At home, Bernie was happy to see Chee’s truck in the driveway. He’d avoided the drug stakeout because he’d put in his request for vacation a day before she got around to submitting hers. He teased her about his knack for planning. Because he had the day off, he got to pack and get everything set for their little trip. And then, when he went back to work a day ahead of her, she’d handle the harder job, the cleanup.
She decided not to take a shower; she didn’t want to wake him. Looking in the refrigerator, she found half a sandwich and some lemonade Chee had saved for her and ate at the kitchen table. She could hear the rhythmic chuckling of the San Juan River and a symphony of crickets through the open windows. The air felt good, finally cool after the hot summer day.
Vacation. Bernie had never actually taken a vacation, except for her honeymoon in Hawaii two years ago. And this trip would be different. No surf, no beach, but plenty of sand.
2
Jim Chee said his morning prayer, then grabbed a cup of the good coffee Bernie had made. He cooked Spam and potatoes for the burritos and wrapped them in flour tortillas. They smelled so good, they tempted him, but he reminded himself that they were road food. He and Bernie could eat them in the truck without too much of a mess.
He was loading the sleeping bags when Bernie came back from her run.
“Sleeping bags? I thought we were staying at Paul’s house.”
“We are, but I know Paul. I never can tell exactly what the situation will be.”
Chee’s cousin and clan brother Paul had telephoned two weeks ago on a Saturday morning—too early, of course—and invited them to check out his new Monument Valley guest hogan.
“I need somebody to take my tour,” he’d said, “and tell me how I can make everything better. I figured you two would be perfect.”
“What tour?”
“Oh. I’m starting a photo tour business. ‘Sunrise, sunset, and everything in between,’ that’s my slogan. I’m calling it Hozhoni Tours. Or maybe Picture Perfect Tours.”
Hozhoni, the word that described a beautiful, peaceful place and that same state of mind. Chee approved. But the other name? “So you’ve become a photographer now?”
“Even better—a photography coach. I told you I got some work as a substitute driver with some of the tours? I watched those guys with the big cameras take pictures of arches, buttes, spires, rocks, and other guys with big cameras. I listened to people complain about not being somewhere at the right time for the right light. After a while, I started to realize what camera people want. They don’t care much about geology, the history, or what made the ruins. They want photo opportunities.” Paul chuckled. “I got my tribal license, and my first group is booked. This would be a great time for you to visit.”
“What’s the difference between a photo tour and a regular tour where people take pictures?”
Paul laughed, a deep, cheerful sound that reminded Chee of the fun they’d had together as boys. “My tours are special, brother. Personal tours with personal attention. Small groups only. I’ll show them the right angle, the perfect perspective, unique sites. I’ll let them use my horses as models, too.”
“Hold on a minute. Let me talk to Bernie about it.”
Bernie, his beautiful Bernie, had been sitting on the deck with a book, waiting for him to get off the phone so they could drive out to her mama’s place before it got too hot. He remembered the title: Helping People with Head Injuries. She could use a break, he thought, and they both had time off coming. A few days away would be nice. He had been thinking about taking her on a little vacation. This trip would be easy, interesting, and practically free.
Bernie had never been to Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii, the Valley of Rocks, known on maps as Monument Valley. Chee had visited many times, helping Paul’s family with their livestock, working side by side with his cousin and his uncle, fixing the generator and refilling the water tank at the well at Goulding’s. And then shooting baskets on the packed-dirt basketball court until it grew too dark to see the rim. He remembered the pleasure of getting up each morning amid the breathtaking buttes and spires. Chee never tired of the place.
He had explained the invitation. “Paul lives in Mystery Valley. It’s part of Monument Valley, right next to it, but not included in the park. Bilagaanas have to be with a Navajo guide to see it because it’s not open to general tourists. It’s full of arches and windows, holes in the rock that are like eyes to the sky. Beautiful. Remote, too. He hauls water, doesn’t have electricity except for the gasoline generator. No cell phone service out there either.”
