Wild Indigo

by Sandi Ault

  “Here,” I said, making my way up to the road and grabbing the rope ahead of where she gripped it. “Let me do that. We’ll trade places.”

  She tipped her head a little, as if she were uncertain whether I could actually manage the job. Then she shrugged and headed back down to the streambed. I began to draw the bucket upward, hand over hand. I felt enormous resistance from the weight of the pail and the wet mud I was pulling it through. I stopped for a moment, looping the rope around the tree and tying a clove hitch. “Hang on a second,” I called to Momma Anna, who was looking at me quizzically. “I’m going to get some gloves.” I went to my Jeep and pulled out a pair and put them on.

  I looked down and saw my medicine teacher smirking at me.

  “Okay, I’m ready now. I got it.” Again, I worked to draw the bucket upward, and it felt like I was trying to bring the Queen Mary into port through a sea of gelatin. I breathed hard, exhaling sharply with every tug. Soon, I broke a sweat. When the container was up high enough for me to reach the handle, once again I looped the rope around the tree and tied it to secure it. Then I tried to lift the bucket. It must have weighed seventy or eighty pounds. I ended up dropping into a deep squat and then dragging it onto the road. I untied my knot and threw the standing end of the rope back down to Momma Anna. “Whew!” I said, unbuttoning my flannel shirt and then lifting the neck of the T-shirt I wore underneath over my face to mop the sweat off my brow. “Those things are heavy!”

  Momma Anna gave me a wry smile. “That why I ask you come.” She chuckled a little to herself, then went to tie the rope on another bucket handle.

  A few days later, I visited Momma Anna and found her out working on the portal in back of her house. It was a cold day, and she had a warm fire in her woodstove inside. She was using the tip of a knife to carve eyes in one of a host of small clay bears she had formed. I smiled at the natural, childlike wonder expressed in these little, unrefined bears. They were so unpretentious, and yet so full of reverence for this animal and its spirit. After she’d finished the eyes, Momma Anna took a straight pin and made a tiny puncture in the top of the bear’s head. I noticed that each of them had the same mark. “Why do you do that?” I asked.

  She gave no answer, but lifted a seed pot that she’d prepared for firing. It featured a lizard circling the tiny opening in the top of the pot. “Old day, we all have door to house in roof,” she said. She set the seed pot down, then picked up a small orb with a tiny, perfect perforation in its crown, holding it out in the palm of her hand, looking it over. “Time before time, the People come out of hole in Indigo Falls. We find bear here. Deer. Elk. Rabbit. Blossom of medicine plant. Indun tea. Bird. Water. Everything we need. We stay until we die. Then, go back beyond ridge, inside Earth, deep inside. Baby start life with hole in top of head, only soft skin there. This how Creator blow in breath of life. That how life come out and into all things. We need hole in top of everything to remind where we came, where we next go.” She picked up a pinch of cornmeal from a little dish on the table and offered it to the five directions, beginning and ending with the east. She took another pinch and made a circle above her head, tossing the meal into the air. She offered me the dish, and I did the same.

  We carried the prepared pottery pieces into the house on cookie sheets. Momma Anna opened the door to her woodstove and used a blunt-ended ash shovel to distribute the coals evenly. She motioned for me to hand her a newspaper-wrapped bundle on a nearby table. I did as she requested. She unwrapped the package. Inside was a variety of dried animal dung: what looked to be a cow pie, some kind of bird droppings, and possibly dog or coyote turds. Momma Anna plucked a long black and silver hair from the top of her head with one hand while she balanced the open parcel with the other. She gestured for me to take the latter, so I opened my palms and she set the paper and its contents in them. She snatched up one of the dog turds and quickly knotted the hair around it, then threw it into the fire. Then, using her bare hands, she fed the other excreta in. She went to the table and picked up some branches of local desert sage. She rubbed her hands with these, then closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the roof. After a moment, she threw the sage in the fire, too, and I smelled the pungent incense of its smudge. Then she carefully set the pottery, one item at a time, in the blade of the small ash shovel and loaded the items into the woodstove, as if it were a kiln. When all were safely nestled inside, she closed and clamped down the woodstove door and turned to me.

