Silence.
Delores rolls her head back, as if attempting to seek heavenly guidance right through the roof of the old pickup. Then she drops her head into both spotted hands and shakes it – and the hands – back and forth three or four times. Slowly.
‘Trade places,’ she says, dropping her hands hard into her lap.
Carly’s one tiny bit of power is lost. Figures. That’s been her lot for as long as she can remember.
‘Maybe I could learn it.’
‘Oh, no. No, no, no. Not on my truck, you don’t. Not on my clutch. This clutch’s lasted since 1973 ’n it needs to keep goin’ long as the truck does. Long as I do. Won’t do to have you strippin’ my gears, no thanks. Trade places.’
‘Can you see well enough to drive?’
‘Nope. You’re gonna have to see for me.’
Carly sits still a minute. Lets that filter down. She’s been asked to take a ride on a dirt road with a blind woman driving. Sure, she wants that phone. Badly. But she needs to survive long enough to get back to Teddy.
‘That sounds … dangerous.’
‘That ’r stay home and forget the whole deal.’
Carly looks again at Jen. Jen’s scratching a goat on the forehead, between its eyes. The goat is trying to rub its head against her. Jen doesn’t seem afraid of the horns. She’s laughing. Carly can’t hear it, but she can see it. She can see Jen’s face, laughing.
They’ll go slow. Even if they crash, it probably won’t be fatal.
Carly sighs. Climbs down. By the time she goes around the back of the heavily loaded bed, Delores has slid into the driver seat, and is gunning the old engine to life.
‘You’re going in the ditch!’ Carly shouts.
They’re not literally driving into the ditch on the right-hand side of the rust-colored dirt road. Not yet. But they will, if Delores keeps going the direction she’s going.
Delores adjusts right, steering them even closer to the ditch.
‘The other way!’
Delores stomps the brake, sending Carly slamming into her shoulder belt. She bounces back again, hitting the ripped vinyl bench seat. She can feel an exposed spring against her lower back.
‘Let’s get somethin’ straight,’ Delores says. ‘There’s two ditches. One on my right. One on my left. If you yell at me I’m gettin’ too close to one, don’t you think it might be wise to specify?’
‘Sorry. You were too far right.’
‘Now that’s a little clearer.’
‘Sorry.’
Delores sits a minute, as if waiting for her patience to catch up. Then she reaches out and feels around close to Carly, grabs hold of Carly’s left wrist and pulls her hand over to the steering wheel.
‘You steer,’ she says, flatly. An order. ‘I’ll go slow. You tell me if there’s anything to hit ’n I’ll go even slower.’
Delores downshifts from second to first and hits the gas again. Accelerates all the way up to five or six miles an hour. It makes Carly nervous at first, because she’s never manned a steering wheel without sitting directly behind it. It requires some adjusting.
Within a minute or two she finds it far less nerve-wracking than watching the truck she’s riding in head straight for a ditch.
Delores rides with her left elbow out the open window, right hand in her lap. Carly quickly learns not to look. It’s alarming to watch a driver who hasn’t got the wheel. Even if your brain knows you’ve got it yourself.
They’re about to pass two little houses now, one on each side of the road. First … anything … they’ve come to.
‘There’s a dog up there,’ Carly says. ‘And three little kids.’
‘I know it.’
‘You can see that far?’
‘Didn’t say I could see it. Said I know it. That’s Hal and Velma’s three girls. I know how far down the road they live, and I know what time they wait for their dad to pick ’em up on the weekends.’
‘Then what do you even need me for?’
‘Well. If you see one right in the middle of the road, lemme know.’
As they pull closer, Carly sees the faces of the three little Wakapi girls. They look an even year or two apart in age and size. They’re waving. The littlest one is smiling widely, showing missing front teeth.
‘Hi, Delores,’ the oldest girl calls, cupping her hands around her mouth. ‘Be careful, Delores.’
The old woman leans half out the window as they roll by.
‘Don’t you worry none about me, Hannie,’ she says as they pull even. The dirty white dog stands up and wags its tail. ‘Got me a borrowed pair o’ eyes.’
