An hour into the drive, near Medicine Ranch, he saw two brown streaks of elk and pounded his elbow twice on the rear window. The truck skidded, and Uncle Sparky and Larson were out and looking in their sights. Two blasts. The elk loped in a panicked curve around the road, making for a grove of cottonwood. The men, all blocky legs and heavy hips, chased to cut them off, but at the bend the animals had already vanished up the hill into the dense trees.
They lowered their guns. At the truck his father laughed. “You missed, Spark. You just scared ’em away.” His pockmarked face exploded in a rare smile, and he punched Sparky’s shoulder.
Sparky said, “I never miss when Adam’s with us, isn’t it?”
“You’re full of shit,” Adam said.
“Well,” Sparky looked both ways and winked. “Don’t tell no one about that.”
Another ten miles down the cratered road they pulled off in a clearing beneath the ponderosas, took their rifles, and split up. Adam felt the drizzle and the wet wind on his face. He followed his father’s heavy legs against the wind and knew they were heading the right way. On one hill they sat by the trunk of a low scrub oak and listened for a long time. They hiked back down and Adam watched his father’s boots. When he was little, he used to try to match him stride for stride. Now his legs were already longer than his dad’s.
After a few minutes Larson stopped and knelt next to him. He balanced on his haunches, his right fingers touching the ground. The air was still; the beaded grass and mud smelled both sweet and acrid.
“The secret of hunting,” Larson whispered, “is a prayer you’ll never come home empty handed.”
Again they set off and had nearly reached the truck when Adam heard a branch break. He clicked his tongue and pointed with his lips across the clearing, to where a cow elk and her calf were standing, rigid and alert.
Adam hesitated to lift his gun, but in one swift, gentle movement his father raised his rifle to his shoulder, aimed, pulled, and shot. The calf dropped. Its mother bolted out of sight with two great leaps. Adam stood still. The echo of the blast died off in his head, the rustling sounds of the fleeing elk grew fainter. He stared at the fallen calf.
Larson looked at Adam. “The meat’s more tender,” he explained. They approached the dead animal and his father held back a step. “You know what to do.”
With his left hand Adam grabbed the calf’s warm head and with his other hand the right front leg. His father helped him pull it around, clockwise, so the head faced where the sun comes up. In the truck they found a sharp knife, and by then Uncle Sparky had joined them. First they sliced the stomach and took out its steaming guts and kidneys. They cut parts of the upper legs and hips and the back and the neck. They wasted no meat; that would bring bad luck. They raised the heavy skin and shook it over the meat and prayed four times that they would always be lucky hunting. Adam had to carry the soft head as they hauled the skin back to the truck bed. He packed the dripping red meat into the cooler and wiped his hands in the grass.
They breakfasted in silence. Adam and his uncle leaned against the cold side of the truck, peeling hard-boiled eggs and flicking shells off their fingers into the mud.
That afternoon they fished Canyon Creek, and near dusk they hiked in the rain single file over the hills, looking for whitetail. Manzanita crunched beneath their boots. Above, a single crow dipped and curved in the dark sky. The pale green hills lay empty—the day had yielded all it was going to yield, and his father decided it was time to head home.
Their old Nissan had only two-wheel drive, so running up the muddy trails was difficult, and they sometimes slid going down. At the bottom of one hill the truck reached a flooded wash where the monsoon water crashed over polished white stones. Larson didn’t hesitate; he raced the engine, threw it into first, and crossed half the churning river before the water exploded against the door and came leaking into the cab.
There was no choice but to climb out. They splashed into the freezing current, carrying guns and ammo high over the water. In a defeated line, the rain sliding down their necks, they retreated a mile back to Indian Ruins and found an abandoned trailer. They left the guns there to dry and returned to the truck to get the food and blankets and to cover the hide. By then the rain was letting up.
Back in the trailer Uncle Sparky scratched his crooked nose. “Nobody knows where we’re at.”
“Game warden’ll be around by morning,” Larson said. “He’ll see the truck.”
“The fucker’s gonna fine us.”