  “Wash hands!” she barked.

  19

  See No Evil

  After my midnight dip in La Petaca, and my rubdown with Grandma’s herbs, I slept like I’d been drugged. The next morning, as I was pulling down to the end of the dirt drive leading from my cabin, a motorist on the connecting gravel road flagged me over, waving his arm out the driver’s-side window. I pulled alongside his sedan. He opened an I.D. wallet—he was an attorney for the Department of the Interior. “You don’t have a phone,” he said.

  “Nope. There are no lines out this way. No line-of-sight to a cellular tower. No towers anywhere in this part of the state tall enough to go over the mountains.”

  “How can you live in this day and age without a phone?”

  Probably a rhetorical question, but I couldn’t resist. “Well, when I moved out here, the phone company told me that as soon as I had the thirty-five grand it would take to lay phone lines all the way from Tres Piedras, they’d get me hooked up. I figured right then I could learn how to live without a phone.”

  He didn’t seem amused. “Well, I’d like to talk to you about the stampede incident. Can we arrange a time when we could meet at the BLM office, perhaps? How about tomorrow?”

  When I got to Diane’s office, she was pacing the floor. “I’ve been trying to reach you. You don’t have a phone!”

  I sighed.

  “There’s an investigation into the stampede incident. It includes me. The Albuquerque office has instructed me to write a narrative, supporting the determination that it was a suicide. There’s a shit-storm coming.”

  “Why does it involve you? They’re saying I caused the stampede, not you.”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll guarantee you if my agency thinks someone has to take a fall to appease the tribe, it’ll be me.”

  “We’ll get that Sam Dreams Eagle kid to make a statement. He’s the one that saw the buffalo out of the confine and told me about them. He can prove that I didn’t cause the stampede, and that ought to put this thing right all the way around.”

  We took Diane’s fed car to the pueblo, and Mountain rode in the backseat like a dignitary being chauffeured. I’d promised to use a lint roller to clean up all the hair from the upholstery after we were done. I rode hunched down in the passenger seat, only poking my head up occasionally to give Diane directions. We took the back roads, and wound from the end of Momma Anna’s dirt lane onto the two-lane, rutted track through the meadow to where Sam Dreams Eagle lived.

  We waited a long time before an old woman answered the door, and when she did, her apparent loss of hearing and limited English made communication a trial. I let Diane do the talking, as we had agreed.

  “Does a boy named Sam Dreams Eagle live here?” Di said.

  The plump little grandmother wrung her hands in her apron and looked at the dirt floor. “No English.”

  I nudged Diane and whispered, “Ask about Rolando, his brother.”

  Diane raised her voice to address the elder: “Where is Rolando?”

  “Not here,” she muttered.

  “Sam’s not here? Or Rolando’s not here?” Diane persisted.

  The old woman raised her hand to her ear and turned a strained face to the side to hear better.

  “Sam? Rolando?” Diane nearly shouted.

  “Nobody home,” the old woman said, obviously nervous.

  “Do you know where we can find them?”

  “School,” the elder said, then held up a finger for us to wait. She shuffled away from the door, back into the
dark hovel of her old adobe. She came back with a battered calendar from the First State Bank. She pointed at a date nearly ten days ago. The only notation on the calendar was in the block for that day. Someone a good deal more literate than this crone seemed to have written St. Catherine Indian School, Santa Fe in neat blue hand printing. “Indun School. Santa Fe.” She grinned, showing bare gums. She nodded her head up and down.

  Diane looked at me, puzzled. I took over: “But they come home sometimes, right? I saw them here yesterday. I talked to both of them.”

  “Nobody home,” she said again. She pointed again to the box on the calendar. “Indun School. Santa Fe.” Then she grinned meekly and began to slowly close the door, bobbing her head up and down—as if to smile and do it slowly would not be taken as rude.

  Diane and I looked at each other in bafflement as the door shut.

