Larson was agitated, shaking his head and cursing under his breath as he told the story. Adam paid for the breakfast—his father had no money on him, not even an ATM card. After the meal, still wearing Adam’s sweats, Larson climbed into his Nissan and peeled out of the one-way entrance to the parking lot. Though he had said he was heading back to the reservation, Adam didn’t believe him. His father was on a tear, and there was no stopping him.
After the visit Adam threw himself more fiercely into his studies and basketball practice. Like his teammates he declared a communications major. In the last meaningless regular season game, up in Salt Lake City, his coach gave him five minutes of playing time, and Adam hit a twenty-footer. They were his only two points for the season, but they were something.
Late in May Adam drove back to Red Cliff for the first time to work the summer with Marie Anne at the town’s grocery store. Officially its name was the Red Cliff Trading Post, but everyone called it the Tom’s Store. Tom, a Mormon from off the reservation, managed the business and took in the profits. The Apaches sometimes started their own trading posts—but they kept giving free food and clothes to their friends. New stores opened, lost money, and within a few weeks were boarded up. The Tom’s Store, though, was operated by an outsider, and it had prospered. Marie Anne worked the busy counter, and on his first day of stocking, Adam enjoyed seeing her waddle up to shelves to pull off cans of Spaghetti Os, pails of Crisco, and jars of pickled pig’s feet.
The town was smaller than he remembered it. Compared to Flagstaff, the reservation had so little traffic it seemed abandoned, yet within a week the place had swallowed him. Adam found himself out until all hours, drinking beers at the creek, sleeping with old girlfriends, and staying in bed later and later each morning. Disconcerted, he felt the eyes of the houses watching him, as if with a single consciousness. In Red Cliff, barely the slightest instant passed between an action and public judgment.
His first Friday after work he walked over to Uncle Sparky’s house, looking for Levi. On the porch he heard a muffled shouting from behind the cardboard-covered garage door. He knocked, waited a few moments, knocked again. For another ten minutes he continued knocking. Inside the yelling grew louder, but nobody answered. Finally a threatening hush fell. The door opened a crack and a voice he recognized but couldn’t place cursed:
“Get the fuck out of here, schoolboy.”
That night Levi showed up at Adam’s house. Since Adam had been away, his cousin had gotten heavier and blocky, double-chinned, wide-cheeked, yet he had the same blood-red eyes.
“Cuz,” he said, “let’s shoot.”
Out back Levi wobbled and could hardly hold the basketball. They shot in silence for almost an hour. Winded, Levi took a break and staggered around the old swing set. Neither suggested they play any of their old games. Finally Adam sat on the ball, and Levi approached and stood uneasily straight, as if balancing on two legs took his full concentration.
He showed up at the Tom’s Store the next afternoon. Adam was stacking cans of Spam on the uneven counters when, through the window, he saw his cousin pull into the gravel lot in a new purple Ford Ranger, with fluorescent yellow sport stripes—a sixteen-thousand-dollar truck. Levi honked three times. Tom, the owner, was reading a newspaper behind the counter and didn’t say anything when Adam left. Outside he strolled over to the truck and tapped its warm metal hood. He asked Levi where he’d gotten it.
“While some of you schoolboys are off in college, others of us putting food on the table.” Levi patted the dashboard with his palm, sounding two hollow thumps. Adam leaned in through the window, inhaling the stale beer odor of his cousin’s breath. Levi adjusted the side mirror with his lean, muscled arm, now tattooed in black ink with some kind of Phoenix gang sign.
That evening after dinner Adam found his father on the porch, sanding down a handle for a broken ax. Adam watched him work for thirty minutes. Finally he blurted out everything he was thinking—about Levi’s new truck, about how he was picking up Uncle Sparky’s bad habits. Larson continued working, as if he didn’t hear. He finished sanding the wood, laid the head across two bricks, and in powerful strokes close to the metal, sawed off the old handle.
“Do something,” Adam begged. “You’re not gonna let Levi get into all this shit?”