‘Who’s your friend?’ the little one asks.
‘Don’t matter,’ Delores says, then pulls her head and torso back inside.
They drive another minute in silence.
Carly looks back at the kids and the dog, suddenly feeling like, if only she’d had a dog who waited for the bus with her each morning, everything in her life might’ve turned out OK. Or, at the very least, better than this.
The old woman’s last words echo, a delayed reaction.
‘I don’t matter?’
‘Didn’t say that. Said “it” don’t matter.’
‘How’s that different?’
‘Look. How much of that story you want me to tell out the window of some movin’ truck? For that matter, how much of that story do I even know? I keep thinkin’ you’ll open up in time if I just lay off it. Beginnin’ to doubt that system.’
Carly falls silent. She does not open up.
She also does not shake the feeling that Delores said what she really meant. Carly is nobody. Carly isn’t worth explaining. Carly doesn’t even matter. Maybe everybody thinks that about Carly. Maybe Carly is even beginning to agree.
‘This should be Chester’s place right up here a piece. You see a blue sign?’
‘I see a sign,’ Carly says. ‘It’s too far away to see what color.’
‘Should be it round about now.’
‘There are three big dogs running out into the road.’
‘Yup. That’s Chester’s.’
‘Slow down! Don’t hit the dogs!’
The three dogs, one beastly yellow mutt and two German shepherd types, are running straight at the grill of the pickup, barking their fool heads off. Delores isn’t slowing down.
‘Tell me when we get to the driveway. I’ll slow down, you turn us in.’
‘You’re gonna hit the dogs!’
‘I ain’t gonna hit no dogs. Chester’s dogs know how to duck. If they didn’t they’d be dead a long time.’
Before she finishes the sentence, the dogs split like water flowing around the truck. The two German shepherds flow to the driver’s side. The ugly yellow mutt appears right under Carly’s open window, leaping and snapping.
Carly rolls the window up, fast, her heart hammering. Why are Navajo dogs so mean? They’re not, they’re just doing their job. It echoes back into Carly’s head, a scene from their long journey. She hasn’t thought much about the walking part of their trip. She’s been trying to think ahead. Are these Wakapi dogs just doing their job? Aren’t they doing it a little too stridently? Can’t somebody drive by without getting this treatment?
‘Slow down. Right here. I mean, right turn. Here.’
Carly has to hand-over-hand the wheel nearly a full turn. Then she corrects too fast, almost running them into the fence along the driveway.
‘Tell me when to stop,’ Delores says, heading straight for a rough barn.
‘Now,’ Carly says.
They’re a good thirty feet from it. But a margin for error never hurts.
An old man comes wandering out from the barn, wiping his hands on a blue rag. Not old like Delores. Medium old. Maybe in his fifties. He has hair down to his waist, tied back in a ponytail. And a truly enormous pot belly. It rivals any Carly can remember seeing. He’s wearing just jeans and a white undershirt.
‘Well, well, well,’ he says. ‘Delores Watakobie
. You haven’t made it out here for quite the while.’
‘Best I don’t drive too much these days. Just be glad I made it out here this time. Borrowed a pair of eyes.’
The dogs are still circling and barking and snarling.
Chester comes around to the passenger side and stares right in at Carly, which makes her surprisingly uncomfortable. She smiles tightly, then looks away. He just keeps staring.
‘This one of your great-granddaughters?’ he asks Delores. As if Carly can’t hear or speak for herself.
Delores is easing herself down from the driver’s seat, seemingly right into the gaping maws of two vicious canine killers. She pushes one aside with her knee.
‘Chester, you been out in the sun too long. That girl look to you like she got one drop of native blood in there, anywhere, in any corner of her body?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Chester says. ‘I guess not. But you never can tell.’
Carly leans over and pulls the driver’s-side door closed behind the old woman. Fast. So the killers can’t come right in after her.
‘Who is she, then?’
‘Don’t know,’ Delores replies. ‘Still waitin’ on her to tell me.’
