by Craig Childs
Whom would I go with? Alone? No. This place below the plane looked too difficult. I would need a strong hand. Dirk came to mind. Besides his hands, he would guarantee a roller-coaster mental journey if I went down there with him. With his predatory tales, with his bloodstained memories, we would dive headlong together into the unknown. Go, little mouse. There are riches you cannot imagine.
Down this truck-rattling road, I am seeing the same landmarks in the distance as those I had figured from the plane on the way to my father’s funeral. A mountain. A solitary plume of volcanic rock at the horizon. A high, juniper-covered mesa. We are getting closer.
Turns out that the land I saw from the plane is ceremonial country. It belongs to the Diné. A few months ago, Dirk and I sat down with a map and a man who used to live in this region. The man told us that he had never been beyond the far roads, but he knew of the place, a mythical labyrinth of canyons. He knew an old singer who had grown up traveling there. Sacred land. Taboos and offerings. An easy place to die, also. Cliffs and impenetrable canyons. Few people know the ceremony, the Protectionway, and few know how to get across the land claimed by this ceremony. We would have to talk with the singer. We would need his permission. Then we could go.
There is a house made of red mud. The old Diné singer lives here in the company of numerous cats, a radio tuned now and then to the half static of a Tuba City station, a wife who offers us fry bread and potatoes this morning, and several dogs who, as soon as they can, add their piss to the streaks on Dirk’s tires. The ground is the soulful color of tomato soup, crumbling easily in the hand, thirsty.
The only entrance to this mud house is to the east, a wooden door with a strap of horse leather for a handle. Faint juniper smoke lifts from a rusted-thin stovepipe. Wind chases it off, as cold and barren as dry ice. Inside, the woodstove door leans open. Bronzed shadows lap against the corbel of a juniper-beam ceiling. Four of us gather at the stove, an oil drum cut in half and shoveled into the dirt floor.
Dirk and I lean into the warmth, reaching out occasionally to flick coals back into the fire with our fingers.
The man who showed us the way here, the singer’s grandson, is standing in jeans and a coat.
The singer—he must be about eighty years old, his eyes milky but quick—sits sideways, grinning, in a chair made for schoolchildren. He wears a down jacket filthy from sheepherding.
For the moment, Dirk does the talking. His voice is usually charged, but this morning it is carefully drawn, spoken in soft church tones. He tells the old man that the two of us like moving across the land. We are hoping for permission to walk in this maze of canyons. He explains that we have a desire for the obscurities and irregularities of the ground. He says that we have a love for stone.
The singer nods and hmms. He does not speak any English.
The grandson examines Dirk, his eyes darkly calm, moving from point to point. He gathers his thoughts and translates Dirk’s words into a different tongue. Voices change hands. The grandson’s words are spoken in Athabascan, schoolbook articulated. The grandfather speaks in return with subtle, watery vowels, his consonants cracking like small twigs. He is not a grim-faced, feather-laden wise man like those hung in art galleries. He is adorned only by the country, his fingernails dark at their edges, uneven from use, his teeth stained by coffee. He folds his hands and unfolds them as he talks, the skin creased light and dark like a paper grocery bag used too often. As soon as he is done with us this morning, he will return to his sheep.
I look over at Dirk, watching him watch the grandson speak to the grandfather. His elbows rest on his knees so that he leans toward the stove, a fire crouch. As the heat evenly coats his crotch, his chest, his knees, his face, he puzzles out the conversation, studying gestures between grandson and grandfather. Unable to understand their language, he investigates their bodies, focusing on their faces and hands.
The grandson finally turns to us and laughs at what he has to say, the guarded laugh of mixed company. “He says that you should herd sheep instead.”
There is a short-lived silence; then we all step into the same laughter.
“You would make good sheepherders.” He points at our boots, the leather scarred and thin on the insides. “The way you crouch like that on your haunches. Anyway, you guys are probably looking for your umbilical cords, huh? That’s why you go out and wander around?”
