A Man Without a Wife

by Beverly Bird

  “Through tomorrow?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is there a motel nearby?”

  “There’s the Navajo Nation Inn up in Shiprock. But everybody will just camp here.”

  “Wow,” Ricky breathed. “Could we, Dad? Please?”

  “We don’t have anything to camp with, Sport.”

  Ellen watched him run a hand through his dark curls. Good. He was a little rattled, too. Perversely, she stirred things up a little more before it occurred to her that maybe she wasn’t doing the best thing for herself. Did she want them to stay all night?

  “People always have extra blankets and pillows and sleeping bags,” she heard herself volunteer.

  “Come on, Dad. Please.”

  Dallas felt himself sinking, getting pulled in, sucked down into something that scared him. And suddenly he knew it had very little to do with Ricky. If a day here was good for him, then two would be better. It wasn’t that. It was just that his first reflex was to say no, to take them back to the safety of their Flagstaff condo where he could lock himself in again and say, Well now, wasn’t that fun?

  When had that happened to him? he wondered dazedly. At what point after Mary’s death had he so totally closed himself off and stopped being spontaneous, stopped enjoying?

  He glanced at Ellen, though he imagined that the defensive, husky-voiced Ms. Lonetree was probably the last person in the world who would understand. But she was staring right back at him, looking a little wild herself, as though she didn’t really want them to stay, didn’t want to risk...what? What was she afraid of?

  That decided him.

  “Sure,” he answered. “Why not?”

  Ricky let out a whoop.

  Chapter 5

  Ellen took them to Martin and Madeline Bedonie’s fire. They were the only thing resembling family she had and it was the only place she could think of while her heart was in her throat.

  Madeline began fussing over Ricky with no questions asked, at least not immediately. “Here, sit here.” She plunked him down beside the fire. “You should be running with those other children—it’s good for you—but since you’re not, we’ll put some meat on those skinny bones. Do you like mutton?”

  Ricky scrunched up his nose, but to his credit he shot only one helpless look back at Dallas. “I never had it.”

  “Then try it.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes. If you don’t like it, then I guess you’ll just have to go hungry because we don’t have too much else.”

  She shoved a paper plate into his hands. It was loaded down with meat and refried beans, sagging in the center. Ricky had to grab it fast to keep it from spilling. But he tried some and he grinned.

  “Hey, it’s not bad.”

  “Of course it’s not,” Madeline answered, then her gaze went to measure Dallas.

  She left Ricky and planted herself in front of him and Ellen. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “I’m his father.”

  Her gaze moved between him and the boy, then it stopped on Ellen.

  Ellen saw something flare in the woman’s eyes. Her heart skipped and she looked away fast. As with Uncle Ernie, there were just some people you couldn’t hide things from. Madeline had fed her too often, had tucked her into bed at night one too many times, to misread anything in her expression now.

  “It’s part of that Tsosie-McNally thing,” she explained awkwardly.

  Dallas shot her a warning look, one she could almost literally feel without looking at him. “Ricky’s all the way over by the fire,” she whispered at him. “He’s so engrossed in eating he’s not paying any attention to us.”

  “If you think that, then you’ve got a lot to learn about kids—at least about this one.”

  She flinched almost imperceptibly. He scowled at the reaction a moment, then he finally looked at his son.

  He seemed to weigh the situation, then he nodded.

  “The court wants him to be exposed to his birth culture,” Ellen went on.

  Madeline considered that for a long heartbeat. “Culture smulture,” she finally muttered. “A child is a child. As long as he’s raised with love, he’ll find the answers he needs.”

  Ellen saw Dallas’s eyes sharpen. He knew a potential ally when he saw one.

  “Is that what you believe?” he asked Madeline.

  “I believe he needs hozro, but he can find that within himself if his heart is good. Nobody has to teach him.”

  “Hozro? What’s that?”

  “Balance with the universe, with life,” Ellen supplied, hoping they would get off the subject of Ricky.