‘Huh,’ he grunts. Like it’s a mystery he can live without solving.
He begins to rummage around in the truck bed. Carly can feel the truck rock as he moves things around back there.
‘Nothin’ worth much,’ Delores says. ‘Maybe some scrap worth meltin’. What you gimme for the lot? We don’t wanna haul none of it home.’
‘This all of it?’
‘No, we got maybe two more loads.’
‘Well. Hmm. If they’re both like this load, maybe ten, twelve dollars all told. Gotta get it off here, though. See what we got.’
Delores knocks on the back window, startling her.
‘Get on out here and help the man unload,’ she hollers.
Carly swallows hard.
‘Not with those dogs out there. I don’t want to get eaten.’
Delores and Chester laugh. At her. It’s clear, just to listen to it, that they’re having a good laugh at Carly’s expense.
Chester whistles sharply, and the dogs fall silent. Carly didn’t realize how much noise they were really making. Until it went away. Until the world sounded so different without it.
‘Barn!’ Chester yells.
The dogs slink away.
Carly climbs down carefully. She really would have liked to hear a door close behind those dogs. But obviously that’s more than she’s going to get. So she just looks over her shoulder at the barn, then jumps like she’s been shot when Chester clears his throat.
They both get another good laugh at Carly’s expense.
Carly spends a good twenty minutes helping unload the truck she spent two hours loading.
For her trouble, Chester pays her a whole three dollars and twenty-five cents. That’s the bad news. The good news is, he accommodates her request that the entire sum be paid in quarters.
By the time she navigates them back to Delores’s house, Carly feels like she’s been through a small war. Her thighs are shaking. When she steps out of the truck, she has to test them briefly to see if they’ll hold.
Jen is working on the corral that contains the goats. Hammering in a couple of broken slats that used to be tied up with rope.
‘Go on ’n load up again,’ Delores calls. ‘I think I got one more trip in me for the day.’
She hobbles into the house.
‘You didn’t ask if I did,’ Carly mutters under her breath.
She walks slowly and carefully to where Jen is hammering.
Jen looks up. Stops. Says, ‘You survived.’
Then Jen pulls a set of ear buds out of her ears. The wires lead into her shirt pocket. Like she was listening to music on an iPod or something. But Jen doesn’t have an iPod.
‘Barely.’
Jen drops the hammer in the dirt and takes off her cowboy hat, mopping her face with her sleeve. Her face is red and wet with perspiration. The bright red bandana Delores gave her is rolled into a thick headband and tied around her forehead to sop up sweat, and to form a shelf to keep the hat off her eyes. The bandana’s soaked through.
‘Pretty brave, going for a ride with a blind woman. Why didn’t you drive?’
‘It’s a stick shift. Where’d you get that?’
She points to the wires leading into Jen’s pocket. Jen lifts up on them. It’s an iPod all right. A nice big new one. Over a hundred gigs maybe.
‘Just about to tell you,’ Jen says. ‘Guess what happened while you were gone?’
‘An iPod fell out of the sky and landed in your ears.’
‘Close. That guy came back.’
‘Alvin?’
‘Yeah. Alvin. And guess what? He really is a policeman. With the Wakapi Police.’
Carly’s stomach and chest ice over lightly. Just what they don’t need is a cop coming around every morning, like clockwork. Asking questions.
‘How do you know? Was he in a cop car?’
‘Sort of.’
‘OK, Jen. What’s a sort of cop car look like?’
‘Well. It was a pickup. Jacked up kind of high and all. But not the pickup he was driving the other day. Light blue. And bigger. Higher off the ground.’
‘Did it say anything about Wakapi Police on it?’
‘I don’t think so. But it had that thing on top. You know. That bar with the lights. For pulling people over. And he had on a uniform.’
The uniform part hits home. Makes it all feel real. So Carly heads in a new direction entirely.
‘I bet there’s no such thing as the Wakapi Police. In fact, I bet there’s no such thing as the Wakapi. I never heard of a tribe called the Wakapi. Did you?’
