The Wash

by Cary Christopher

  He turned to Ruth, “Where did you find it?”

  “It was in a hole in my cellar. It’s probably been here since the house was built.”

  J.B. looked back over to the stone, “I think maybe we should tell somebody.”

  “Who?” asked Robert.

  The three of them sat there for a moment longer.

  “I know someone I can ask,” J.B. finally offered. “There was a man on the reservation who may know something more about them. If he’s still alive that is. He’s got to be pretty old now. Plus, there’s always the chance no one there will take my call.”

  Ruth spoke up, “Maybe it would be best not to tell anyone just yet. I mean, I don’t want this to turn into some spectacle.”

  “No, it won’t be like that,” J.B. assured her. “He won’t want a spectacle either. I trust him.”

  “I think that’s probably okay, Ruth,” said Robert. “What do you think?”

  She put her hands on the box and closed her eyes, “Okay. But just tell him and no one else. Don’t ask me why, but I think this needs to stay between the three of us. I don’t even think we should tell Javier.”

  “I’m good with that,” said J.B.

  Robert put a hand on Ruth’s shoulder, “We’ll keep it quiet.”

  He looked up at J.B. but the man was far away, lost in thoughts about crying stones and the end of the world.

  VII

  Christmas Eve for Steve and Sara had been more solemn than she’d hoped it would be. She wasn’t worried anymore about being pregnant thanks to both the negative tests and the arrival of her period which strangely had been nothing more than some spotting. She’d been looking forward to a day off with Steve and dinner with Cindy. Instead, Steve was sullen. Wendell had always been invited to their house for Christmas and that weighed heavy on him.

  The weather was gorgeous even if it was a little overcast. The winds were light and the air was in the mid-30s which wasn’t terrible if you were dressed properly. Sara tried to get Steve to go for a walk with her, just to get out of the house, but he seemed stuck in his chair. All he wanted to do was watch TV. The sullenness and sulking were driving her crazy, even if she understood where they were coming from. Finally, she gave up and let him brood. When Cindy arrived the two girls retired to the kitchen to make margaritas.

  Sara picked up a glass, poured some tequila in the bottom and tossed it back.

  “Am I going to have to finish dinner for you?” Cindy asked.

  “We’ll see,” Sara turned to a casserole on the counter, slid it into the oven and spun around to watch Cindy mix two drinks.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Sara closed her eyes and took a breath.

  “It’s the Wendell thing. Steve can’t get past it. I know he’s hurting but I don’t know how long I can take him not trying to move on.”

  Cindy handed a drink to Sara, “Well, it’s got to be rough for him. Wendell was about his closest friend. Plus, the last time he saw him was at Thanksgiving, when you had me over. I’m sure seeing me here has got to weigh on him.”

  Sara nodded, tears beginning to well up in her eyes, “I know, but damn it…”

  She crossed her arms and looked away, fighting back tears of frustration. Cindy stepped forward and held her a moment.

  “I just can’t keep living like this,” Sara pushed back and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Like what?”

  “Like this,” she said, gesturing around the room. “The two of us sit in this town, year after year and nothing changes. Steve’s business never changes. My life never changes. For Christ’s sake, I work as a waitress just so I’ll have something to fucking do!”

  She found a napkin and blew her nose into it.

  “Do you have any idea how much I’d hoped I was pregnant again just so something new would happen?”

  “You’re beginning to sound like me.”

  Sara laughed through her tears, “I know.”

  “Have you talked to him at all about this?”

  Sara leaned against the counter again, napkin clutched tightly.

  “I tried last night. I tried to break him out of this funk but I couldn’t get through.

  “But you didn’t tell him what you just told me?”

  “No. I haven’t even told him about thinking I was pregnant.”

  Cindy pointed to the margarita on the counter, “Drink that one and go tell him.”

  Sara looked at her and shook her head, “Not with you here. That would be awkward.”

  “I’ll leave. It’s no big deal.”

  “But we’re making all this food. No, I can talk to him later tonight. For now, let’s have some fun.”

  Cindy shook her head, “Invite me over for leftovers tomorrow. You need to do this now. I’ll let myself out. Go on.”

  She pushed the margarita up to Sara’s mouth and Sara took a big gulp of it.

  “You’re sure?”

  Cindy picked up the bottle of tequila, “I’m holding this hostage but yes, I’m sure.”

  Sara smiled weakly as Cindy pushed through the kitchen door and out into the gray living room, lit only by the television.

  “Dinner ready?” Steve asked.

  “Not yet, but I’ve got to head out.”

  She grabbed her coat and stepped out the door before Steve could think to ask anything else.

  Upon walking back in her house, Cindy realized she didn’t have much of anything to eat for dinner. There were a few frozen meals in the freezer, some cereal and a couple of cans of soup, but that was pretty much it. She set the tequila bottle down on the kitchen table and pulled her cell phone from her pocket. When it rang in her hand, she smiled.

  “Merry Christmas,” she answered barely containing the excitement in her voice.

  “Merry Christmas to you, too,” Robert answered. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing much. I was just sitting here at the house trying to figure out what to do for the rest of the day.”

