The Pale-Faced Lie

by David Crow

  As I neared our old neighborhood, I saw Joe and Willie, the two boys Mr. Lee mentioned during the meeting.

  Joe was siphoning gas from a truck parked on Seventh Street while Willie sprayed graffiti on the side of a trailer.

  “Looks like fun,” I said as I rolled up to them on my Stingray.

  “Go home, Gáagii,” Willie said. “You don’t belong here.”

  Joe coughed and spit. “You could get hurt.”

  “I want to join you guys. I’ll do anything you do.”

  They laughed and said a few words to each other in Navajo. “Okay, come with us,” Willie said.

  I left my bike on the corner of Eighth Street, and we walked to the edge of a wash next to a lone hogan surrounded by wine and whiskey bottles.

  “Old man Yazza live here,” Joe said. “He mean old widower. Nobody like him. You play trick on him.”

  Willie gathered crab apples that had fallen from a nearby tree into a pile about ten feet from the hogan entrance, a traditional sheepskin. “Throw into door. Don’t miss.”

  The prank seemed simple enough. Winding up like Whitey Ford, I fired ripe, squishy crab apples into the taut sheepskin. Splat noises cracked the still air.

  And then I heard a gravelly voice from inside the hogan. “Bad boys. Bad. Go away,” Mr. Yazza said, emerging with a shotgun and shaking it in the air. He yelled Navajo words that sounded like a war cry. “Not come back or I shoot you with shotgun!”

  All three of us laughed and slunk off out of sight.

  “See you tomorrow night, Gáagii,” Joe said.

  My heart pumped a little faster. He’d asked me back. “Okay.” I returned to my bike and began the ride home, hoping tomorrow they had something different planned.

  The next evening, I sneaked out of the house again. Willie and Joe were waiting. “Let’s go back to Yazza’s hogan,” Willie said. “You throw more crab apples at Yazza’s door.”

  As we walked, I had a bad feeling. When we got there, Joe piled the crab apples closer to the entrance this time. The moon was still full enough that I could see the outline of the sheepskin door.

  “Throw all of ’em,” Willie whispered, backing up a couple of steps behind me.

  “Mr. Yazza said, ‘I shoot you with shotgun,’” I reminded them. “It sounded like he meant it.”

  “Not worry. He drunk.” Joe gave me a crooked smile. “Won’t expect it. Can’t aim shotgun.”

  “This last time,” added Willie.

  Joe handed me a crab apple. “Go, Gáagii.”

  “Yazza can’t hit nothin’,” Willie said, but he backed up a few more feet.

  I should have walked away, but this was my chance to be one of them. The first three fastball crab apples rocketed against the sheepskin: splat, splat, splat. The fourth apple struck Mr. Yazza’s chest as he thrust through the door, his double-barrel shotgun aimed at me.

  I turned to run. The click of the trigger gave me an instant to jump to the right just before two shots rang out, hitting me on the left side and lifting me into the air. I flopped down hard on the ground, gasping for breath. My backside sizzled with a dizzying burn that scorched my butt and thighs. My hip throbbed as my jeans, underwear, and skin tore off. A high-pitched “eeeee” filled my ears, worse than after the potpie explosion in the oven.

  “Not come back. Never!”

  Mr. Yazza didn’t need to worry about that unless I couldn’t get up. I forced myself to my feet and dragged my left leg like dead weight. Willie and Joe had disappeared.

  I hobbled for what seemed like hours, the pain shooting up and down my body, until I reached my bike on Eighth Street. When I got on, I cried out when I tried to sit. I rode home standing up the whole way.

  INSIDE OUR APARTMENT, I LIMPED to the bathroom and took off what was left of my jeans and underwear. Blood dripped on the linoleum in a trail to the bathroom. I checked out my wounds in the mirror and let out a loud moan. My left buttock and side of my back looked like they’d been worked over by a cheese grater.

  I filled the tub, hoping to wash away the pain. As soon as my ravaged butt hit the warm water, my body bolted upward like I’d been shocked, and I yelled out. Salt, blood, and pebbly pieces of flesh rose to the surface and floated on the water. Stretching out on my right side, holding on to the edge of the tub, I stared at my left buttock and thigh, horrified by the sight.