  “You need that in any culture,” Madeline pointed out. “It’s just that Anglo city folks don’t usually realize it, so they run around out of whack all the time and wonder why they’re unhappy.”

  Something about the concept jolted Dallas. Out of whack and unhappy. Was that what his problem was? The woman made the alternative sound so...simple.

  “How do you get it?” he asked. “This hozro?”

  “Nature just is. The universe just is,” Madeline explained. “You’ve got to bend yourself to accommodate it, rather than expect it to change to suit you. That’s balance.”

  Dallas nodded. He decided he would have to think more about that later. Now Madeline Bedonie was dragging him to the fire as well, pressing food into his hands. He didn’t really want it and he wasn’t sure how it happened—she stood only as tall as his chest—but somehow she planted her hands on his shoulders and pushed down. The next thing he knew he was seated beside his son.

  He noticed that Ellen Lonetree settled herself a judicious distance away from both of them. And he realized that it didn’t matter. He could still smell her hair.

  “Tsosie’s old news, anyway,” Madeline went on. “Now this Ozzie thing, that’s something to talk about.”

  Dallas looked at Ellen across the fire. “Who’s Ozzie?”

  “Calvin Ozzie,” she said shortly. “He’s running for tribal-council president.”

  Madeline snorted as she bustled about. “He wants to put a power plant on the Res. I ask you, what do we need a power plant for?”

  “Electricity?” Dallas suggested. He glanced around the sweeping desert, at the distant chiseled mesas and a mountain far to the south, which loomed up as though watching them. He saw no immediate evidence of power lines.

  Madeline’s husband looked up from his own plate, speaking for the first time. “Used to be they laid our telephone wires right across the desert. Nailed ‘em to fence posts and whatnot. So if a tumbleweed got caught on a post, if it snowed, if a sheep ran into the fence—” he snapped his fingers “—then no telephone service. And when it was windy, the voices would fade in and out. So now they route our calls three hundred miles to Santa Fe, beam them up to a satellite dish and rebroadcast them down to a receiving dish somewhere. If it snows or a tumbleweed gets into the receiving dish, no telephone service. When the wind blows too hard, the voices fade in and out.”

  Martin fell silent, eating again. It took Dallas a moment to understand that he had said all he was going to, another moment to realize that nothing else needed to be said. He laughed aloud, startling himself, and Ricky looked at him quickly.

  I don’t laugh anymore, either. The realization sobered him abruptly. Again it occurred to him that perhaps Ellen Lonetree’s meddling had opened some kind of door, a door that had desperately needed to be opened to let in some light.

  “Most of us live in hogans,” Madeline was grumbling. “No phones, no electricity to worry about anyway. Only the folks in Shiprock and Farmington and Crownpoint have that stuff. The town people. That’s who’ll vote for Ozzie.”

  “So you won’t?” Dallas asked. He wouldn’t dream of asking a friend such a personal political question over dinner in Flagstaff...but this was different. The people felt different here.

  Indeed, Madeline Bedonie took no offense. “When he tells me how to irrigate that west mountainside so m
y sheep can eat, then I’ll vote for him.”

  “What about you?” Dallas asked Ellen.

  Madeline answered for her. “She’s a townie. She lives in one of the trailer parks outside Shiprock.”

  “So you’ve got electricity and a telephone?”

  Ellen eyed him almost suspiciously. “Just electricity.”

  “I got the impression that you were more traditional than that.” Although, he realized, he wasn’t sure where he had gotten the idea. A lot of women were wandering around here dressed in long velveteen skirts and voluminous blouses, but Ellen Lonetree looked as if she had just stepped off the streets of Albuquerque. Maybe it was just the way she had been so all-fired righteous about Ricky being exposed to his birth culture, he thought.

  He watched emotions play over her face again, but this time it happened too quickly for him to identify any of them. Then her voice dropped an octave, making him almost wish he hadn’t questioned her.