  “I thought you had plans with Steve and Sara.”

  “I did but they had something come up and had to cancel.”

  “So you’re sitting over there all by yourself on Christmas Day?”

  Cindy looked around the room again and chuckled, “Yeah, I guess I am. Lucky me.”

  “Well, we did Christmas lunch and everyone’s gone.”

  “Want some company?”

  There was pause on the other end of the phone and Cindy momentarily wondered if she’d overstepped.

  “I don’t have much in the way of entertaining,” he finally replied. “We’ve got leftovers and a few movies I haven’t watched. Not sure if you’ll like them or not.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” she replied with a smile in her voice.

  Despite all the tears and the inevitable burning of the casserole, Sara lay in Steve’s arms. They had taken to staking out their own sides of the bed in the last six or seven years. After their deep conversation, Steve had just held her until she’d let it all out. They made love much like they did the night she’d discovered the ball of feathers. It hadn’t lasted as long but it was every bit as passionate. A lot had been resolved, and while he didn’t promise he would let go of Wendell’s disappearance completely, he did agree they needed to get away from The Wash for a while. He couldn’t close up his shop and move, but he could close it for a couple of weeks. Sara jumped at the suggestion.

  ‘Baby steps,’ she’d thought to herself.

  They laid together and tossed ideas back and forth. With the money they’d put away in savings, they could go almost anywhere as long as they were reasonable about what they did. Steve suggested someplace tropical like Hawaii. It would be nice to get out of the snow and cold. Neither had been further than Las Vegas before. The possibilities were endless. As Sara drifted off to sleep, Steve’s arm wrapped around her and pulled her up against him. Her mind drifted off and soon, she was in the woods again, running through the snow. She knew it was a
dream because her feet weren’t sinking into the powder. Running was effortless and looking up, she saw the bluebird was again gliding just inches from her head.

  “Why are you running away?” it asked her.

  “I’m not running away. I’m just running. It feels good to run.”

  The bird flapped its wings and flitted in front of her so that she pulled up short. It landed on a branch, folding its wings by its side.

  “You shouldn’t leave yet,” it whistled softly. “You don’t want to be in a strange place when you have the baby.”

  “But I’m not pregnant.”

  The bird chirped, “I don’t know why you insist on saying that when you’re almost ready to pop.”

  Sara looked down again and saw her stomach was huge. It had dropped lower down toward her pelvis but it was still light as a feather.

  “How long do you think I have to wait?”

  The bird flitted off the branch and circled her head, “Not long now.”

  “But when I have it, I’m going to have to take care of it. If I’m going to go, I should go before it’s born.”

  “You don’t have to worry about taking care of it. We’ll watch him for you.”

  Sara looked up at the trees around her and felt the weight of a million eyes. There were crows in the branches around her, so thick they blocked out the sun.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

  “Well you should have thought of that before you got yourself pregnant, young lady,” the bird scolded her and flew off.

  Sara looked up to the branches once more and then began running as if her life depended on it.

  VIII

  While Cindy and Sara were mixing margaritas, J.B. was home trying to call a man he wasn’t sure would even speak to him. Dinner at Ruth’s had been an awkward gathering. For one, Robert beginning to see Cindy was getting under his skin. He hadn’t expected it too, but it did. Once Javier arrived things became even more awkward. With Ruth, Robert and J.B. keeping silent about the stone, J.B. felt certain Javier could sense an elephant in the room. Making an excuse to leave as soon as he could, J.B. bolted for home. Now, as he flipped through an old address book, he realized this conversation would be even more awkward. He would be reaching out to people who had all but disowned him and he’d returned the favor. It had been eight years since he’d set foot on tribal land. His own grandmother was long dead and what cousins he had didn’t speak to him. However he was fairly certain if he could reach John Ouray, the man would take his call.

  Ouray was the grandson of a great Ute chief who had worked hard to settle differences with the white men who invaded Ute lands. He had been the only one who had ever given J.B. any sense of belonging to the tribe. When others sought to leave him out, calling him a half-breed, Ouray would pull him back in. He made J.B. an important part of ceremonies, a favorite at his table and had treated him with respect. In return, J.B. respected him, more than most men he’d met. The thing that bonded them more than anything was a love of mythology and legend. Ouray knew the tribe’s history inside and out. He understood the importance of preserving the stories he had been told and J.B.’s willingness to listen was something he truly appreciated.

  J.B. picked up the portable phone from its cradle and looked down at the faded number in the address book. The only number he had was his uncle’s and in J.B.’s estimation, the man was a grade A asshole. He took a deep breath, let out a sigh and dialed. It took three different calls and twenty minutes before someone finally located Ouray. Even then, he’d had to plead to get someone to travel out to him with a cell phone. Ouray lived in a house two miles away from the rest of the community and refused to have a phone of his own. J.B. finally convinced a distant cousin to drive out to him with the promise that he would mail the man fifty bucks for his trouble. As he sat back on his ratty couch and waited for the return call, his mind kept poring over the idea of the crying stones being real. What were they? What did they really mean? Did they mean anything at all?

  The phone jolted him and he snatched it up.

  “This is J.B.”

