The Pale-Faced Lie

by David Crow

  After helping themselves to $23,000, the uncles tied up the manager, rendezvoused back at the house, and released the family. Buddy and his uncles drove south a few hundred miles, whooping it up the whole way for getting away with the crime. He sat on the money for six months before making a down payment on a car upholstery business and a house. Then he became a socialite.

  “He was such an idiot,” Dad said. “He and his wife attended all the local theater events. He was living large and loving life, bragging that his uncles had given him a lot of money. Nothing like drawing attention to yourself.”

  It wasn’t long before Buddy confessed the crime to his best friend, who happened to be jealous. Using an FBI wire, his friend got Buddy bragging about the heist, about how he and his uncles masterminded the crime and how much fun it was to be rich. Shortly after the wiretapped confession, the police raided Buddy’s house late at night and hauled him to the slammer. Buddy immediately spilled his guts about his uncles’ involvement.

  “Just an hour after meeting him,” Dad said, “I knew Buddy’s entire life story. Far more than I ever wanted to know. Then he asked me what he should tell the parole board. He’d be talking to them in no time, he said, because he only had a one-year sentence for breaking and entering. All he had done was go into the house, put a gun to everyone’s head, and wait to be picked up. Buddy didn’t understand that he’d also been convicted of kidnapping, which carried a seven-year sentence, along with armed robbery, which carried another seven. I told him he’d have at least eight or nine years to think about what to say to the parole board.”

  But that wasn’t what Buddy wanted to hear. Dad barely got the words out before his cellmate flew into a volcanic rage and tried to choke him. “You’re not going to lay a life rap on me!” he screamed at him. A guard had to come in to calm things down, telling them it was the only warning they’d get. A fight in a prison cell was good for sixty days in the hole—no light, bread and water only. And the parole board would lengthen their sentences.

  “I said he was right,” Dad said. “Told him I was wrong, hopelessly wrong, schoolboy stupid. Yes, of course, he’d be out in a year. How could I have misunderstood his crime? All he could have been charged with was breaking and entering, and no one even got hurt.”

  Keeping Buddy on good terms became Dad’s top priority. “He was an insane son of a bitch,” he said. “Every night I worried he’d jump out of bed while I was sleeping and try to choke me to death. Never again, in my wildest circumstances, have I been around anyone as defensive as he was.”

  Buddy told the warden that he needed to get out of prison to take care of his upholstery shop. And he needed the money from the robbery to keep it running.

  “I told Buddy he was right, and soon they’d agree, I was sure. It took everything in me not to crack up.”

  Dad and I both laughed, and the mood in the car remained light for the rest of the day.

  Buddy became our secret. When the timing was right, I could just say his name, and Dad would start laughing. In fact, nothing made us laugh harder.

  I had found another way to survive.

  CHAPTER 36

  EARLY ON A SUNDAY MORNING in September, someone knocked at the door. We rarely got visitors. I ran to the window, and Dad looked through the peephole.

  Mom stood on the porch in a thin blue cotton dress next to a tall woman with a beehive hairdo and bell-bottoms. Two and a half years had passed since we moved from Gallup, but it seemed much longer. I could barely remember what it was like living with Mom.

  “What the hell do you want, Thelma Lou?” Dad yelled through the door. “These kids aren’t yours. Get out of here right now.”

  Mom looked at her friend, and the woman nodded, encouraging her to speak. Mom stared at a paper in her hand. “Thurston, I have a letter from a lawyer. You have to let me see my kids.” She sounded as though she’d read the words off the paper.

  “That isn’t going to happen,” Dad said. “Go back to wherever you came from.”

  Mom’s body stiffened, but she didn’t leave. In the past, Dad’s demand would have sent her away sobbing. Her friend leaned over and said something in Mom’s ear.

  “They’re our children, not yours, and I have rights too!” Mom shouted. “You have to let me see them.” Her voice trembled, but she sounded more like an adult than she ever had.

  “I don’t have to do a thing. The court gave me full custody, and no one has to see you again—ever.”