His father lifted the ax head to drive out the remaining wood with a chisel. “What you want me to do? It’s a family thing.”
“That’s why you gotta do something.”
“That’s why I can’t.” Larson took up the new smooth handle and forced it tight through the ax head. “I’m supposed to have your uncle arrested?” He lifted the saw and began cutting off the extra wood on top. “You want me to put your cousin behind bars? That what you want?” He finished sawing, stood the ax straight on the cement step, and with a hammer drove a small wooden wedge deep into the slot. Finally he stopped, breathing heavily, and stared up at the sky. Adam followed his gaze. Stars were sprayed across the summer night. Larson said, “You don’t go betraying blood.”
With the ax lying straight across the bricks, he sawed off the extra inch of the wedge.
A deal went sour. At 1:20 on a bright Thursday afternoon, mid-August, word reached Adam at the trading post: Sparky had been shot.
His uncle had been driving in his red Corvette out to the highway with a new girlfriend, a plump San Carlos Apache woman who had witnessed the whole thing. A rival dealer from Phoenix, a Mexican, was waiting for them at the Turnoff. He strode into the middle of the intersection and pulled the car over, signaling with a shotgun. Sparky was bent over fumbling for the 9-millimeter pistol he always kept beneath the passenger seat when the Mexican blasted twice through the window. Glass shattered across the girlfriend’s lap and bloodied her chest and face. She screamed one piercing note while the Mexican slid calmly into his black Mercedes, and she had not stopped screaming five minutes later when Pastor Wyckoff, heading down to Tucson, pulled over in his minivan and found Sparky dead.
Red Cliff had lost its dealer, and the town went into mourning. Adam’s old friends printed black T-shirts with Tupac Shakur’s “Rebel of the Underground” rap lyrics on the front and a portrait of Sparky on the back. Half the procession at the crowded funeral wore the shirts. Sparky was buried on the hillside cemetery above the creek, inside the barbed-wire fence that kept the coyotes out. The site was surrounded by other graves marked by freshly painted white wooden crosses. Councilman Dale helped lower the casket, his face expressionless, rigid as stone, and Marie Anne bent over the grave, bracing herself with her hands on her knees. Levi was nowhere to be found.
At the Turnoff that weekend Sparky’s friends erected a permanent memorial stone, decorated with pink and red plastic flowers and inscribed with his real name and the dates of his life. To get to Red Cliff, you had to pass it.
There were no fishing trips, no barbecues, no rodeos for the duration of the summer, and the only thing that raised Larson’s spirits was the construction of the casino. Adam drove him up for the final weekly inspection that August, and on the ride back his father seemed pleased. The building stood ready for the slot machines, the poker tables, and the buffet lounge. It would open in late fall, just a few months away. At the Turnoff Adam swung his father’s new Toyota 4x4 onto the paved road, past the memorial. Over the final ridge to Red Cliff he dodged a spotted cow, the truck handling nicely; its power steering responded to the slightest touch. Adam rounded the steep downhill curve, and it was then he saw it—the white pimple on the face of their valley, the bubble. That morning, when he and his father had driven out of Red Cliff, it had not yet been visible in the rearview mirror. Now it shone in the spotlight of the four o’clock sun.
“They’re inflating the dome,” Adam said.
“I see that.”
As Red Cliff’s councilman, his dad should have been able to stop the construction. But it had been forced on them by Washington, by the BIA, by Larson’s boss, the tribal chairman—outsiders, his father called the
m, outsiders who could care less, outsiders like the man who killed Sparky. Adam stepped harder on the gas.
“What the town needs is money,” Larson said, “not some instant school, built on the cheap, like someone bought it with food stamps.”
Adam knew the construction plan: his father had approved it only through pressure from the chairman. The dome would take twenty-four hours to inflate. Once it was up, they would spray an initial layer of fiberglass inside to lend structural support. Over thirty days, layers of concrete would be spiraled to the top, and in a month the instant building would stand on its own.