  “Look, I can prove that Sam Dreams Eagle wasn’t in school since then. Let’s go to Momma Anna’s house. It’s right up at the end of the road, where we got off the graded surface. I hate to bother her while she’s grieving, but she saw Sam when he came to the house for me. She heard him say the buffalo were getting out. She’ll tell you.”

  On the dirt porch in front of Momma Anna’s house, the pack of pueblo dogs yapped and pawed at us while we waited for an answer to our knock. Mountain hung his head out of the back window of Diane’s car and yipped in jealousy. I tried to ignore him. The heat of the afternoon was abated by the cool shade of the brush arbor and the limbs of a nearby apple tree. Momma Anna peered through the window next to the door and gave me a stern look. She opened the door just a few inches. “I’m so ti-ired,” she moaned in a high-pitched voice, making the word tired into two, painfully long syllables. This was a common tone used by the women of the tribe when they were giving notice of suffering or complaint.

  “I know, Momma Anna,” I apologized. “I’m so sorry to bother you. I just need to take a minute or two of your time.” I expected her to invite us in as she always did—this was a custom even for strangers that came to her door. The Tanoah way was to be generous and welcoming with all and to give abundantly to everyone, especially strangers.

  “I not feel good,” she said. “Maybe next time.” She wore the same sheepish grin that signified the gentle, passive resistance often practiced by her people.

  “Just tell my friend here about Sam Dreams Eagle coming to the door on Saturday. Just tell her real quickly what you saw and what he said, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “I not know,” Momma Anna said, clasping a hand to her head while she kept the other one firmly on the door to keep it from opening any farther. “Lot been happening, me. I not remember good. My mind tired.”

  My mouth dropped open in surprise. For a minute I couldn’t speak. Then I drew in a big breath. “You know Sam Dreams Eagle, right, Momma Anna? The little boy who came here? The one who interrupted us when we were making jerky, and I had to leave because he said the buffalo were getting out?”

  Momma Anna shook her head and pressed her lips together in a frown. She kept shaking her head as she looked down and said, “No more. I am old. I need take nap.” She quietly but firmly pressed the door closed.

  Diane cocked her head at me and frowned. “Strike two.”

  We turned to leave, but a flash of shiny red behind Momma Anna’s house caught my eye. I looked to the back lot, to Jerome Santana’s place. A familiar red Mustang convertible was parked in front of the house, the same one I’d seen Gilbert Valdez driving on Sunday morning.

  As we were turning onto Rattlesnake Road to leave the pueblo, I raised myself from the low crouch I’d been folded in and sat upright in the car. “Wait! Stop!” I told Diane, and she braked, raising a cloud of dust. “Back up a little, to the edge of that latilla fence back there.”

  On the side of the road at the corner of the fence was a small brown boy with his head buried in his knees as he squatted in the dirt. I opened the car door and got out. The child raised his head to look at me. I saw tears streaking his dusty face. “Angel, what’s wrong?”

  He looked at me but didn’t speak. Instead, he folded his face into his arms as if he were ashamed of his tears.

  I squatted down beside him and stroked the crown of his head gently.

  “My friend is hiding from me. I can’t find him.”

  “You were playing with a friend, playing hide-and-seek?”

  “I always play with him. He’s hiding. I can’t find him.”

  I patted his shoulder and stood up. “Don’t give up, Angel. You’ll find him.”

  He stood and shuffled off without speaking.

  When we got back to the FBI office, Diane stopped at the front desk to pick up her messages while I went in her cubicle to use the phone.

  I called Roy. “Don’t come in to the office, Jamaica,” he warned.

  “I have an interview tomorrow with that attorney.”

  “Well, okay, but don’t come in today. That Sherman guy—that reporter from the Taos Times? He’s lurking around out front like we were fixing to give out cash to all comers. Just stay away from him. Let the big guns talk from here on out. We can talk some more when you come in tomorrow.”

  “Okay, Boss.”

  “And Jamaica? Stay away from the pueblo.”