  Dad and Mona stirred in their bedroom. Lonnie and Sally made muffled noises. Sam raced to the bathroom, opened the door, and gasped.

  “Goddamn it,” Dad said to Mona. “What did the little bastard do this time?” He made his way down the hall and appeared in the doorway in his sleeveless T-shirt and boxer shorts. His trusty belt was wrapped around his hand, the end dangling at his side. He pushed Sam out and closed the door. Staring at me, he was strangely quiet for several moments, and then he plunked himself on the toilet seat and let go of the belt.

  “What the hell happened to you? There’s blood everywhere. There isn’t much left of your jeans—or your ass, for that matter.”

  In between loud whimpers, I told him what had happened.

  “Really stupid,” he said. “Didn’t you think if he said he’d shoot you, he probably meant it? Dumbass, if it was lead shot, you’d be dead. How did you know he used rock salt?”

  “I didn’t. I just wanted Willie and Joe to let me join their gang.”

  “Why do you need that? I never belonged to anyone or anything, and I never missed it.”

  “I wanted them to like me.” Tears rolled down my face, not because of the pain but because of the lengths I’d gone to for acceptance. “I had to do something. You’ve let Mona take everything from me. I hate my life. I don’t care what happens to me.”

  Dad’s chin dropped to his chest and he started mumbling, his eyes losing focus for the longest time. Finally, he raised his head and looked at me, nodding. “I understand,” he said. “You’ll do whatever it takes to be your own man. I admire that. When I was in the Q and walked into the yard for the first time, a vicious lifer con decided to test me. He wanted to make me his punk. Ugly son of a bitch. He asked me if I was married and where I was from. I was naive—I told him my wife and I were from Texas. In his nastiest voice, he said he’d screwed every woman in Texas and their twats were stretched wider than an ax handle because they were all whores.”

  He made a fist and punched the palm of his left hand. “I crunched the guy’s jaw so hard it knocked him down. Then I crawled on top of him and pounded his head into the concrete like a jackhammer. His teeth went flying, and I smashed his nose into a bloody mass.”

  “Did you kill him?” I asked quietly.

  “Three more seconds, I would have, but two of his buddies pulled me off. One told me to get up slowly and begin moving. Another handed me a handkerchief. Several small groups formed. The cons pushed me from group to group as we steadily walked away until it was impossible to identify me.”

  The water had gotten cold, and I pulled the plug with my toe to let the water drain. “Did the guy ever come after you?”

  “No. Never. In the code of the cons, I’d been challenged and won. You can’t let anyone push you around in the Big House or they’ll own you. But one of the con’s friends told me that if I ever did something stupid like that again, he’d push me into the center where the armed guards up in the tower would have a clear shot. But I didn’t care. I did what I had to do. I passed the test. I could get smokes from anybody, and no one confronted me again.”

  The sucking noise as the last of the water slipped out of sight startled me, and I turned to see the ugliest bathtub ring in history.

  “You’re no longer grounded,” Dad said, standing up. “You’ve earned it. You can buy candy bars from the trading post, visit the Kontzes, play sports, go to Gallup with the family on weekends, and eat dinner with us. I’ll tell Mona these changes begin at once. I don’t care what you do as long as it doesn’t come to my attention. She sets the rules inside the house. You set your own rules outsid
e it. You’re one tough bastard.”

  Smiling, he shook his head and looked at me warmly. It had been a long time since that happened. “What a mess. You really did it this time, boy. Clean up the blood and go to bed. And you have to buy new jeans and underwear.”

  IT TOOK ALMOST A WEEK for me to heal enough to go back to school. Henry greeted me like I was a conquering hero. Everyone knew the story, thanks to Joe and Willie.

  Henry gathered a group of our classmates before homeroom. “Let’s look at Gáagii’s mutilated ass,” he said, dragging me to the bathroom to pull down my pants. The kids oohed and aahed.

  Of all the dumb pranks I ever pulled, this one had the most value. In Dad’s mind, I had somehow passed a test, upheld a code. Impressing him enough to get my life back had been worth it. Mr. Yazza’s shotgun did me a world of good, even if it almost killed me.