“I’ll take care of it.” His father turned to Adam and said in Apache, “Always tell someone where you’re going, or else you get lost like us.”
Late that evening the plastic tile of the trailer floor grew frigid, and the men spread two damp wool blankets to share among them. They stretched out, hands beneath their heads, and gazed up as the ceiling darkened. Uncle Sparky teased Adam about how many bottles of Miller he could drink and how many girlfriends he had. “You know Apache love?” he kept asking. “A hickey and a black eye. You ever do it? You will soon enough.” Adam remained silent while the two adults laughed at him. He felt the blood running to his face, and he heard his dad’s laugh, so loud the floor of the trailer shook. Sparky gave up on Adam and said to his father, “Lorena’s gonna be worried ’bout you boys.”
“She’ll worry about him,” Larson said.
Sparky sucked in a long breath. “Not a bad thing, having a woman worrying ’bout ya.”
Adam said, “Mom don’t worry about Dad ’cause he’s never home anyway.”
The blow came out of the darkness, the shot of his father’s hard hand, once across the lower forehead, then again across the bridge of his nose. His head smashed into the metal base of the wall. The scuffling of shadows. His uncle pulled his father off him. “Leave it, Larson. Kid’s right. Leave it!”
“Kid doesn’t know. Needs to—”
“Leave it.”
With the pain the room around Adam collapsed into white blank space. He kept his eyes clenched shut and lay immobile, refusing to check the size of the pounding welt on his forehead or to wipe the warm wetness spreading in back of his head. He disappeared into the wilderness of pain, amazed by the expanse of it all, by what it was possible for one body to take.
Some time later the pain wore down. His eyes were sticky when he opened them, and he reemerged from the distance to hear his uncle and father discussing someone. Did they think he was asleep? They talked about her as if he didn’t know. A white teacher from off the rez. Not his mother.
It would be easy, he thought. He would wait for both of them to sleep. He would rise and take the long serrated deer knife from the cooler. He’d slice open his father’s stomach first, then pull out the steaming guts and kidneys. After, his mother would be better off. She wouldn’t worry; she wouldn’t have to fight anymore. He thought he could do it. Everyone thought Adam was quiet, harmless, but he knew he had it in him.
Then he questioned it, and told himself he was too young to kill anyone. He hadn’t even started college yet.
In Flagstaff, after a week of tryouts, Adam managed to walk on to the NAU basketball team. He never expected to start; the recruits were too strong. The Lumberjacks had won their division each of the past three years and had played on national television in the March tournament. It was a thrill just to make the team.
Adam had learned basketball from his father. Like most Red Cliff families, the Dales had set up a makeshift plywood goal on their camp, and Larson had shown him how to shoot—first underhand, standing straight beneath the rim, then a two-hand push shot, banking it off the shaky backboard, and at last a set shot, which Adam practiced with his cousin Levi defending him.
Larson sometimes joined the boys in the backyard for a game of horse. They tried to outdo one another’s unlikely shots. They played with different words, such as frybread and Geronimo, and even Apache words like llkaad dijege, which meant candy and had no real spelling and made the game funnier. They played a version of twenty-one
—one person took foul shots while the others rebounded and put the ball back into play. By age twelve Levi was already a strong young point guard. Despite his weight he had naturally quick hands and rarely missed from the baseline. Adam surpassed him, though: he could do just about anything with the basketball, and he was faster than anyone in town, much faster than his limping father.
Still, Larson was tallest, and he showed the boys little mercy rebounding.
“You gotta block me out!” he once yelled at Adam. “You can’t let me get into your area! This space”—he bent over and with his heel dragged a line in the dust where the key would have been— “this area, this, this, this, and this, belongs to you. Why are you letting me get in there?”
On the next shot Adam tried it. He held his father out and grabbed the rebound, and for a second he felt victorious. But with the strength of years of hauling wood, Larson yanked the ball out of his hands and laid it into the basket for his own points. “You just gave me that!”
Adam squinted and stepped away.