  Sam, Sally, and I gathered behind Dad. Whether they wanted to spend time with Mom wasn’t clear, but I wanted to see her. Though she’d brought someone for support, this seemingly brave woman wasn’t the mom I remembered. I hoped she’d changed, that she had gotten help for her broken nerves.

  “Mr. Crow, you need to read the letter from Thelma Lou’s lawyer,” Mom’s friend said. “She has the right of legal visitation. You can’t stop her. You’ll be held in contempt.”

  Dad yanked the door open. Mom’s friend was holding up the letter for him to read.

  “I don’t know who the hell you are, but go bother someone else’s kids, like maybe your own.” Dad snatched the letter and slammed the door again. His eyes shifted back and forth down the page.

  I peeked out the window again to see both women standing with their arms crossed, waiting.

  When Dad finished reading, he opened the door to face the women. “This is total bullshit, but you can visit once a month for only a few hours. You can’t take the kids farther than Gallup. Lonnie doesn’t have to go, and she won’t.”

  “I’ll see you next Saturday,” Mom said with a sad smile. She walked to the passenger side of an oxidized blue ’58 Chevy, and her friend got in the driver’s seat.

  I watched them roll down the street until I couldn’t see them anymore.

  WHEN SHE APPEARED THE NEXT weekend, Mom came with a man who had the same big blue eyes, blond crew cut, and toothy smile as the great home run hitter Roger Maris of the New York Yankees, but she called him Ted. It turned out he didn’t like baseball and didn’t know who Roger Maris was, but when we got to the movies, he bought me all the Cracker Jacks and soda I wanted, placing him firmly on my “good guy” list.

  On our way to the theater, Mom twisted in the passenger’s seat of Ted’s ’62 Ford to look at the three of us sitting on the bench seat behind her. She asked Sam and Sally questions to get them to talk, but they either shrugged or gave her one-word answers and then looked away.

  “David, tell me what you’ve been up to.” She forced a smile.

  “I still like to play baseball and read the newspapers before I deliver them,” I said.

  Mom’s green eyes lit up. “Do the teachers know you have dyslexia? Are they treating you right? If not, you can come live with Ted and me in Albuquerque where the schools are better.”

  “My grades aren’t great and it took me a while to make friends, but now I have a few good ones.”

  Mom’s smile disappeared and her face clouded over. “Your daddy tried to kill me,” she said.

  My heart sank. I didn’t want to talk about Dad.

  “When I got home the day you all left me and found that ugly note on the door, I walked to your friend Joey’s house. His mother let me stay and said she’d help me find you guys. Every day I went to our house hoping you’d come back. The morning after you and your daddy were there, I wanted to get away from that sad place, so I got in the car and drove very slow because I was crying and hadn’t slept. At a stop sign, I hit the brakes and nothing happened. They didn’t work. At all. It’s a good thing I always took the long way around, or I’d have gone flying down the hill and crashed.”

  If Mom had taken the shortest way out of town, down Elephant Hill, she wouldn’t have survived without brakes. Her car would have hit another vehicle in the intersection a lot harder than the tire Sam and I had launched into the Volkswagen Beetle. Only Mom would have driven an extra four miles to avoid a hill, but it saved her life.

  “I walked to the
nearest gas station,” she continued. “A friendly mechanic took me back to the car and said, ‘Lady, I can’t fix this without taking it to the shop. Someone cut your brake lines on purpose. They meant to kill you. This wasn’t an accident.’”

  Dad had disappeared for hours the night we arrived at Mud Flats. He must have gone back to Gallup to cut her brakes. When he and I were at the house that awful afternoon, I noticed a small puddle by the rear tire of Mom’s car but didn’t think anything of it—now I was positive it had been brake fluid.

  That was why Dad had been so angry and agitated that day. Maybe he had expected to hear about a fatal accident or read about it in the paper. But as the days passed without any news, he knew his plan hadn’t worked. Mom had unknowingly outwitted him.

  My head throbbed. The awful guilt returned, reminding me I had gone along with ditching her.