Bernie looked up from her book. “It sounds wonderful. Quiet. Relaxing. I’d love to see it.” Then her expression darkened. “But what about Mama? What if she gets sick or something?”
“Think positive. Mama’s fine, and Darleen lives with her. And it’s not like we are going to California or somewhere. It’s only a two-hour drive from Shiprock to Paul’s place.”
“OK. If we can get time off and Darleen agrees, let’s do it.”
Chee got back on the phone.
“Great,” Paul said. “The hogan should be all done by then.”
They stopped at the trading post at Teec Nos Pos. While Bernie pumped the gas, Chee went inside to get her a Coke, a treat to officially launch their vacation.
The place was busy as usual, a mixture of Navajos shopping for meat, vegetables, and maybe a sack of Blue Bird flour, and tourists checking out the weavings in the rug room or looking for jewelry or a little wooden horse or some other souvenir made by one of the locals to hang on a Christmas tree. A woman Chee knew was working the cash register.
“You should have been here yesterday for the flea market.” She rang up the Coke and gave him his change. “Everybody and his brother had something to sell. Where are you off to?”
“Monument Valley.”
The woman nodded. “I hear that hotel the tribe built is fancy. You staying there?”
“Not this time.”
“I think Rhonda is staying there. She’s making a movie.”
“Rhonda?”
“Rhonda! Can you believe it? Yeah. Here on the rez.”
He would have asked, “Who is Rhonda?” but there was a line of customers waiting patiently behind him. And, he thought, it didn’t matter anyway.
His phone vibrated just as he left the store. He pulled it out of his pocket, saw that it was Captain Largo, and took the call.
Chee knew the drive through the north-central section of the Navajo Nation always took Bernie’s breath away. She marveled at the purple hue of the Carrizo Mountains and the softer colors in the rounded hill beyond them. She asked him to stop at Baby Rocks and took photos of the formation, which resembled an artist’s clay rendition of a flock of totem poles. He pulled over again when they reached a pullout with a view of Comb Ridge, frozen waves of rock. They climbed out and Bernie took more pictures while he savored the beauty.
“You’re really quiet today,” he said. “Everything OK?”
“I keep thinking about that dirt, you know, the boxes in that car I stopped yesterday? I’m dying to know how he used that to hide drugs. Or to hide something else. I keep replaying the scene and wondering what I missed.”
“If that guy hadn’t offered you five hundred bucks, would you have been suspicious?”
“Sure, wouldn’t you have been? Why would somebody have boxes of dirt in the trunk? Why was he so nervous and sweaty?”
“That’s the thing about being a cop. You run into all kinds.”
“I know. I almost wish we could have put off our trip just so I could find out what that guy was up to. You know, see for myself how he hid the drugs.”
Chee took a breath. Now, he decided, was as good a time as any to tell her. “Speaking of work, Largo got a call from the guy in charge of the office in Kayenta. They opened a little substation at Monument Valley because of all the visitors this summer and a movie that’s being made there. The filming is taking longer than expected, and some of the
officers on duty had a training scheduled. Largo asked me, as long as we were out this way, if I could fill in for them for a few days.”
Bernie looked at him, waiting for the rest. He shrugged. “How tough can it be, babysitting some Hollywood types?”
“But what about our vacation?”
“We still have four days. I don’t have to go to work until the end of the week. By then, you’ll probably be sick of me anyway.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
Chee heard the irritation in her voice.
“He just called when we stopped for gas. You know, we can use the money.”
“I know.”
She turned from him and looked out the window. “I guess that goes with the territory when you’re married to a cop. We’ll just make the most of the time we’ve got.”
“Good plan,” he said. “We’ll call this vacation lite.” They passed the junction for Bluff, Utah, and headed on to Kayenta, Arizona, the last town before Monument Valley.
“You hungry?” Chee asked. “There’s a hamburger place here that has a Code Talker museum. It’s pretty cool.”