  “I try to be,” she said softly.

  “Will you vote for Ozzie?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “What’s holding you back?”

  “I don’t like the idea of a big Anglo electricity factory blemishing our desert.” She spoke fast and preemptively, as though to close the subject, then she started looking about at the others, as though expecting one of them to introduce a new one.

  “So when’s this election?” he asked. “How long do you have to decide?”

  She flashed him a warning look and he finally realized that she really didn’t want to talk to him. It wasn’t the subject matter she had a problem with so much as it was...him. She had brought him here, but now she clearly wanted to dissociate herself from him, to let him go his way while she went hers. Somehow it made him all that much more determined to keep her from wriggling free.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Next month.”

  He scowled. “Primaries aren’t until June.”

  “That’s in your world,” she snapped. “Ours is different.”

  “Sort of like a country unto itself? Going by its own rules and government regardless of what the rest of America does?”

  “That’s right. The Res is legally a nation. Self-sufficient and self-contained.”

  Finally, she changed the subject on her own, looking away from him. “How come the others didn’t come?” she asked Madeline. “Where are Shadow and Mac and Jericho and Catherine?”

  “Catherine says that Shadow’s having activity,” Madeline explained, then she looked at Dallas as though to include him. Ellen sighed. “That’s one of those doctor words my daughter-in-law uses. She’s Irish. Me, I think Shadow and Mac got a little carried away with their reunion last weekend—he’s an archaeologist and he works away from home a lot. So Catherine is with her. She says if her womb calms down, they’ll be here. If it doesn’t, then we’ll have three more babies.”

  Ellen put her plate down abruptly. “Two more babies. I should go over there.”

  Madeline shook her head. “No. If something happens, Jericho said he’ll come for us. And there are three babies in there.”

  “She had an ultrasound, Madeline. There are two.”

  “Ernie says three.”

  Ellen fell helplessly silent. There was no way to argue the point. She had never known Uncle Ernie to be wrong. Besides, Madeline had just handed her the perfect excuse to leave and she fully intended to grab it.

  She stood quickly. Not even Dallas Lazo could dispute her right—her responsibility—to be with her best friend when she delivered two or three babies, she thought. Then she looked at him.

  He was watching her with an odd, knowing smile, a smile that infuriated her because it reminded her that he was in the driver’s seat and she was just along for the ride.

  “Running off so soon?” he asked quietly. “I don’t believe that was in the contract.”

  “You have an agreement with Barbara Bingham,” she snapped. “My services weren’t mentioned anywhere in it.”

  “Then again, there are such things as moral culpability.” He watched, intrigued, as her eyes flashed, then narrowed so that he could no longer see what was in them. No, he thought, she wasn’t like Mary at all. On one hand, she wore her heart on her sleeve just as his wife had. But this woman was very adept at grabbing those emotions and pulling them back again, at concealing them from view. Maybe she’d had to learn because she was so innately readable.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she whispered.

  “Because you deserve it.”

  “Why are you so desperate to find someone to blame?”

  His smile vanished abruptly. Touché , he thought.

  He would have let her go then, but she went still—staring over his shoulder. He put down his own plate and twisted around to look behind him. Barbara Bingham was hurrying toward them, and if Dallas thought he had felt out of place when he had arrived here, then this woman was almost frantic with discomfort.

  Then again, there was a very odd, very old little man chasing her. Dallas hadn’t had to contend with that.

  Ricky’s voice rang out. “Uncle Ernie! Are you going to camp here, too?”

  Barbara and the old man reached the fire. “I camp everywhere, Grandson,” he said. “I am here and I am not.”

  Dallas shot a highbrowed look at Ellen. “This is your Uncle Ernie?”

  Even she looked discomfited. “I thought you met him already. I sent him to find Ricky earlier.”

  “Ricky just told me that your uncle found him and that he was going off with him somewhere.”

  “I did,” Ricky contributed.

