. Strange to think of her as my aunt.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the kitten.
“You want to hold him?” She reached the cat out to me, and I took it. Not bad—cuddly.
“His name is Cockeyed.”
I looked a question at her.
“Take a gander at his right eye.”
I held the kitten up in front of my face. Sure enough, while the left eye looked straight at me, the right one pointed out and up, seeing who knows what?
“I’m cockeyed in one tooth, and he’s the same in one eye.”
“Where’d you get him?” Definitely not from around here—he would have been coyote chow by now.
“When Mom and I drove Uncle Mose and Nizhoni out here, I brought him along for company. He was barely weaned, and he’s still just a kitty.”
“Don’t let him run around outside—you won’t have him long.”
My mother had ladled food into beautiful hand-beaten silver bowls and onto Pueblo pottery serving dishes. She took one last look around the kitchen and announced, “Dinner is ready!”
I walked into the dining room and flipped on the lights above the table, bulbs affixed to a wagon wheel, the local version of a chandelier.
Iris put Cockeyed on her shoulder and quick-footed it in the direction of food, carrying serving bowls to the dining table. She went back into the kitchen, her hands ever-moving. It seemed that was her way, hands never still, body in perpetual motion. It was like she was dancing to a tune only she could hear.
Grandpa wheeled himself to the head of the table. Mom slid a tray of hot fry bread next to him and plunked down a jar of honey. She sat at Grandpa’s left, Iris next to her, and I sat across from the women, still mystified.
Mom’s face was animated now. “How do you like our surprise?”
Grandpa grinned in his distorted way.
Mom jumped in. “Frieda knows what family is. Which is why she drove out, got Grandpa and me, and carted us right back with her to Santa Fe when we needed help. What a woman, sixty years old, more like twenty, and driving that dirt road from Flagstaff? Then your grandfather decided he’d had enough rehab”—she gave Grandpa a look of disapproval—“and Frieda drove us back here. Iris came along.…”
“And I fell in love with the place.”
“Now we can’t get rid of you.” Mom tried to grin.
“You’ve been herding sheep?” I said. Unbelievable.
“Am I enamored of that part of life here? I think not. Who would love camping out and watching sheep curl their wool and squirt shit five days a week? And what has Nizhoni sent me out to eat but canned Spam and biscuits? I mean, awright, I’m no observant Jew, but Spam? And the biscuits, cold and stale? Thank God I had Cockeyed to talk to.”
Iris’s accent was strong, and I’d heard women say cuss words before, although not many.
“Mom’s not really tough,” I said. “She’s just trying to promote you to Jake Charlie status.”
Iris stuck out her tongue at me.
My aunt had pizzazz.
“Why did you come from New York, which to me might as well be Paris, to this far end of the planet? And stay?” The whole family had visited us, but not since Great-Grandpa died, maybe eight years ago. Centuries ago, it felt like.
She smiled. “Not now. But, if you’re a good boy, I’ll show you in the morning.”
There it came, another corkscrew of guilt. I’d arrived just before dark, would be gone as soon as the sun came up, and I still hadn’t said a word about it. My mother was right. We weren’t always great about being honest with each other.
“Are you excited to be home?” said Iris. “You are, right?”
More and more guilty.
Mom got up and went to the kitchen. I knew she didn’t, could not, see the big rejection coming. Or what would feel like to her as rejection.
I faked a grin. I said, lowering my voice as if I was some newscaster on the radio, reading the latest from the front:
“Headline: WAR SURVIVOR KILLED BY BOREDOM
“Subhead: OVER ONE HUNDRED SHEEP ARE SUSPECTS IN DEATH OF SEAMAN GOLDMAN”
Iris threw her arms high, and Cockeyed slid into the crook of her neck. “Why not follow my lead?” she said. “Get delirious to be here. This place is pure magic. Maybe you need to see it with fresh eyes, not with your memories.”
I didn’t know what to think about that. Iris fit on the rez like an Arab at Yom Kippur. Navajos are soft-spoken people, always patient and courteous, and we go to any length to avoid dispute. A New Yorker? That’s probably as far from Navajo as you can get.
Passing the food, we started filling up our bowls and plates. The scent, the steam. It was pretty close to heaven.
“You want to tell me about the world war?” Iris said. “You know, the one our country didn’t get into until Hitler had killed half the Jews in Europe?”