“Yes,” I say, leaning forward, higher onto the balls of my feet.
But then I lean back. No. I do not want him thinking I am a fool itching at my navel, dumbly digging for the truth. I belong to this Blood Desert. I want to open my mouth and have sand spill onto the ground to explain myself. I give both the grandfather and grandson a pleading glance, wishing to explain that like them we have our own mysteries from the desert, that in the wilderness Dirk and I are like dogs feverishly rolling in something dead, coating our bodies in the toadstool stench of instinct. But all I say, quietly, is “We are dogs,” and the grandson eyes my hands, my knees, my canvas work coat, deciding not to translate my comment to his grandfather.
“People come here looking for help,” he says, the laughter shaken off now. “My grandpa knows the songs and the prayers, both ways, Earth and Sun. And the four sacred colors. Then there are offerings, which are very important, you know . . . at a little spring coming out of the ground, a little natural spring. You leave your offering. You ask for protection. You ask for prayers. Right there. That is how he goes about his life.”
I am interested in this talk, but I feel a little as though I am eavesdropping. I do not want to horde information about ceremonies. I only want permission to go. I want to be in the canyons. Still, I am curious.
I lean forward, venturing, “These songs you mention, they’re for the Protectionway ceremony?”
He looks at my shoulders and briefly passes my eyes, leaving nothing as he goes by. “Yes, Protectionway.”
I take that in. I know of many Diné ceremonies from having spent most of my life not far from the reservation. The names are familiar: Evilway, Coyoteway, Beautyway, Red Antway.
The Protectionway is a regional ceremony, and I have heard that it is slowly being forgotten. It’s a sanctuary ritual, something that men coming back from the Second World War and Vietnam went through, a rite that protects refugees and people being chased. Some time in the late 1800s it became popular around here. I imagine it was a response to devastating troop invasions by the United States, the sort of prayers and songs that people perform when pressed to the very edge.
The singer begins talking, and the grandson turns away from us, nodding receptively, saying “Ah, ah.” He then translates back to us: “These canyons and certain features of rock inside of them, this is where the Protectionway songs come from, this is their origin, this place where you want to go.”
The grandson tells us that when his grandfather was a child, other Diné children were being plucked by the Indian School, ridden south on horseback, and not returned to their families until a decade later. His parents sent him to hide in the same canyons where we want to carry our packs and ropes, a place where canyons lie within canyons within canyons. It is a place hard to imagine, so no one would ever dare go looking for him there. Each time the school patrols came through, he ran off alone into this farther desert. That, he says, is why his grandfather is this way now, why he knows so much about the land.
I imagine this old man as a child and the sound of his footsteps through sand in a canyon floor. He waited in a massive and revealing landscape. He walked through cathedral canyons carved one into the next, his voice carried into echoes as he prayed and sang and talked in his sleep. He found paths a thousand years old, small steps chiseled into cliffs where people had once traveled, people from long before the Diné. He slept in natural wind shelters so deeply eroded that he could not see the stars. I only know the place from maps and from looking down out of the airplane, but I know how to read and how to imagine.
There are more stories told at the
fire, more wood added as we listen and ask questions. The singer draws objects from inside his coat one at a time, a polished leather pouch of corn pollen, a spear point made of a smooth stone, chert. Explaining that they are items of protection, the things he places in front of him for safe passage, he hands them around. Dirk and I admire them, turning them between our fingers, rubbing their polished surfaces.
The grandson speaks, and I look up.
“He says that you have what you came for. He has one more thing to show you.” He gestures lightly toward the door, where we will leave to get the flour and vegetables and other offerings we have brought.
