The reservation was in hysterics. It had been years since anyone remembered a moment of such intense Apache pride. Over slow-motion replays and pumped-up rock music, the ESPN announcers yelled, “Adam Dale, out of the Red Cliff, Arizona!”
That Saturday the Lumberjacks lost their second-round game by twenty-five points, but back on campus the student body welcomed the team with a rally. A crowd of five hundred frantic students, shaking banners, were waiting for them, and they chanted his name as he stepped off the bus.
AD-AM! DALE! AD-AM! DALE!
The glory of the NCAA tournament soon faded. Adam graduated and returned jobless to the reservation. At first he pumped gas at the Tom’s Store. Then the pastor at the Lutheran church—which Adam used to attend sporadically with his mother—gave him some part-time filing work. After he had been home a month, his father secured him a position with Healthful Nations. Early that fall Healthful Nations organized a diabetes fair in the Cottonwood Gymnasium. Adam was disappointed. Despite balloons, free door prizes, Kool-Aid served in paper cups, and a basketball raffle, the fair was poorly attended, and the microphone didn’t work for the announcements. Healthful Nations also ran the Feeding Center. In his pickup Adam delivered food to elders who had no transportation, but he never figured out how to ensure that the elders, and not their families, actually ate the food. Healthful Nations had him organize biannual dental examinations at the Day School, with the Mormon dentist who taught the children to brush in circles and not to forget behind their teeth.
“This Healthful Nations is an okay idea,” Adam told his mother, “but I don’t know if it’s doing any good.”
“In this town nobody cares,” Lorena said. “You might be the only one.”
Red Cliff had a population of twelve hundred people. That year fourteen teenagers killed themselves.
The first was his old friend Garcia Armstrong, who used to swim with him at the creek near White Springs. He sawed off a shotgun and blasted it into his chest. Indian Health Services radioed a helicopter from Navapache Hospital, and in less than forty minutes they had evacuated the young man up over the mountains, across the Sonoran Desert, down to Tucson’s University Medical Center, and onto the operation table. By some miracle Garcia survived, and Red Cliff celebrated his return with a party at the Catholic church. The town swamped him with get-well presents; his mother brought his favorite food, Pizza Hut pizza. Six weeks later he shot himself again, successfully.
A plague of copycat suicides followed: dropouts, ex-rodeo stars, rejected lovers, single mothers, two gay teenagers. The tragedies culminated in a suicide pact: four girls swallowed six bottles of sleeping pills and left a note claiming a ghost in the eighth-grade English classroom had ordered them to do it. The deaths mounted. In the fall of 1998 three separate groups of teenagers died in drunk-driving accidents. One week after the third accident, Adam’s sister, on a joyride up to the newly opened casino with two friends, hit an elk and rolled their truck into a tree. Only Verdena survived.
The night of the car accident, waiting for his sister to be released from the Navapache emergency room, Adam demanded of his father, “Do something, dammit. You’re our councilman. You gotta do something.”
His father acted. He ordered the police to tow the wrecked vehicle up to the Day School playground, next to the ruined dome, and to keep it there as a warning: this is what happens if young people drive drunk.
This solution infuriated Adam. Verdena hadn’t even been drunk. The very afternoon he heard about the smashed truck on the school grounds, he hurried into his father’s office.
“That’s not gonna help, Councilman!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Daniel’s pickup. The wrecked-up truck.”
“What’s going to help, Mr. University?”
“Scaring the kids is the answer? Is that what you think?”
His father stood up at his desk. “You kids! You don’t make no effort. My generation, when we were young, we didn’t go out cruising or nothing. This town was enough for us. We never spoke to elders the way you speak to us. We respected tradition.”
Adam sat down on a metal folding chair. “You can’t just sit around wishing times didn’t change, wishing we acted like you when you were young. You’re councilman. Ain’t it your job to figure out some way to stop this shit?”
His father snorted like an angered horse. “Work our asses off. Twenty-five years. Hauling wood, chopping trees. Give you kids everything. And what do your friends know how to do?” He pointed at Adam. “Your friends. Out cruising, drinking and driving. Need to be taught lessons.”