“I’m OK. I can’t wait to see the monuments. Let’s stop there on our way home.”
Paul greeted them with enthusiasm and a snack of sweet watermelon. Then he offered them a tour that started with a vehicle parked under a ramada.
“This is my joy, my baby.” Paul gave Chee a playful punch in the arm. “I want to take you guys for a ride.”
The baby had six wheels and looked like the hybrid offspring of a bus and a heavy-duty pickup. The front was a truck chassis, the back a platform with seats on both sides of a central aisle and metal siding that came halfway up. A striped awning deflected the sun. The cover and the vehicle itself were yellow, the color of fertility, a sign, Chee thought, that Paul intended not only for his vehicle to stand out but also for his business to grow. Someone had carefully painted “Hozhoni Photo Tours” on the hood.
Bernie climbed up inside. “Nice Jeep. You can haul a lot of people with this.”
“It looks like a Jeep, but it’s an old military vehicle. It has a speaker system so the driver can talk to visitors. I call it a People Mover. The folks who ran the tours at Canyon de Chelly used it and I bought it from the old Thunderbird Lodge. Chee and I had some fun back in the canyon. You remember that, bro?”
Chee nodded.
“We’ll make a trial run in it later. Let me show you the rest of this place.”
They admired the solar shower he’d constructed, walked past an aged corral with a pair of horses, saw his single-wide and the hard-packed dirt basketball court next to it. Then came the new hogan. As Chee had suspected, but not mentioned to Bernie, it was far from finished.
Paul didn’t ask for help, but they offered to work inside it, sweeping the dirt floor, smoothing down the rugs Paul had brought, adding dowels where visitors could hang their clothes. Although traditional Navajo families slept on the floor on cozy sheepskins, Paul had wisely decided non-natives would be more comfortable with the option of a cot, and Chee and Bernie put them up and added the new bedding.
Paul had followed the traditional plan for building, so the octagonal structure had no windows. The single door faced east, as the Holy People advised. Ventilation was through the door and the smoke hole in the roof. Hogans provided a cozy living space for families in the winter. In the summer, traditional Diné herders went with their sheep to the fields, camping and using ramadas for shade and cooking. Tourists could sleep inside on a summer night if they wanted, Chee thought, but he preferred the open air, his sleeping bag, and moonlight.
After they worked in the hogan, Bernie made the mistake—at least that was how it looked to Chee—of asking if there was anything else they could do to help. There was, and when they finished, tourists from New Zealand, Japan, Michigan, and elsewhere wouldn’t worry about tripping over anything on their way to the outhouse. The wind came up, contributing fine red dust to the process of building the path.
Chee had failed to mention to Bernie that Paul liked to talk. Really liked to talk. That quality could make him a perfect tour guide, but the constant chatter combined with working in the heat usually gave Bernie what she called “the start of a headache.” She looked hot and sweaty, but his Laughing Girl didn’t complain about cleaning up someone else’s debris. “It’s beautiful here,” she said. She was right, Chee thought, as always.
When Chee found her alone, he suggested that they go see a movie. He liked the idea of sitting in a cool dark room after a dusty warm day working outside.
“A movie? There’s a theater in little Kayenta?”
“Not in Kayenta. At Goulding’s.”
“Goulding’s? Is that a town near here? I haven’t heard of it.”
Chee shook his head. “You haven’t lived, girl.” He explained that Goulding’s was an historic lodge named for the couple who put Monument Valley on the map, thanks to their appreciation of both the massive red buttes rising from the valley floor and the potential Navajo workforce. They enticed Hollywood director John Ford into using the scenery in classic films such as Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers. Monument Valley’s sandstone buttes became the landscape synonymous with the word western.
“Some of my kinfolks made movies out here in their spare time. You ever heard of a guy named John Wayne? Well, my relatives helped him get famous.”
Bernie laughed. “Gosh, I can’t believe you never told me all this before. So, does this mean they have a movie theater at the lodge?”