  Mom reached over the back of her seat to grab Sally’s arm, but Sally pulled away. “Are you listening?” When Mom tried to do the same with Sam, he crossed his arms over his chest so she couldn’t paw him. “Your daddy tried to kill me. I’m not making this up.”

  Both of them looked out the window. Like children in war zones, they’d become numb to the adults in their lives.

  Ted drove into the Chief Theatre parking lot in Gallup. He hadn’t said a word the entire trip, as if he’d been hired as our chauffeur. Mom and Ted made us sit right next to them with me closest to Mom. She sniffled throughout the movie and kept reaching for my hand. I let her hold it for a while and then pulled away, and she’d try again. Eventually I sat on my hands. As awful as I felt about what happened to her, I wasn’t going to let her spoil John Wayne and Richard Widmark starring in The Alamo.

  But after the movie ended, I thought again about what she’d said. It was obvious Dad saw cutting her brake lines as an easy way to kill her. He would have said she killed herself running a red light and crashing into a truck or a train.

  On the car ride home, as if she’d read my mind, she turned in her seat and picked up her story. “I didn’t have much money after getting my brakes fixed, adding oil and gas and all, so I drove to Albuquerque, pulled over, and slept in my car. I only had forty dollars left. A policeman stopped by and gave me a blanket. ‘God bless you, lady,’ he said. ‘I hope you have somewhere to go.’”

  When Mom tried to get Sally’s and Sam’s attention again, they continued to ignore her, quietly whispering about the movie. But I looked her in the eye and listened. I wanted to hear the whole story.

  “I called your daddy’s old boss at Woodmen Accident and Life. In his spare time, he helps people. But he was out every time I called, so I had to live in my car for a while. When I finally reached him, he got me a room, money, and a job as a waitress trainee at the Copper Bull Truck Stop restaurant. Then he got me a lawyer so I could visit you guys.”

  If a moment existed to rethink the choice of picking Dad over Mom, this was it. But Mom was no choice at all. She was still more of a child than any of us. Whatever was wrong with her hadn’t gotten much better.

  Besides, I couldn’t go without Lonnie, Sam, and Sally. They were all I had in this world. And Dad would kill Mom for sure if any of us were crazy enough to go with her.

  I wanted to help her, but nothing could save her, and the mental agony of being around her every day and listening to the broken record of her complaints would have driven me insane.

  AFTER OUR SIXTH MONTHLY VISIT, Ted waited in the car as Sam and Sally walked ahead of Mom and me toward the house. She grabbed my wrist with her clammy hand. “I need to tell you something, David.”

  I stopped and looked at her. As usual, her sad eyes were shiny with tears.

  “You have to go with me,” she said, her voice rising. “If you tell the lawyer you want me, we can live on welfare in a trailer in Albuquerque. You can help by getting a paper route and doing chores, and you can cut lawns during the summer for extra money. Sam and Sally will mind you. You’re the only one who can stop your daddy.”

  I shook my head and wrenched free from her grasp. “Why don’t you just keep visiting us with Ted?”

  “I can’t. I quit my waitress job, and Ted is moving to Iowa to work as a carpenter. If you won’t come with me, I’m going with him.” The tears spilled down her face. “You don’t love me or you’d live with me. How can you want to be with your dad? I gave birth to you. You owe me—I’m your mother.”

  “It wouldn’t work, Mom,” I said softly. “You can’t take care of us.”

  She knew she couldn’t change my mind. We hugged each other for a long time, and then she climbed into the car and drove away with Ted.

  It would be two years before I saw her again.

  PART 4

  * * *

  WASHINGDOON

  1966

  Coach Ford (left) and me (right of center) at a Walter Johnson High School track meet. Bethesda, Maryland. 1970.

  CHAPTER 37

  AFTER LIVING IN FORT DEFIANCE for more than three years, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I had grown to love the Navajo people, and the reservation felt like home to me. Every day I tried to outdo myself entertaining my classmates, and they never got tired of it.

  I continued playing Little League even after I turned thirteen. Mr. Kontz discovered a rule that allowed an exception if the team was short a player. We had only eight without me. On the nights before our games, he and Mrs. Kontz let our team camp out in their backyard. In the mornings, we crammed into the bed of his old black pickup truck, and he hauled us, sometimes more than fifty miles, to baseball fields. We each brought twenty-five cents to help pay for gas.