I pass the stone I’m holding to Dirk, who examines it and then returns it to the singer, who has stood and is bent. He places the rock back into his coat. We leave one at a time, out of the firelight and into the morning. As if emerging from a cave, we duck through the door, shielding our eyes from the eastern morning light. The wind has fallen away, but the air has not yet recovered from a night below 20 degrees. Still as loaves of bread, numerous cats sit on the red ground, eyes sleepy in the sun. Some rise and slip toward our legs, their tails grasping our calves.
The old man has a bundle in his hands. He unfolds its leather wings and draws out two long dowels draped in gray feathers. He lifts these, and the feathers slide out, catching on their leather cords, lolling like the heads of sleeping men.
“These are used in the ceremony,” the grandson says as he takes them from his grandfather. “Very important. Grandpa is Salt Clan. He carries the medicine bundle.”
The grandson does not hold these decorated rods tightly. He cradles them, the way a mother supports her baby’s head, showing me how to do it as he passes them across. My hands come around them.
“Protectionway?” I ask.
“Yes.”
They are light, fragile between my fingers, hardly thicker than pencils. They are rubbed into pearl by skin oils. Old scars in the wood have been sanded down by ceremony after ceremony, hand after hand. They are strung with beads, each dowel bearing a different set of colors. From what I know of Diné traditions, the color arrangements are male and female.
I see that beneath their dressings, these rods are actually arrows, broken so that the points are gone, the breaks cleanly bandaged in animal sinew. The wind- and dirt-chewed fletching along the tails has nearly disintegrated, touched by too many hands, the arrows fired too often.
I bring the ornamented pieces of wood up to one eye, as if checking a piece of lumber for warp, and I find them to be absolutely straight. Had these arrows been used for hunting or for killing men? I thought back to a flight the Diné had made into this territory more than a hundred years ago, when U.S. troops chased them into the canyons beyond here. Did they use these arrows then? How old are they? A hundred years, perhaps. Older, maybe.
“These are beautiful arrows,” I say. “Can you tell me anything about their history?”
The grandson looks at me as if I have mistaken a raccoon for a car tire. “They aren’t arrows.”
“I mean, they were once arrows.” I turn the butt ends toward him to show that I noticed the notches in back, each deeply worn, having been set numerous times into a bowstring and fired. “Here are their nocks.”
He is still looking at me that way. I have misnamed them again.
“No, they are not arrows,” he explains.
I dip my head in compliance. I realize that he speaks English only out of courtesy to us, replacing each Athabascan word on his tongue for the nearest English one. In his language these are, indeed, not arrows. In mine, we hold names from the past as if we would sink without them. My culture is different, and in this instant, I am glad; its intention does not mask the past. At the same time I am envious of the Diné’s ability to move wholeheartedly ahead to where an object is purely what it is now, the past is tacitly understood, and the future is not even here yet.
I look to the singer for consent. He gestures yes toward Dirk. I pass on the two feathered pieces to Dirk, who turns them in his hands, checking their straightness, tenderly feeling for strength and weakness.
I think about something the grandson had translated to us, that the Protectionway stories are imparted by the shape of the landscape itself. Walking out there is the telling of the legend. Boulders appear in the path, and they already have names. Water holes are characters central to the story. Every object encountered has consequence. Nothing is formless. These arrows, I think, are the first tales of our own legend.
Dirk’s hands ride over the broken weapons, fingers testing the skin-polished beads as if reading something about his own life. Like these objects, he is a weapon transformed, a cop snapped in half. He comes to the desert as a person of ceremony. He drapes himself in the feathers and beads of boulders and cliffs. I look at him. No matter how shiny his beads, he is still an arrow to this very day, sharp-tipped and seeking the kill. He is still a cop.
When Dirk is done, he passes these adorned rods of wood to the singer. The old man puts them back in their leather bundle. Dirk watches every move: the grandfather’s hands closing the coverlets, the arrows leaving his sight. We now have permission to go.
Day in the Park
When Dirk was eighteen years old he owned a gun. He kept it in his bedroom. It was a heavy, chrome-plated handgun with a six-inch barrel, a .357 Magnum. He stored it on his shelf throughout his two years at the police academy, eager to slip on a uniform, hang this contrivance off his hip, and walk outside to command the world around him.