“You better protect that ball once you got it. Watch me.” His father tossed the ball against the rusty rim and went up and took the rebound. He came down and covered it in his powerful chest, twisting right and left, his elbows pointed to throw the boys off him.
“More elbows!” shouted his father. “You’ve got to throw those things around. They’re your weapons. Your shotguns. Keep other people away. You give a guy a good shot—pow!—early in the game, they won’t be trying to get the ball off you anymore, isn’t it?”
From that time on Adam went up for rebounds and always came down throwing first his right then his left elbow—even when no one was threatening him. By the time he was in college his game had grown so intense, he felt that the rebound—the spinning globe in the air—was his, and nobody could take it from him. His elbows, his weapons, guaranteed it.
NAU practices were held in the immense white dome on the southern end of campus, sometimes twice a day, mornings and evenings. Substituting did not bother him. He enjoyed the competition of scrimmages, scoring on the starters, occasionally stealing the ball. The other players came from Arizona, California, and even as far away as Michigan and New York. For preseason games he traveled through nearby states on the team bus. As they bumped along, his teammates played cards and traded rap CDs for their Walk-mans. In the long hours of travel Adam gazed out the bus windows at the unfamiliar names of towns, the wide-open spaces and empty roads. Not only was there a world beyond the reservation, there was a world beyond Arizona—there were other lives to be lived.
This he would contemplate while training on weekends in October, getting in shape by jogging three times a week to the top of Mount Humphreys. He drove to the trail in Jeff’s truck and circled ten thousand feet upward through the flaming aspens to the parking lot. From there he paced himself up the shaded trail. The trees ended, the final quarter-mile of boulders could not be run, and he scaled the rocks until he reached the twelve-thousand-foot peak. Standing alone, in cargo shorts and a long T-shirt, surrounded by photographers and day hikers in Gore-Tex jackets and fleece hats, he looked out past the town below, in the direction of the Red Mountains. The reservation was too far away to see. To the north lay the Grand Canyon, on clear days the crack just visible from the peak. Pink streaks of the Painted Desert ran along the dry eastern horizon, across the Navajo reservation.
His mother had once told him that from a mountain like this the Apache crown dancers descended to cure the evil ways of their tribe. As children, at the Sunrise Dances he and Verdena used to scream when the crown dancers got close, and his mom laughed at the two of them. From the highest point in Arizona, breathing hard, he could see the world below as the mountain spirits might have seen it: in miniature, no more than a scrap of wreckage against the surge of land and sky. He would squat for twenty minutes on the cool ground, catch his breath, and begin his descent.
He wrote Jeff once a month from school. Life was easier, he told him, off the rez. He forgot the dangers, the infighting between families, the need to be cool. His head was clearer; the constant pressure and disappointments slowly seeped from his mind. In a single-paragraph letter, in late October, he wrote that he had managed to pass all his midterms.
Uninvited, Councilman Dale appeared on the campus one bright fall afternoon as Adam was walking to his logic and rhetoric class with two of his teammates. His father smacked him on the back of his head and insisted on shaking hands with his two friends. Larson claimed he was in town on some vague tribal business. He walked along with them to class and plied Adam with embarrassing questions about college, then delivered private news from Red Cliff: news of the family, what kind of crossbow he was shopping for, who had gotten whom pregnant. At the classroom door Adam paused while his friends went in and found seats.
“What are you doing here?”
“Passing through, I told you.”
“Could have called. Told me you were coming.”
Larson glanced into the classroom. “Thought I’d surprise you. See how things are going, schoolboy.” He laid a heavy hand on Adam’s shoulder.
Adam tensed up. “Semester’s just normal. Nothing happening yet.”
His dad dropped his arm and stood with his legs apart. Adam turned to enter the classroom without saying goodbye, but Larson limped in beside him. The seats were arranged in a horseshoe around three long tables. His father squeezed down in the chair next to him, and Adam felt the weight of twenty students’ eyes. At last the young professor hustled in. She was just about to begin lecturing when she paused and asked Larson who he was.
“Adam Dale’s dad. You just go on teaching, Miss. Pretend I’m not here.”