  Thomas Kontz, Richard’s oldest brother, bought us Cokes when we won. After our games, we went to the movies at the Window Rock Civic Center for a dime. Our baseball uniforms got us discounts on candy and hot dogs. Sam and I had a tight group of friends and were as much a part of the team as the Navajo boys. In a place that had once felt so hostile, the Kontz family, Henry, Jim, Tommy, and my other Navajo friends accepted me in a way that seemed impossible when we arrived in Mud Flats.

  A month into ninth grade at Window Rock High School, Dad told us to meet in the living room after dinner. Sam, Sally, and I looked at each other with dread. It was just the three of us now that Lonnie had graduated and left for Arizona Western College.

  As we piled onto the red couch, I kept thinking that Dad’s announcement would have something to do with Mom.

  “We’re going to Washington, DC, for six months, or Washingdoon, as the Navajos like to call it,” Dad told us. “I’m getting advanced training at the BIA national headquarters, a few blocks from the White House.”

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Sam and Sally didn’t move.

  “This is terrible,” I said. “I don’t want to go anywhere—ever.”

  Over the summer, I had secured a pitching position on our baseball team and then tried out and made the high school football team. The following spring, I’d be running the one-mile and two-mile races on the track team. On my paper route, people waved instead of shooting me with BB guns, my weirdo customers continued providing much-needed comic relief, and the dog packs ran from me in fear. Mr. Ashcroft and I had long discussions every afternoon before I went to see my second family at the Kontz residence. And on the weekends when I didn’t go on stealing trips, Henry and his dad took me everywhere with them. This was my town.

  I followed Dad into the kitchen. “Can I stay with the Kontzes while you go to Washingdoon? They have eight kids and won’t even notice me.”

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, not answering, so I continued, “When you come back in the spring, I’ll move back home.”

  “No. Pack up now. Find someone to take your paper route. We’re leaving in five days.”

  “But . . .”

  The bulged eyes meant Dad would explode if I pushed him.

  On Friday, during classes, at lunch, and after school, I said goodbye to friends, reassuring them I’d be back in the early spring
. The Rambler was packed so full the frame groaned under the weight, and we towed the same green plywood trailer from our EPNG days. Friends waved and smiled as we drove off, and I missed them already.

  DAD DROVE THE RAMBLER FOR fourteen hours a day with brief stops for gas, food, and a late-night cheap hotel. Mona sat next to him looking straight ahead, bragging about how much land she owned in North Carolina and going on about how glad she was to be getting away from the reservation, hopefully for good.

  The brown, rocky terrain turned into fields of wheat and corn. Gradually the flatlands became rolling hills until we finally reached the green East Coast. Walls of trees and shrubs surrounded us on every side. It was hard to believe that this place was in the same country as the Navajo Indian Reservation.

  Dad turned off the massive Interstate 495 toward Kensington, Maryland, and drove down a beautiful parkway with a creek running alongside it. The Rambler came to a stop at 3922 Prospect Street, a three-story gray house with a yard full of trees and a beautifully manicured lawn.

  It was nicer than any house we’d ever had. Sally got her own bedroom. Sam and I shared a huge room on the third floor that had to be bigger than our whole house in the government compound. The street was lined with cars I had read about but never viewed up close: Mercedes Benz, Audi, BMW, and Volvo. Our little suburb had more roads, bridges, libraries, recreation centers, and sidewalks than on the entire reservation. How could the Navajos have so little in a land where there was so much?

  After a weekend of moving furniture and unpacking boxes, Sam and I walked down the tree-lined streets to school. Kensington Junior High covered grades seven through nine and looked like a brick fortress on the side of a green hill. A stream flowed out front. Most of the kids were dropped off by their parents in fancy cars like the ones on our street. They dressed in expensive clothes, too, better than the ones I’d stared at in the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Several boys waited for their parents to leave, lit a cigarette, and left the school grounds. No one seemed to care.