‘Nope, I never did, and I told Delores that, and she laughed. She said most people haven’t heard much about them and they like it that way just fine. She said there’s more than ten thousand Navajo for every Wakapi. She said the Hopi people are getting smaller and so is their land, and they’re still dozens of times bigger and better known. She said the Wakapi have lots of kids but they go off and live in the city and don’t come back. So there just aren’t that many of them left.’
‘Will you please stop talking for a minute, Jen? I don’t care about any of that.’
‘Well, you said you thought there was no such thing as a Wakapi. But they must be real, because they have a police department and Alvin’s in it, and I saw his uniform with the patch on it.’
So there it is again. The uniform. There’s no ducking the uniform.
‘What kind of uniform?’
Carly is determined to prove this cop observation false. But her weapons are wearing thin.
‘I don’t know. A uniform-uniform. Short-sleeved. I think he was wearing jeans, not uniform pants. But it was a uniform shirt. It had this patch on it that said Wakapi Police, and then this … I don’t know. Design.’
‘What kind of design?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know, Carly. Geez. What’s with the twenty questions? I kept looking at it, but I couldn’t really figure out what it was. It was just a design. Some circles and some lines, and … well, what difference does it make? What if I said it was an eagle, or a horse? And then you’d say … what? “Yeah, that’s the Wakapi Police all right.” You don’t know. So why are you even asking?’
Carly looks over her shoulder to see where the old woman is. She can see her through the window into the house, puttering at the kitchen sink. But Delores has phenomenal ears. To be safe, she grabs Jen’s upper arm and walks her around to the back of the henhouse.
‘Ow. What?’
‘Did you tell him anything?’ she asks, with an ominous shadow on the last word. ‘Anything about our situation at all?’
‘No. He didn’t ask me anything. The only thing he asked was whether you still needed to make your phone call, and I said no, Delores was driving you to the junk man, and when you’d done a few trips and h
ad enough money you’d stop at the village store while you were out. So it was OK. And he said, “Delores is driving?” and I said, “Yeah, but it’s OK because Carly’s along to watch the road.” And he said, “It’s a good thing I didn’t hear that,” so I said it again, but he just said the same thing. “It’s a good thing I didn’t hear that.” So that’s when I knew what he meant. That he was pretending he didn’t hear that. And then we just talked about Delores and what a character she is, and then he left. That’s all.’
‘Don’t tell him anything about us, Jen.’
‘What if he asks? What am I supposed to say?’
‘Nothing. Pretend you’re stupid or something.’
‘Well, he already knows I’m not stupid. But anyway, most times you’ll be here when he comes. How much money did you make?’
‘Only three twenty-five. But we got a couple more loads we can do. If I live that long.’
‘He seems nice, Carly. I saw this iPod sitting on his dashboard, and I said, “Wish I had one of those while I was out here working,” and he said, “How long you here with Delores?” and I said “Six more days.” And so he loaned it to me. He’s nice. Not exactly what I listen to, kind of new-agey, but it’s OK. You get used to it.’ She stops. Waits. Braves a look at Carly’s face. ‘He’s nice.’
‘He’s a cop!’ Carly barks, way too loud. Delores might have heard that from all the way in the house. She lowers her voice. ‘He’s probably got some kind of oath to turn us in. He’s a cop.’
There. She admitted it. She didn’t want it to be true. She wanted him not to be. But he is.
Sometimes even Carly just has to buckle under to what is.
After lunch, Carly heads right back out to finish up that second load.
‘It’s still siesta,’ Jen says. She’s on her back on the couch, the cowboy hat over her face.
‘Mad dogs ’n Anglos,’ Delores says from the kitchen area.
‘I just want to get done. Hey. Jen. Can I take that iPod?’
Carly wants to take the measure of this cop. If he were here, she’d study him. On the sly, while he wasn’t looking. Instead she’ll hold something that belongs to him, and listen to what he likes to listen to. She has no idea what that will tell her. But it makes her feel like she’s in control. Of something. Like she has a plan.
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