“For me, what war?” It was good to have an audience. “When I enlisted, which was ’thirty-nine, no one really expected a war, at least not in Asia. They sent me to San Diego, and I got a blue-water assignment as a seaman. Water to the east of us, waves to the west of us…”
“Oh, poor baby.”
“Hey, I signed on to see the world—‘Go Navy!’ What I saw, total, was Pearl Harbor for a refueling stop. We got eight hours of liberty and hopped right back onboard. I didn’t get to see one grass skirt.”
“Bet you wanted to do more than see,” said Iris.
Grandpa made a coughing sound that seemed to either be his try at laughter or putting a lid on it for Mom.
“When we got back to San Diego, I asked for shore patrol duty. A lot of sailors hate it, but I thought it was good work and good times. At first it’s just patrolling, you know, the bars and—”
“Whorehouses,” Iris chipped in.
Jeez, what a tongue on a woman. I fumbled my way forward. “… And finding sailors who are drunk and getting them back on board before they get into trouble. Sometimes you have to rap a head with a baton, but usually nothing much. Made me think that maybe, when my tour was over, I might want to be a cop. Something like that.”
“Such talk,” Mom said. “Let’s think of a nicer topic for the dinner table.” Meaning no talk about anything but me spending the rest of my natural life at the trading post.
Cockeyed curled up in Iris’s lap, fifth diner at the table. Even before her first bite, Iris asked me, “You ever fire your piece?”
Mom glared at her. Evidently, Iris didn’t put much stock in “nice.”
“I shot into the ground one time. That put a quick stop to a scrap that was brewing up. That was about it.
“Something good came along, though. Two things, actually. One, I asked for long-term duty on shore patrol. For most guys, it’s just the duty of that particular day, but having one sailor in every patrol who has a lot of experience works well. So I got what I wanted.
“Then came my real break. I showed some of the NCIS guys—that’s Naval Criminal Investigative Service—I showed them that I wanted to learn how to investigate crimes and do it right. You know, like suppose a real crime was committed, let’s say assault or assault with a deadly weapon, and the perpetrator, or the victim, was a sailor. In comes NCIS.”
; “A cop? No kidding?” Iris tore off a small bit of lamb and fed it to Cockeyed on her lap. My aspirations didn’t seem to impress her.
“Almost all the NCIS guys are officers, you know, above everybody else. But one man, a warrant officer, took to me and offered help. He said if I passed the exam and went up one more grade, he’d ask that I be on his team. I passed and got the duty. So guess what? I got to be a real cop.”
Iris leaned her forehead into her hand. “Oy vey.”
“I loved it. Actually, my thought was…” Normally, I wouldn’t have said this—why did Iris make me talkative? “Actually, I’m thinking with that experience, maybe I’ll look for work as a railroad dick.”
Iris grinned at the word.
“I’ve always loved the sound of that train coming in and out of Flagstaff, and add that to my cop experience? It seems like a natural.”
Mom interrupted, and she dismissed my talk with one wave of her hand. “Enough of all this. Time for dessert. You three adjourn to the sofa.”
Grandpa settled his wheelchair at the end of the big leather couch. Iris and I found seats at each end. Mom cleared the empty plates. I took Cockeyed, held him, and studied his crazy eye. Weird and sort of hypnotic, both … kind of like a New York aunt being here in Navajoland.
“Where do you think that off-eye looks?” said Iris.
“Into the great unknown,” I said.
She was pleased by that.
Just then Mom came out from the kitchen with a cobbler made of dwarf peaches. I’m sure the Anasazi didn’t have anything like that peach cobbler. I’m also sure they enjoyed the dwarf peaches, the sticky juice running down arms, as much as we do. She was really putting on the dog for me, and I loved it. Grandpa had gotten our trees from a Hopi trader as saplings decades ago. We stored the dried peaches in the root cellar over the winter and reconstituted the slices in water for treats. Mom handed us full bowls and sat facing us across the coffee table.
“Ummm, this is pure bliss,” said Iris. Then she eyed me. Eyebrows arching, she said, “‘Dick’ is exactly the right word, isn’t it?”
It’s like I’d erased my mind when we left the dining table, and my face went hot. Then I remembered. The railroad. “You’re having way too much fun razzing me.”