“Well, it’s not a theater like in Farmington. It’s a room with chairs, where they show those old films starring the Duke. You can’t buy popcorn, but it’s cool in there.”
“Indians always end up the losers in those old Westerns. Do you really like those movies?”
“Sure. You know, when Paul and I played cowboys and Indians with our friends, I always wanted to be a cowboy. I was in junior high when I realized a guy could be a cowboy and an Indian at the same time.”
“And a comedian, too.”
He grinned. “It’s five o’clock. Quitting time. I’ll buy you dinner at the lodge to go with the movie. A real date.”
“What about Paul? I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him.”
She headed off to take a shower with the sun-warmed water and put on clean jeans and a T-shirt.
“You two lovebirds go on,” Paul said. “When you get back we can hit the highlights of the sunset tour. I’m going to take you up to Enchanted Mesa first, and then—”
Chee let him explain the route for another five minutes. “Cousin, why don’t you tell us all about that when we are on the tour, so we can critique you as a guide?”
Paul nodded. “You get going. They get busy at this time of year.”
Before dinner, they headed into the cluster of buildings that formed Goulding’s Lodge, first to the quaint old museum with upstairs rooms where the Goulding family lived, and then to the exhibits about the geology and the world of movies downstairs.
Bernie stopped in front of a photograph, a still from one of the films. “Hey, look at this.” She drew Chee’s attention to a group of Anglo cowboys and others who looked like Navajos but wore costumes designed to resemble Indians of the Great Plains. She indicated a man who sat with a single cowboy on a bench. “That guy reminds me of somebody.”
“You know what they say. All Indians look alike.”
“He looks like your friend Robert. The one who made that bracelet for me.”
Chee studied the picture more closely. “You’re right. He does.”
The movie of the day, Stagecoach, was about to start in the little theater. Chee had seen it in high school when a substitute came for history class and brought the movie with her. He still remembered the date it was released, 1939, and the fact that scholars credited the film with reviving the Western movie genre. Class ended before Stagecoach was over, so they we
re allowed to watch the finale the next day. Chee had felt a fondness for it ever since.
After that, they walked to the restaurant. A young Navajo hostess showed them to a seat by the window, perfectly situated for a view of the Mitten Buttes across the highway to the east. Bernie asked Chee to order her usual, a hamburger and a Coke, and took pictures while her husband made up his mind.
He looked up from studying the menu. “Did you like the movie?”
“Yes, especially the scenery, those shots of the monument with the stagecoach in the foreground. And Navajos pretending to be Apaches.” Bernie laughed. “Some of those riders chasing the travelers did look like your relatives.”
“I told you we were a handsome bunch.”
A large blue tour bus was heading up the drive toward the lodge. It stopped in front of the motel office, and a man in a khaki hat that tied beneath his chin climbed down the steps. He returned to the bus a few minutes later with a large brown envelope in his hand. The bus chugged up the steep incline and stopped near the dining hall front steps. The door opened again and Hat Man climbed out. Then the other passengers started unloading, walking toward the restaurant.
The waitress returned. “If you’re ready, you better order. Looks like we’re gonna be slammed in a few minutes.”
“Is this place big enough for all those people?” Bernie heard a mumble of conversation from the newcomers as they filled the entranceway.
“That’s a small group compared to some. It’s always like this in the summer. Bus after bus. But the customers aren’t too bad, except when they’re grumpy. Food always cheers them up.”
Chee grinned. “Yeah, my wife says the same thing about me. So, should I have the pork chops or the Navajo taco?”
“I like the pork chops.”
“OK, then. And a burger and Coke for my bride.”
The waitress left, and Bernie took another photo through the window.
“I’m going to send these to Darleen to show Mama.” She glanced at the phone, and frowned.
“There’s probably a stronger signal outside, back by the museum,” he said. “You can get a different shot out there, too.”
Rock with Wings Page 2