“Enough with the lessons. There’s two kids dead! You put that car up on the school campus, what the hell does that teach anyone?” Adam stopped, took a breath, and swiped his face with his hands. “It depresses people, Dad. You know what you gotta do?” He looked up. His father’s brow was furrowed, his forehead deeply lined. “You gotta make life better than death. You put that car up at school; that’s death looking us in the eye, tempting us. You gotta give kids something to do.”
“Day you’re councilman, you make the calls,” Larson bellowed. “Till that day comes, you shut your mouth and trust me.”
“Trust you to do what? Open a casino for old white folk from Phoenix?” Adam swung out his arms. “How about a teen center, or a high school maybe?”
Larson pointed to the door. “Out of here, you son of a bitch! There’s things you don’t understand. You think you know politics? How to get money together? Winning votes? How to pass laws? Lobbying? You understand nothing. Telling your father what to do! Go on, get outta here then! Why don’t you—”
But Adam had already fled the office. He slammed the door behind him so hard, the windows in the hall shook.
He drove his truck to the Lutheran mission to talk to Pastor Wyckoff. In his office the pastor listened for a long time until Adam had told him everything and had no more to say. The pastor said Adam needed to take it easy, let things roll off him a bit more. He told him his father was a decent man and wouldn’t let the tribe fail.
They sat silently for a few moments. Adam twisted from side to side on a swiveling desk chair until finally he realized the noise he was making and stopped. The pastor sighed and blew his red nose into a handkerchief. In a soft voice he reassured Adam. “He’s good, your father, deep down. He just can’t control the rage. There’s talent here in this town, you see. Talent. And your father knows it. Just nobody’s telling these young people. And they’re not going to hear it from outside, from someone like me. All your friends, wanting to die, they don’t know what they’re worth. What life’s worth, for that matter. This suicide, this death wish—it’s gypping them. Life’s a miracle, Adam. You understand me? I pray your friends will see that. I pray every day they will see that.”
Nobody was worse off than Adam’s cousin Levi. Since Sparky’s death he was gradually losing his mind, and Adam would spot him wandering stoned around the village or hiking into the arroyos, where he hunted cottontail and turkey with the same 9-millimeter pistol his father had died reaching for. Six months after Adam returned from university, his cousin broke into a shack and robbed a blind mother of two. Nobody pursued him. With an air of invincibility, Levi walked freely around town.
“Do something!” Adam urged his father again. “You gotta talk to him.” But the councilman did nothing.
In January the Apache police were on high alert after a series of break-ins. The crimes followed the same pattern: a window busted in with a thin metal rod. Everyone knew that Levi—tripping, high on something—was robbing the houses. He grew so brazen, one Sunday he even broke into the Dales’ place. Late in the morning Lorena and Marie Anne pulled up the driveway and saw the young man, a rifle across his shoulder, a sandwich in his mouth, hopping the rusted fence at the back of the camp. The kitchen was turned over, he had stolen a pocketknife and an extra set of house keys, but he had found no money.
The next night he broke into the Cathol
ic church’s trailer, the home of the female deacon. At two in the morning he forced his way into her garage, gave her dog a pound of frozen hamburger, and scared her awake. She fled in her nightgown across the playground to the Lutheran mission.
Now Councilman Dale had no choice but to allow the police to find Levi and put him away. Adam dreaded news of the arrest, but for two days his father came home complaining his nephew had disappeared. The tribal police couldn’t locate him.
Levi appeared five nights after the robbery at the foot of Adam’s mattress. Adam awoke to a rough shove of his leg, and opening his eyes, he saw the dim figure of his cousin, fingering the bobcat pelt on the floor. Adam did not know what to do. With quiet steps he led Levi to the kitchen and gave him some cold frybread, which his cousin folded in half and devoured in a few bites. Adam shook his head and told Levi he could crash there a few hours, but he had to get out by dawn, since the police were stopping by pretty often and giving their father updates. They climbed onto the mattress together. Levi smelled like a stale watering hole. He whispered he had been hiding up in a trailer out by Medicine Ranch, but he didn’t have nothing to eat and was afraid to go to the Tom’s Store because he’d be caught.