  “I’m looking for a John Youngblood,” said an old voice.

  “John Ouray, you’ve found him,” J.B. replied already warming to the man. In his mind, he could see his face, deep wrinkles around light brown eyes, graying hair pulled back in a ponytail and smile lines as deep as canyons around his mouth.

  “It’s been a long time since I heard you,” Ouray said.

  “Too long. If I regret anything at all about leaving it’s that I haven’t seen you.”

  Ouray chuckled, “You can cut the horseshit, John.”

  “It’s not horseshit. I miss you.”

  “That’s not why you’ve called though, is it?”

  J.B. shifted on the sofa, “No. It’s not. I’ve come across something I need your help with. It’s something I don’t know how to explain exactly, but I’m hoping you can help.”

  He recounted how and where Ruth found the stone and how it had begun to drip water.

  “I can’t explain what it is,” he finally said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, but it reminds me of the crying stone story.”

  The silence on the other end of the line was broken only by the sound of Ouray breathing.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” the old man replied. He let the silence sit for a moment longer and then J.B. could hear him moving on the other end of the line.

  “About six years ago, I moved away from the rest of the tribe,” Ouray began, his voice halting occasionally with effort. “I told the people here that I no longer wanted to be on the council. I needed to spend time alone to think. I moved far out away from everyone, dug a well, built a small place to sleep and eat and stopped going into town. A few people come by every week with food or news. My son and his wife… my eldest grandson… no one else. I needed to be alone.

  “At first, I thought I just needed a break. It was hard for me to see the younger members of the tribe growing up ignorant. You were the last one who really cared at all about the stories and the tribe and where we came from. I moved out here and I began remembering things I had forgotten. You live with yourself and only yourself for a while and you’ll begin remembering things that will surprise you too.”

  J.B. listened closely. In the background now, he could hear wind and the sound of a songbird somewhere.

  You know,” the old man continued, “about a year after I moved away, I remembered the day you came back to the tribe as an infant. You weren’t welcomed by anyone but your grandmother, but there was a reason for that. Do you know why people didn’t want to see you come back to the tribe, John Youngblood?”

  “I wasn’t wanted because I was a halfbreed,” replied J.B. He was getting tense and irritated at the memories being stirred up. He remembered being told to sit outside with the dogs when he visited a cousin’s house for dinner. He remembered his drunken older cousin coming home and kicking him in his sleep, shouting names at him.

  “No. That’s not it at all,” Ouray continued. “It was because of what you brought with you; a memory of a different time, one that people couldn’t recall but still felt. You brought a memory of a time when our tribe and other tribes were all one and we chose to divide. It’s a painful memory to all of us because we chose to leave some of our brothers behind.”

  J.B. laid his head back on the headrest of the couch and looked up at the ceiling. None of this was ringing a bell. It was gibberish.

  “How did my mother running away with a white man remind them of that?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the phone, then a sigh like a breath held for a million years.

  “You are not a Ute half breed, John Youngblood,” Ouray said. “The blood in your veins is older than any of us and that is why we hated you. Even I hated you at first, but I didn’t know why. Just like many of the others who wronged you, I wanted to be rid of you but I overcame that. I pushed back at what I could not remembe
r and I embraced you. When I moved out here, I thought about you often and it was a long time before I began to remember why it is we hated you. Do you want to know why?”

  J.B. had closed his eyes. He could still see Ouray’s face in his head but now he saw other faces as well; faces of cousins who had spit on him, his uncle drunk, punching him in the mouth. Anger and frustration suppressed for years was bubbling to the surface.

  “Go ahead. Tell me why.”

  “Because your blood is that of our brothers who we left so long ago. We feel guilty about leaving. We hate you because you remind us that we left them alone and when we made that choice, we set in motion the end of this world. We have been living on borrowed time, John Youngblood. You returning to our tribe was a reminder that the clock has almost stopped ticking.”

  On the other end of the phone, J.B. could hear Ouray’s labored breathing. He could almost feel the weight of the air coming from the old man’s lungs.

  “The stone you have found is your stone, John Youngblood. It cries because it is time to mourn the end of the world.”

  J.B. felt a knot in his stomach. There was silence on the line for a moment more, then the connection was cut off.

  Ouray had hung up on him.

  IX

  Morning found J.B. tired but anxious. His night had been a restless one, going back over his conversation with Ouray again and again. The conversation hadn’t really gotten him anywhere. He’d learned nothing except that a man he used to consider a friend seemed to have shut him out just like all the others. By ten o’clock, he needed to get away so he climbed into his truck and hit the road for Brian Head. The drive was peaceful and while there was some traffic once he was headed up the mountain, it hadn’t been bad. The scenery and thin air helped him clear his head and while the trip really hadn’t made anything more clear, it at least allowed him to get out of The Wash and breathe a bit. For some reason, the place seemed stifling lately. When he got down the mountain, he didn’t have time to go home. He went straight to Jim’s and despite being the only one there, was all set up to open on time. He popped open a beer and hit shuffle on the iPod. Bob Dylan’s “Jokerman” began playing and was halfway finished when he heard Robert coming through the rear entrance.