“I see.” The professor looked at Adam, her lips pressed. “I see.”
For the duration of class his father read over his shoulder, first the textbook, then the copy of a student’s paper the professor was critiquing. Adam sat erect, paralyzed with fear that his father would raise his hand. Larson’s shoulder pressed against him; his warm exhalations smelled of last night’s beer, his unwashed jeans stank, and the rise and fall of his heavy chest made it impossible for Adam to think straight. Once, during a particularly oblique explanation by the professor, in a voice entirely too loud, Larson hissed, “Bullshit.” Half the heads in the room turned to face them.
When the lecture ended, Adam was first out of the classroom, and he didn’t say goodbye to his father. The following weekend he spoke to Marie Anne on the phone, but apparently neither she nor his mother had any idea Larson had visited. Adam decided not to tell them.
His father appeared a second time in January. On a blustery winter night, snow whirling around the streetlights outside the dorm, Adam pulled the blinds to go to sleep. A pounding on his door woke him some time later, the sound echoing off the concrete walls of his room. He jumped from bed. In the hallway his father balanced himself against the doorframe, his drenched windbreaker covered in melting white flakes. Thin wet curls of gray hair shone in the fluorescent light, and drops of water clung to his ears and nose. Adam pulled him into the room and Larson lurched forward; the mud on his shoes left brown streaks on the tile floor. The dormitory lay in complete silence, punctuated only by the distant flush of a toilet from a higher floor.
“What the hell you doing?” Adam whispered.
“Come up to see ya.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Thing is,” his father said, “you’re Apache.” He fingered the CD collection on a shelf, twirled and lifted Adam’s Lumberjack backpack, kicked down the whiffleball bat leaning against the closet, and stood transfixed by the poster of Pamela Anderson, her white teeth shining like a beacon in the dim room.
Adam guided his father to the bed, sat him down, peeled off the freezing jacket, and struggled with the knotted, icy boot laces. He undressed him, pushing the large unsteady body back on the bed, unzipping the pants, and tugging the soaked jeans off each powerful leg. Larson’s skin was rough and goosebumped, and a th
ick purple scar from a sawmill accident lined the bottom of his knee.
“You doing it like this—this all the time?”
“Fuck off, Dad.”
Adam directed his father’s wide limbs into dry sweats and an NAU T-shirt. He waited for him to pass out on the bed, snoring, and he slept that night on the floor, bile in his throat, recalling the trailer on that hunting trip six months ago, the first time he had imagined this man dead.
The dorm was quiet in the morning when he shook his father awake. They had a silent breakfast of western omelets at the Village Inn Diner. He could tell his father was preoccupied, and after Larson polished off his eggs, he spoke. “BIA’s changed its goddamn mind,” he said. He explained how that fall they had reversed policy on building the high school in Red Cliff. The elementary school had reached four hundred children, and taking notice, the Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered the town to build its own high school to accommodate the numbers. “Not like I haven’t been trying myself five years now!” his father said. He had protested and pressed his boss, the tribal chairman in Blackriver, not to rush into any outside plans. “If they’ll wait until the casino’s built, we’ll fund the largest damn high school of any rez town in this country.”
But already the BIA had taken matters into its own hands. In Blackriver the tribal chairman researched Dome Technology, the fastest and cheapest way to put up a building; then the tribe purchased a plan from an Idaho construction company. The fifteen-ton fabric lining was flown in from France, then shaped in Houston; fiberglass filling and rebar were ordered from Albuquerque, and a Mormon-owned construction company from Holbrook was contracted. By late autumn at the building site the earth had been flattened and the foundation poured, but then funds stalled, bickering over contracts wasted time, and progress slowed. “I didn’t think they’d ever get the goddamn thing started,” his dad said. But now the bulldozers were moving again, and they’d raised a ten-foot concrete stem wall. This spring, when the weather warmed, workers would truck in the fabric from storage, attach it to the stem wall, and seal off the doors and windows. By summer they would inflate the bubble with a giant blower, supplanting with air his father’s vision of a high school.
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