  CHAPTER 35

  LATE ONE AFTERNOON THE FOLLOWING JANUARY, I collected on my paper route and staggered into the kitchen, aching from the cold. Every part of me was frozen: my hands, my nose, my feet—even my eyelashes.

  During the winter in Fort Defiance, snow squalls hit us all the time, and the temperature would drop into the teens and stay there for several days. Fires burned in the hogans around the clock, covering the hills under Canyon Bonito with smoke. Horses froze to death standing up, many of them stuck to fences. Even the dog packs hid from sight. When Dad and I drove by the Navajo Inn, we’d see new “Popsicles” lying on the ground, their frightening bluish faces staring back at us.

  Mona ordered me to hand over the money and counted it. “You’re five dollars short.” She narrowed her cruel, beady eyes. “If you’re hiding the money, produce it.”

  “I must have dropped the five-dollar bill,” I said. “I didn’t know it was missing.”

  “Well, then you better go find it because you can’t come back inside until you do.” She walked to the board and wrote, “Lost $5 on paper route.” She didn’t fill in the punishment execution date.

  I held up the weather header on the Gallup Independent. “The paper says the temperature will drop to minus seventeen here tonight. I’ll freeze to death.”

  “Nonsense. Out.”

  Dad stood behind her without speaking, pointing to the door.

  How could I possibly find the money in the dark? “But . . .”

  Mona pushed me outside.

  As I trudged down the street with my head down, trying to stop the wind from hurting my face, I saw lights ahead shining brightly. Fort Defiance Indian Hospital stood like a giant flagstone monument in the swirling snow. I ran to the side entrance. The first two doors were locked, and I started to panic, but the door to the daily clinic opened. They closed at five but had forgotten to lock up.

  I spotted a gurney down the well-lit hallway. Finding the light switch, I watched the fluorescent bulbs go dark as I climbed onto the gurney and snuggled under the warm blanket. I finally stopped shivering. It took longer to feel my feet.

  There wasn’t a sound. Mona worked at the clinic, so I needed to be long gone before it opened at eight. In the meantime, I was safe. Free of Mona and Dad for the night, I relaxed and fell into a deep sleep, imagining myself escaping from a German concentration camp.

  It seemed like only a few minutes had passed when I woke up to the dim light of a new day. My clothes were damp but warm, and I was starving. The large clock said it was seven-thirty. I jumped off the gurney and hurried out into the cold. When I reached our street, I hid behind a house across from our apartment. Mona strode by a few minutes later. Once she passed, I sneaked into our yard and crouched behind our shed. Soon after, Dad walked out the front door. Then I slipped through the back door into the kitchen.

  Sam was at the table finishing his cereal. Lonnie and Sally had already driven to school. We had almost twenty minutes before the bus came.

  “Where’d you go last night?” he asked.

  I poured milk into a bowl of cornflakes and told him about the clinic. On the punishment board, the execution box still didn’t have a date. “The money must be repaid” was written in red ink.

  “Mona says you have to pay back the money and you can’t have any dinner until you do. And every night, you have to wash the dishes and put them away after the family has finished eating.”

  Lucky for me, my evil stepmother didn’t know I was friends with Mr. Ashcroft at the trading post. And she didn’t know that he let me leave extra copies of the newspapers for his customers. I usually made enough to pocket some money and still buy candy bars and crackers. Sometimes I stashed away a dollar a day. I’d be able to pay back the five dollars in no time.

  UNAWARE OF MY PLAN, MONA hounded me constantly for the money, calling me stupid and irresponsible. On Saturday morning, my anger surged out of control and I cursed at her. Dad hit me with a swift backhand to the face and told me to get into the car to run errands.

  “Mona has every right to punish you,” he said, as we drove off in the sedan to requisition supplies from Uncle Ulysses S. Bia. “My family could have eaten for a week off the money you lost. And you act like it was no big deal.”

  “Even if it means freezing to death? It was totally unfair.”