In the morning when Adam awoke, Levi was gone. At the kitchen counter, toasting bread for breakfast, he told his mother he knew where his cousin was and asked what he should do.
“One day you’re going to have to find the strength to go against your father,” Lorena said. “I never had it, and look what he’s done to me.” She spoke quietly, as if talking to herself. Adam realized for the first time her hair was ashen. Her words were garbled from so many years of not hearing her own voice. “We raised you to be strong. Strong as possible. I wonder we raised you strong enough to do what’s hard. Even if you’re told not to. We raise you strong enough to make up your own mind?”
Adam said nothing.
Three days later he came home from a long afternoon—he had skipped work at Healthful Nations and shared half of a case of MGD with his old school friends. Mom and Verdena were in town, shopping. His father was out, probably up at the casino. Adam answered two loud knocks on the backdoor, and there Levi stood, dirtier than the other night—with mud streaked across his cheeks—and thinner, more nervous. His slightest movements were uneasy; still, when he greeted Adam, his maniacal laugh held a sickening note of innocence.
Adam slapped his cousin’s hand in greeting. “You got the munchies again, eh, Leev?”
In the kitchen he fried some grilled cheese and bologna sandwiches for both of them. At the table Adam said, “Shit, man. You stink like hell. Family won’t be back for a while. Go take a shower.”
He brought Levi a bath towel. When he heard the water running, Adam strode into the kitchen and dialed the tribal police. In three minutes they had stormed the house and were arresting his cousin in the shower. They dragged him out naked. His slimy hair was matted and dripping. From across the living room his red eyes flashed at Adam. Stoic, Adam tried to stare back, but found his gaze pulled to the floor. The police held Levi tight; he did not struggle. They dragged a shirt over him and were directing his legs into his underwear when he called out to Adam: “Before my father got shot, know who took 20 percent of the drug money?”
Adam looked up and stepped back.
“Your dad,” Levi said. “Twenty percent, fucker.”
The police put the handcuffs on him.
“Twenty percent to the tribal councilman, isn’t it?”
They led Levi out of the house. They pushed him through the doorway and he stumbled over the uneven porch. He shouted, “Hey, Adam, remember the teen center?” Suddenly he laughed—an insane squawk. The police forced him into the jeep, and Levi yelled one final time before the door slammed:
“Thanks, cousin!”
They were the last words Adam heard from him. He was locked up in Blackriver on multiple charges, then sent to maximum security in the desert down by Winkelman.
That afternoon Adam drove to the Lutheran Mission again, seeking some kind of forgiveness. The pastor made coffee in the Sunday School kitchen and served it to Adam in a mug with a big green cross on it. Adam asked if he thought calling the police on Levi had been a sin. The pastor told him, the way he saw it, he’d done nothing he needed to be forgiven for, nothing to be ashamed of. They were the words Adam needed to hear, but somehow he was not reassured.
Late that night his father accosted him in the kitchen. “My nephew would have been caught himself, but you gotta turn him in. You know what a traitor is? They teach you that at university?”
They stood silent, practically nose to nose. Now in the leathery wrinkles of his father’s face, Adam saw it, spelled out: the rage. Adam understood that rage now—he knew it himself, it was his inheritance—and he could not forgive him it. He had no doubt he would kill the man if he moved even the slightest muscle toward him.
Larson must have sensed it. He turned and stomped through the house out to the backyard. Adam watched his steady course toward the wooden backboard he had built for them fourteen years ago. He watched Larson heave his shoulder against the rotten pole, cursing; he watched the pole bend against his weight and finally crack halfway up its height. He watched the makeshift basket fall, and Larson crush it, snapping pieces beneath his boots. He watched his father kick the backboard frame over to the rusting refrigerator of past days of rage, and stumble out of the yard, secure in the knowledge that the desecration of the family was complete.