  As I hung up, Diane appeared in the doorway with a message slip in her hand. “They’re not waiting on my narrative. My field supervisor is coming up from Albuquerque tomorrow,” she said. “I better put on my asbestos underwear, ’cuz I know that guy. We’ve got some history. He’s looking to burn my ass.”

  20

  The Invitation

  That afternoon at the gym, after a hapkido sparring session with Diane that left me sore in the ribs, I came outside to find Mountain, once again tied to the hitch in back, fiercely defending the territory of my Jeep against a broad-backed pueblo man I saw only from behind. The fellow had both hands in the air and was backing away from Mountain, saying, “Okay. Okay. Okay.” The wolf was at the end of his leash, the hair up on the ridge of his back just as it had been on the Gorge Rim trail the previous evening, when we’d seen the apparition.

  “Excuse me,” I called, making for my car as quickly as I could. “What are you doing there?”

  Hunter Contreras turned to face me, his palms still up as if he were under arrest. He smiled apologetically. “Oh, hi, Jamaica. I saw your Jeep. It’s pretty easy to tell yours now with that door off.” He fished in his shirt pocket, brought out a scrap of paper. “I was going to leave you a note.”

  “Hold on,” I said, putting my gym bag down and taking Mountain’s fully extended leash in my hand, forcing him back toward the Jeep bumper in order to create a little slack. I knelt down and stroked his chest and whispered in his ear, “It’s okay, buddy. It’s all right. I know this guy.”

  Hunter waited, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “That’s a mean dog you got there. Lot of wolf in him, huh?”

  I stood up again, but Mountain lunged once more.

  Contreras danced backward, even though he was well out of the range of Mountain’s leash limit.

  “Yeah, he’s a lot of wolf,” I said, “and I don’t know what’s been spooking him lately. He’s normally not aggressive at all. But he’s been a little strange this week. What’s the note about?”

  “Oh!” Hunter recovered, still obviously wary of Mountain. “I was going to see if we could have a cup of coffee. Remember, we said we’d try to talk? My brother being the tribal governor, I was going to take your story to him, talk to him, see what we could do about…maybe getting you back on good terms with the tribe.”

  I picked up my gym bag and put it in the back of my Jeep. Mountain remained on heightened alert. “Thanks for the invitation, Hunter. I’m sorry to put you off again, but I have to go. I’m meeting someone. Besides, I’ve thought about it, and I don’t know what else I would tell you. A little boy came to Momma Anna’s when I was there on Saturday and said the buffalo had gotten out of the fence a
nd were wandering up into the mountains. I went out there to take a look, and…” I started to say Jerome Santana’s name, but stopped myself this time. “And someone was in the pen with the bulls. He wouldn’t come out, even when I called to him. The gate was open when I got there, and the bulls started to run. They trampled him. That’s the same thing I told Ruben Rael and Sonny Warm Hands when they arrived a minute after the whole thing happened. It’s the same thing I told Officer Lobato when she got there about two minutes later. It’s the same thing I told Chief Moon Eagle when he showed up about ten minutes after that. And that’s what I told the FBI and the BLM. No matter what kind of spin you want to put on it—and believe me, I really appreciate your offer to try—I just don’t have anything else to say.”

  Hunter lowered his hands and put them in his pockets. “Well, let me think. You say a boy came to tell you about the buffalo? Do you know his name?”

  I was about to answer him when a pickup careened across the gravel parking lot and Bone Man jumped out of the passenger side. He hollered a thank-you to the driver, slammed the creaky door, and came around the end of the truck just as the driver peeled away, no doubt grateful to be able to breathe clean air again.

  “Hey, Hunter my man!” Bone Man called, a ludicrous grin on his face. “Jamaica, hey. ¿Qué pasa, eh?” Then he made an exaggerated lurch and raised his eyebrows. “Whoa! Jamaica! What happened to your face, dude?”

  Neither Hunter nor I responded, so Bone Man went on without hesitating. “Remember I warned you about some big animal coming for you, right, Jamaica? The bones were right, man. The bones were right.” He reached into his shirt, pulled out the bone necklace, and started strumming along it with his fingers. He closed his eyes and started bobbing and weaving back and forth.