  “Get over it. You would have found somebody to let you in. The Kontzes, for one. Hell, you could have conned half of Fort Defiance into helping you. Unfair? Don’t talk to me about unfair. I nearly froze to death plenty of times, and we were always hungry. You ought to try sleeping in a car or under a bridge on a regular basis. Especially in the winter. You have no idea how bad I had it growing up. And you don’t know how tough it is in prison. You have it easy.”

  That was Dad’s justification for all his cruel behavior, and he puffed out his chest, winding up to continue. I leaned against the door and prepared myself for a long day of watching out for the police or concerned citizens who might turn us in. During the winter, fewer cars and trucks drove by, so being the lookout was easier except when Dad turned off the car and the temperature dropped inside.

  Nothing had changed about our weekend trips since Dad married Mona. As far as I could tell, she never asked any questions about them, even when we got home past dark. Still, Mona had to know what we were doing. Dad brought the BIA tools inside the house in plain sight, though she pretended not to see them.

  Dad poked me hard in the arm. “You can’t imagine what goes through a man’s mind on the bus ride to prison.” His eyes bugged out, and the vein on his forehead started thumping.

  This wasn’t good. How stupid of me—I should have kept my mouth shut. I’d gotten him angry, and we might have twelve hours ahead of us today and more tomorrow. As usual, I didn’t know what he had planned, but for sure, he’d take his anger out on me.

  “That might be the toughest part of all,” Dad said, his voice harsh, “the swelling up of the stark reality that this is it. You’re going to wake up in the Big House for untold mornings to come. There’s no escape. By that point, you’ve pushed the fury, or whatever dominated your brain when you committed the crime, so far back so many times that you would swear you didn’t do anything wrong. You even use more passive ways of talking, like turning ‘when I committed the crime’ into ‘when the crime was committed.’ It doesn’t matter—even if what you did was justified.”

  We drove for a few miles in silence. Then he yelled, “Are you listening, boy? You need to know how to survive in this world. You’re the lookout now, but you have to learn to do what I’m teaching you on your own.”

  “Yes, Dad.” I had to calm him down. Otherwise, a slap in the head would come next—or worse. But I also had to keep paying attention to the road to make sure we didn’t get caught. Sometimes I wondered if he and I would be cellmates in the Q.

  “When the bus unloads at the entrance of the prison, your life as you know it is over,” he said. “The diesel tour, they call it. Before the day has ended, you’ll be locked up in a six-by-ten-foot cell. With another inmate. He’ll already be there, in the top bunk.”

&
nbsp; My mind was spinning, trying to think of a way to trigger him into changing the subject. It was always a gamble—I had to say or ask something without making him feel manipulated, which would make him even madder. But if I could pull it off, it was like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine—stories would come gushing out, and Dad would tell me far more than he ever intended. And he’d forget about being mad at me for a while.

  “The odds are fifty-fifty that your cellmate did something worse than you. And the odds are equally bad that he has an immutably criminal mind. And he may not be very smart either, which is the worst combination.”

  Here was my chance. Dad had never talked about this before. “Who was in your cell when you got to the Q, Dad?” I blurted out, afraid to say anything else until I could gauge his reaction.

  He stopped and looked at me. “Buddy. Buddy Figuerido. He was my first cellmate.” He burst into laughter. “Talk about dumb—he was the dumbest con I ever met.”

  Dad’s face lit up and his shoulders relaxed. He reached over and rubbed my head.

  Jackpot. I let out a sigh of relief.

  DAD UNBUTTONED THE TOP OF his coat, settled down in the seat, and told me about James “Buddy” Figuerido, who was waiting in the top bunk of cell 1440 in the east block when he arrived. “He had gotten there just hours before,” Dad said. “The guy was so stupid he didn’t know he was stupid. He had the face of a child and wasn’t very tall, but he was extremely muscular. And he had a hair-trigger temper to match.”

  Buddy’s crime was almost comical. In late 1946, he and his three uncles robbed the Sears and Roebuck in Modesto, California, pulling off the most publicized heist in the city’s history. On a Saturday evening close to Christmas, Buddy rang the doorbell at the manager’s house and asked to come in. Two of his uncles swooped inside and pulled guns on the manager’s wife and children. Buddy and one of the uncles held them hostage while the other two drove down to the store and forced the manager to open the safe.