Adam had his sister drive him over the pass to Highway 60. At the Turnoff Verdena swerved onto the gravel shoulder, stopped Adam’s pickup, then cut the engine. “Where ya going?”
“I dunno. But I won’t be back. Verdena?”
“What?”
Adam shook his head, looking straight at the intersection. “You’ll get outta here—to college or something.”
She hesitated, reached into her purse, felt around, and pulled out an abalone shell, the one she had worn for her Sunrise Dance. “Here.”
Adam closed his fingers around the textured shell—smooth and warm. He climbed out of the truck and lifted the duffle bag from the rear of the bed. Verdena leaned through the window. “Hey!”
“Yeah.”
The engine roared. Adam was fingering the sharp corner of the shell with his thumb.
“I ain’t going nowhere,” his sister said. “I’ll be here.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean it.”
“Yeah.”
The truck circled back in the dust, picked up speed, and grew smaller in the hazy distance. Its bumper flashed as it rounded a curve and was gone.
Vowing never to return, Adam hitched a ride in a Winnebago with some senior citizens down to Phoenix, where they dropped him off at the Greyhound Bus Terminal. He wanted to keep moving, to get as far away as possible. A white banner draped above the ticket counter announced a special: SIXTY-THREE DOLLARS TO ANYWHERE. From Phoenix the bus crossed New Mexico to Amarillo: then he was on to Houston, New Orleans, up the Mississippi River to Birmingham, Memphis, all the way to Pittsburgh, then across the last stretch of the continent toward New York City.
Three days of buses, terminal toilets, and fast food had sickened him, and when he arrived at the Port Authority, he was shaken by the crowds. The people of the city came in colors he had never seen; they rushed at him from all directions. They seemed to know where they were going and wanted to get there fast. Outside the information kiosk on the second floor, he leafed through a free copy of the Village Voice and found an advertisement for a cheap hotel.
He’d bus tables, he’d mop floors; he’d give New York a try. And if it wasn’t far enough, he’d go farther: other countries, other continents. Jeff was always inviting him out to Istanbul. Hell, he’d go there.
8
ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON, wearing his striped Chinese Addiddass sweatpants, Anarbek hurried through Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka. He pushed his lumbering frame into the pochta, shoved past the scarved Russian babushkas f
ighting to collect their late pensions, and leaned on the cracked counter.
“Beautiful!” he called in his loud, exultant voice.
He was beckoning the postwoman, Altin Eje. She had two moles on both sides of her nostrils, a swollen throat, thinning gray hair, and a mouth full of scattered gold teeth. The teeth that were not gold were missing. Altin Eje scuttled to the counter and blushed, as she always did when he teased her.
“Come away with me, Altin Eje. We can ride my horse into the mountains.”
“Only to meet your seven other women there. Not me. I’m no fool.”
“Oh!” Anarbek said. He turned to the crowd of old women. “Did you hear that? Did you hear what she said to me?”
The babushkas were not amused by his game. They wanted their pensions.
“Do you have anything for me, Altin Eje?”
He was hoping for the certificate of deposit. The government payments lagged, skipped months, but just when Anarbek thought that the factory oversight had at last been reported and the payments had dried up, the money always seemed to arrive again.
“Nothing from Bishkek,” Altin Eje said. She sifted through a shoebox full of letters, yellowed with age, and found a crisp envelope, conspicuous in its poorly shaped Cyrillic letters, the kind sloppy first-formers scribbled before they learned to write. She handed it to him. “This is from the American, I think.”
“Great. Big thanks, Altin Eje.”
“Good leaving.”
“Good staying.”
Anarbek examined the envelope, postmarked in smudged red ink: January iz, Istanbul. Disappointed, he saved the letter for Nazira to translate. He stepped outside again into the bright village afternoon, ignoring the smell of a smoking pile of trash, and hurried opposite the park and the statue of Lenin into the bazaar, where the Kurdish milkmaids called to him. At the butcher Nurgazi’s table he shook hands, scrutinizing the cuts.
This Is Not Civilization Page 14