From ten miles off, the future school seemed to crouch on the hilltop like a UFO. Half-inflated, it already dominated the idyllic valley. Adam hit the gas pedal, the truck flew closer, and over the final five-mile stretch the dome grew higher and wider and more grotesque. Slowing as he entered town, Adam saw that people had climbed onto their rooftops for a better view; they were pointing and chattering.
“Even the neighbors don’t know what we need,” his father mumbled. “Cheering handouts from Washington!”
They found Lorena, Verdena, and Marie Anne watching from the porch outside the house. The high school dome loomed in the west, gleaming in the orange light. Adam drove into the dirt driveway and cut the engine. His father gathered his papers from under the passenger seat, and with the door open Adam heard Verdena questioning their aunt. “There gonna be computers in there? There’ll be a cafeteria, isn’t it? How many teachers they going to need?” His mom held Verdena around the waist while Marie Anne answered patiently. None of them took their eyes off the dome, not even to greet Adam and his dad.
“Our own goddamn family,” Larson muttered under his breath, slamming the truck door.
Verdena was chomping a grilled cheese sandwich, and between bites she pointed with her crumb-encrusted lips and said, “Looks like a big egg, Dad, isn’t it?”
Lorena said, “Supposed to hold five hundred students!”
Larson faced them with a wry smirk, squinting. “Looks like a big old birdshit to me. You gonna go to school in that thing, Verdena?”
Verdena told him she didn’t mind. It was better than the trailer.
Larson laughed. “Going to school in a big ol’ bird turd. That’s all right with my kids. They don’t care.”
Adam glared. Marie Anne said, “What you telling them? You should be happy about this. It’s what you wanted.”
“I wanted a real school for my children!” He turned to Adam and said in Apache, “Never would have seen me in a school like that.”
That night Larson told Adam to get in the truck and they’d check out the dome. They drove through the dark streets up past the Day School to the top of the hill, where his father parked by a power shovel. The high school, illuminated by a sliver of moon, seemed to hover ahead in a white phosphorescence. The generator was grating away, blowing hot air into the bubble, a roar Adam imagined could be heard for miles.
They stepped carefully around the dome to what would become the main entrance. It was sealed with boards to prevent air from escaping. His father pried loose two six-foot beams, then tore them off with his bare hands. A heavy stream of warm air rushed from the hole. The space was just wide enough to squeeze through if they sucked in their stomachs. Inside, the dome was darker than night, a sky without stars, lit only by the faint opaque glints of boarded windows in the stem wall. Adam clapped his hands, and the sound went off like thunder, reverberating off the fifty-foot ceiling and the cement floor, a storm only they could hear.
Back outside, Adam tried to reattach the boards to the entrance, but his father said not to bother. They drove down the hill. At the house Larson kept the truck running and wouldn’t get out.
“Where you heading?” Adam asked.
“Just go inside.”
Behind Adam the truck took off again. In the middle of the night he heard his father crash through the living room and step over his mattress, stumbling past the woodstove. Adam pretended to sleep.
That morning Larson feigned outrage when the town woke to the deflated bubble, to a school that was no longer there. Someone had shot up the inside of the dome, fifty rounds at least, the fabric decimated. As councilman, he vowed to find out who had done it—who had destroyed the future of their town. He promised to get the BIA to replace the fifteen-ton fabric from France. They never did.
Adam told no one on the rez what he knew. To blame his father would only cast suspicion on himself. But in his only letter to Jeff that summer, in two scribbled pages, he unburdened himself.
The next week it was a relief—the relief of escape—to drive Jeff’s truck, loaded with his stuff, back to Flagstaff, where basketball would be starting up soon.
5
ANARBEK BENT DOWN on his hands and knees and crawled under his office desk, searching for the thumbtack he had dropped. He was attempting to hang the factory’s first MANAS 1000 YEARS poster. In an effort to proclaim its identity and connect to the outside world, the new nation of Kyrgyzstan had announced that it was throwing the biggest party the earth had ever known, to take place the following summer. The government had chosen to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the Epic of Manas, the story of their country’s mythical hero. The Kyrgyz boasted that the Manas Epos—double the combined length of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—was the world’s longest poem. Traces of the ancient oral tradition remained. Illiterate men still wandered remote mountain villages and could sing the entire epic from memory in a trancelike state.