  Madeline Bedonie was bustling around with more food, pressing it on the newcomers. She pushed at Barbara Bingham to sit just as she had pushed at Dallas, but Dallas noticed that the orphanage director popped right back to her feet again, looking around desperately for a place to put the plate she obviously didn’t want. She wore a trim, neat skirt with a perfectly pressed blouse and high heels. The heels kept sinking into the red rock sand so that she had to lurch for balance every few seconds.

  Dallas got to his feet as well and moved around to stand beside Ellen. He enjoyed her expression this time. She wore a tiny, not entirely pleasant smile.

  He leaned into her a little bit to speak quietly. “Now, now, don’t be ugly.”

  “I’m never ugly.”

  “You’re watching her like a cat watches a mouse run itself to exhaustion. You don’t like her, do you?”

  Ellen felt herself flush. “Perfection irritates me.”

  “So you enjoy seeing it crack once in a while.”

  She wanted—needed—to retort, because this was too much like confiding in him. But there was no time to respond. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Ernie pulling a bird fetish and a small pouch of pollen from the waistband of his trousers. She groaned. She didn’t like Barbara, but she didn’t want to see even her subjected to what she knew was coming next.

  “Grandfather, I don’t think—”

  “Her spirit is stiff, Granddaughter,” Uncle Ernie interrupted.

  “Well, she likes it that way.”

  She heard a burst of laughter from Dallas—the second one since they had come to the Bedonie fire. She looked at him sharply. The sound rocked something solid inside her, made something within her threaten to soften. Then, impossibly, she felt a grin tugging at her mouth, too.

  In the second her attention was diverted, Uncle Ernie moved in on Barbara Bingham. He had his pollen out now, a pinch between the fingers of his right hand and he sprinkled it over her head as he began waving the bird in front of her. He was chanting in a low guttural voice.

  Barbara backed up, coughing, waving a hand in front of her face to clear the powder that drifted down into her eyes. She stepped right out of her shoes when they wouldn’t come with her.

  “I really didn’t plan on staying—” she began.

  “Is that bird real?” Ricky interrupted, jumping up to press close
r to Uncle Ernie. “Geez, it’s dead. How come it doesn’t stink?”

  Barbara began to look green. “Ellen, I really think that as you’re present, there’s no need for my—oh, my God!”

  Ernie ran the bird over her breasts in the shape of an X. She crossed her arms over them protectively. Dallas roared.

  It was good, heartfelt laughter that sounded as if it came all the way up from his gut. Ellen choked, but it did no good. She laughed as well and sat down hard where she stood, covering her face with her hands.

  She sensed rather than saw Dallas drop beside her. She opened her fingers a crack to peer at him, trying to gauge his reaction to Uncle Ernie as well. But he was only watching the curious scene now, still grinning, and his expression made something shake inside her all over again. His force, his strength, his determination—all those things were still there, and she knew he still wouldn’t cut her any slack. But now they were aimed at the others. He watched closely, ready to interfere if things got out of hand, but willing to enjoy himself until it happened.

  And something about his smile was...mean.

  “Talk about me,” she breathed, lowering her hands.

  He shrugged and his grin widened. “That ought to teach her not to butt in where she isn’t wanted. She had a hand in starting this mess, too.”

  They both looked back to see Barbara scurrying for her car. Her high heels were still stuck in the sand where she had been standing. Ellen had to swallow carefully to keep from laughing again.

  “I’ll take them back to her on Monday.”

  * * *

  Quiet settled over the fires as dusk gathered. Dallas noticed that while most of the people had spent the day milling and gossiping, now they migrated back to their own camps as night came, to eat again. He was overwhelmed by the amount of food that was being consumed. They had been stuffing themselves intermittently all day, but now that the Kinaalda girl had returned from her run, the real official meal started.

  The children took their plates and gathered around their elders, listening to stories. At the Bedonie fire, Uncle Ernie was spinning one of his own, something about a coyote, and Ricky listened, rapt, still chewing relentlessly.