He was a teenager from a stable household, with a mother and father still married, two brothers, and a dog: a good home with an honest mortgage. Romancing the adrenaline of youth, he was a member of a boys’ gang that perpetrated meaningless street crimes: blowing up mailboxes with small, illegal explosives, hurling rocks through the windshields of parked cars—the usual reckless thrills that serve as training for urban police work.
After graduating from the academy, he moved onto the street fully armed. His beloved .357 holstered for all to see. He also wore a stainless-steel semiautomatic backup pistol in a holster under his left armpit, something he could grab with his weaker right hand in case of struggle. He carried sundry wooden batons and canisters and artillery magazines on his belt, a double-edged fighting knife on his calf, and an illegal lead-weighted beaver-tail sap that waited in his back pocket like a flattened sack of marbles, ready to snap a nose bone. He was twenty-one, just old enough to drink.
The Denver police force he went to work for was notoriously violent. During his rookie year, he testified against two fellow officers, refuting claims on doctored paperwork. The next day, his locker and the vents of his car were flooded with tear gas. At headquarters his face was met with insults.
As a reprimand he was handed over to Buzz, a physically brutal patrol partner in his fifties, a man who preyed on women after the bars closed at 1:00 AM, inquiring out his patrol car window for sex or at least a feel. The women were always there. Buzz knew the ones, those who would sit in the back letting him paw their breasts. During these overtures, Dirk left the patrol car and headed off with his radio to prowl the streets. Buzz would announce himself over the air, talking in code to alert Dirk when he was finished if it was an on-duty blow job.
When Dirk grimly turned a blind eye to Buzz’s night games, Buzz just shook his head. He thought Dirk was an oddity, maybe gay.
Buzz hated gays. He hated Mexicans. He hated blacks. He hated sloppily dressed, unshaven, or greasy-haired whites, which could mean that Buzz hated himself. He did not like to get out of his car, especially if he had to run, meaning Dirk chased down a lot of people himself, climbing fences, flashing into alleys among graffiti-lavished Dumpsters, sprinting through sidewalk crowds of people who despised cops, waving his baton to keep them from throwing concealed punches or trying to trip him.
Because Buzz hated Mexicans, he and Dirk were assigned to a city park that was becoming a popular weekend football and barbecue location for Hispanics. They were
sent in to be a presence, to write petty tickets for busted taillights, open bottles of beer, or failing to use turn signals into the parking lot. Dirk and Buzz were thorns in the sides of several hundred people, from gang members to churchgoers.
One Sunday afternoon there was a car chase at the edge of the park. A banana-yellow late-model Trans Am with tires too big for its chassis took the corner with a chirp of tire rubber, Buzz’s patrol car just behind, the cruiser’s beacon lights spinning witlessly.
The Trans Am jumped the street onto the sidewalk, then sped across the park lawn. Grass mulched into the air around its tires as it swung past one of the barbecues, across a walkway, and onto the street on the other side, people peeling out of the way.
Buzz followed, aiming into the opening that the Trans Am had cleared, punching the accelerator. The patrol car struck the curb too hard. All four tires blew out at once. Pieces of black rubber flew through the air like meteorites.
The car plowed sideways. It came to a stop in the center of the park, in the midst of maybe three hundred people, barbecued chicken in hand, kids staring as if a woman had just stripped naked and was singing as loudly as possible right in front of them. But everything was absolutely quiet, the siren off, lights still spinning.
Buzz did not look at Dirk. “Just hold tight,” he said. “Don’t get out of the car.”
Dirk held tight. He watched as the crowd closed around them like water moving in, shutting off any view to the outside. He watched every gesture out the windows and in the mirrors, mouths snarling to slur insults, hands on hips. Everyone was waiting for something to explode.