Manas was a giant who could toss boulders across the peaks of the Tien Shan and pull trees out by the roots and shoot them like arrows. Legend said he was immaculately conceived when his elderly father had begged Allah for a son. He had been born in the Talas Valley, not far from Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka. As a child he vowed to free his people from oppression. His life played out in a series of noble campaigns epitomizing the heights of bravery, until he was at last betrayed and killed. To this day, if anyone approached the hero’s secret burial place, the heavens protected it with thunder, lightning, and a torrential rainstorm that could be quelled only by reciting the epic.
With independence had come an effort to revive interest in the Manas tradition. Young schoolchildren now memorized entire chapters of the epic, and nobody was better at this than Baktigul Tashtanalieva. Nazira had coached her, and Anarbek had watched his daughter place first in the yearly oblast-wide school competition, where, dressed in elaborate felt costume, her hands flying in fierce gestures, she recited the verses perfectly to mesmerized crowds. The prize won Baktigul a part, as an extra, in next summer’s outdoor dramatization of the epic. Baktigul’s recitation had also won Anarbek this poster.
He was still crawling on the floor when the government official arrived unannounced, slapping the hollow door with the palm of his hand. Startled, Anarbek jumped to his feet as the man strode into the room. He was wearing a solid green tie and bore a leather briefcase with an imprint of the Kyrgyz flag—the red sun rising on a yellow background. The word mencheekteshteeroo had been embroidered in black on the leather. He introduced himself as Bolot Ismailov. Anarbek offered him a seat, and the stranger flopped the briefcase onto the desk and clicked it open, so the flag and its label faced Anarbek upside down.
“Will you have some tea?” Anarbek asked. Behind him the Manas poster slid off the wall.
The squat man adjusted his glasses and cocked his head slightly, as if Anarbek had implied something illicit. “Perhaps later,” he said. “We need to have a conversation. Pressing business.”
Anarbek was overcome with dread. Jeff had warned him, and he had been expecting the visit, but now he decided it was best to play innocent. “Of course,” he said. “What have you come to talk about, brother?”
“I’ve driven from Bishkek today. I’m overseeing privatization of businesses in the valley. We’ve been in your oblast for nearly six weeks now. Are you aware we’ve opened an office in Talas?”
“Perhaps I have heard.�
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Bolot explained that he had been sent to inspect state-owned farms and factories, in order to produce a list for this year’s coming auction. It would be a cash-and-coupon auction—the government was distributing vouchers to all state workers, who could now take part in the purchase of the former collectives or any industry in the country. “We’re making progress, you see. You can own your own factory now.”
Anarbek spoke quietly, respectfully, examining his own fingers. “I understand how it works. But even with the coupons, we will need credit, no? And foreign investors?”
“Certainly. A great deal of credit. With a fine, productive factory like this, I can’t imagine that would be a problem.”
“No. Of course not. We have an American working here.”
“Ah, wonderful. I didn’t know that. As I said, I’ve been sent to inspect the state-owned farms and factories—in order to create the list of enterprises for the privatization auction.”
Anarbek hesitated. “Yes. Would you like me to show you around?”
“Certainly, but first . . .” Bolot leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs, and with some effort crossed his right foot onto his knee. His brown leather shoe was rubbed to an impressive shine. He thought for a moment, his hand pulling at his rough-shaven chin, then he suddenly spoke in Kyrgyz. “Tell me! How are things in the village?”
Anarbek tried to answer calmly. “As you know, sir, it has been very difficult these few years.” It pained him to have to show deference to this short, stubby man, perhaps twenty years his junior.
Bolot asked if the government salaries were still arriving on time, and Anarbek told him not always, but regularly enough. They both agreed that the state of affairs in the country was very much up in the air. The official assured Anarbek that the changes would be for the long-term good.
This Is Not Civilization Page 10