Ride the Rainbow Home (11 page)

Jim loaded the food into the refrigerator while Meg took the chicken off the stove and set it out on paper towels to cool. Then they found Sally with the newborns in the family room. "Look who's here," Meg announced.

"How's the little fella?" Jim asked. As if on cue, Tommy bounded in, looking as healthy as if nothing had ever happened. "Hey! How ya doin', partner?" Jim grabbed Tommy under the arms and swung him up until his hair brushed the ceiling. Tommy giggled with delight. "He seems pretty healthy to me," Jim observed.

"All better!" Tommy declared. "Up again! Up again!"

"Okay, one more time!" Jim called and swung the child to the ceiling while Tommy squealed with glee.

They ate a few minutes later, Jim's deli salads and Jell-O a complement to Meg's chicken. Jim excused himself a few minutes later, explaining he had some business calls to make before the late galleries closed in California. When Meg offered to walk him to the door, he said, "No, don't get up," and showed himself out.

He brought lunch on Thursday, but stayed only long enough to eat, then showed himself out again. By that evening, when he called to finalize plans for the weekend, Meg couldn't help wondering why he'd bothered. He'd hardly spoken to her since he got back into town.

* * * *

Whatever he had in mind would start early, Meg realized as she clambered out of bed at four a.m. Exhaustion ached in her bones, ordering her back to bed. If she had been able to sleep when she first crawled in last night, she might have felt better, but she'd lain awake a long time. Until last night, she hadn't realized how quickly Jim had changed her life. It had been only three weeks since she'd first seen him on the hill. Three weeks, and he already had her wondering about sharing her condo, and considering motherhood!

In fairness, it wasn't just Jim that had caused the changes. They'd been coming for some time. She already knew she couldn't go back to Montgomery Adams on the same terms as when she'd left. Time away had only persuaded her that her dissatisfaction was genuine, her concerns real. Then too, there was that other nagging sensation, the feeling that something important, something she needed, was missing from her life. That had begun before she left California and had only intensified since. She remembered how she'd felt as she sat on the bluff above Rainbow Rock, watching the hawks circle the valley. The sudden stab of longing made her catch her breath.

She showered and brushed out her curls, then carefully made up her face to cover the circles under her eyes and put a touch of color in her wan cheeks. Then she dressed in layers to help her adjust to warmer or cooler temperatures, and stuffed two more outfits into her backpack. Jim should be here any—

The ringing doorbell snapped her head up and she realized she had been dozing.
Great. I'm going to be fine company today
, she thought as she pasted a smile on her face and met Jim at the door.

She caught her breath at the sight of him. He was wearing soft blue-denim jeans and a white tank top, layered with a long-sleeved shirt in blue plaid flannel. Always an impressive sight, he was stunning in a tank top, but the most amazing thing about him was his hair. Blond as he was, Jim looked like a pale Indian. His glorious hair was bound back in the style worn by traditional Navajo men, folded at the nape in a kind of bun. With a blue bandanna as a headband, Jim was breathtaking. His eyes twinkled as he helped her into the truck. “Like what you see?”

“Sorry. I guess I’ve been staring. Would you understand if I said you look like a pale Navajo?”

“I’ll take that as a sincere compliment.”

“That’s how I meant it.”

“That was why I grew my hair,” he added. “It’s a mark of respect for the traditional culture, and it tells the
Dineh
people that I consider myself one of them.”

Dawn crept over the eastern horizon as they made their way out of town toward the Navajo nation. The eastern sky was a rainbow of soft pastels, ribbons of pink, peach, and mauve mimicking the brighter layers of sandstone beneath them.

Meg quickly understood why Jim drove a pickup. By the time they crossed the borders onto the reservation, the roads had turned to barely paved trails. Later they became paths made by horses' hooves and wagon wheels, little more than ruts on the desert floor.

Their first stop was at a summer hogan some thirty miles inside the reservation. There Jim dickered for a magnificent squash-blossom necklace, got the price down so it sounded like a steal, then nonchalantly mentioned that he might consider the earrings too, and ended up paying as much as the artist had asked in the first place. All of it Meg followed through the men's body language, the items they picked up, and the dollar amounts they quoted.

"I didn't realize you speak Navajo," Meg observed with admiration as they started down the rutted path.

"Like a native, or so I'm told." He shrugged. "It makes sense. I learned it as a native language, right along with my English."

"How? Navajo is one of those languages nobody learns—except Navajos."

"Remember Franklin Nakai?"

She couldn't have forgotten. Nakai had been at the hub of too many jokes and pranks during her school years. "Didn't he work for your father?"

"That's right. He and his wife Ruth worked on our place from my earliest memory. Ruth helped Mom in the house. She understood English, but she never spoke anything but Navajo. I grew up speaking Navajo to Ruth and English to my mother. I learned both at the same time and never thought a thing about it."

"I've heard of that," Meg said. "We studied the concept in a language class in college. They say a child can learn any number of languages at once, so long as he always speaks the same language to the same person and never mixes them up. It's only when the same person speaks to the child in different languages that the kid gets confused, or worse yet, stammers."

"It worked that way for me," Jim answered. "When I got older, the Nakai boys were always around and we spoke only Navajo. When I'm with them, I think in Navajo. It's automatic."

"The only Navajo I ever learned was Yah-ta-hey."

"And that's only sort of Navajo," Jim said. When Meg looked confused, he told her of how a former tribal chairman had started a radio program for Navajo listeners and had created a greeting out of the Navajo words for "good" and "morning."

"So it's a translation?" Meg asked.

Jim nodded. “Sort of.”

"Then I promise I won't use it for the next two days."

“That’s a good idea,” he said, smiling wryly.

Their itinerary took them through Indian Wells and Ganado, as well as down a couple of rutted cow paths with the hogans or small homes of talented artisans at their end.

“I’ve noticed most of these little compounds have both a home and a Hogan,” Meg observed. “So where do they live?”

“Some of the
Dineh
still live year-round in hogans,” Jim answered, “but most have a more or less European style home they live in. Still they keep a Hogan for ceremonial purposes.” He grinned. “It can double as a guest house, too.”

Meg noticed how the hogans were all built in the same general pattern, mostly in hexagonal or octagonal shapes with an earthen ceiling. At each stop, Jim pulled into the door yard and waited patiently in his truck until the occupants came out to speak to him, explaining to Meg that Navajos considered it a sign of rudeness if a stranger walked up to their door. Whenever the people spoke English, Jim used it, trying to include Meg in their conversations, but many reservation-born artists spoke only their native tongue. Jim led those negotiations in rapid, easy Navajo, quickly concluding deals worth hundreds or many thousands of dollars and always paying in cash.

"Don't you worry about carrying so much money?" Meg asked as they loaded a beautiful hand-tooled saddle into the truck.

"Only when I'm off-rez," Jim said. "Things I take onto the reservation sometimes walk away by themselves, but I've never had anything stolen."

"What's the difference? Between walking away and thievery, I mean."

Jim frowned in concentration. "It's a little tricky to explain to someone who doesn't already understand the concepts, but the Indians have a communal sense of ownership unlike anything we know. If you leave a half-eaten plate of beans lying around, or a pair of still-serviceable work boots sitting outside your house trailer, they likely won't be there when you come back. They’re being used by someone else who has a need of them.”

“And people just
accept
that?” Meg felt her cultural norms doing a one-eighty.

“It’s what people grow up expecting,” he answered. “On the other hand, everyone here recognizes that money, being a European concept, is treated with a white or European kind of approach. It belongs to an individual. If it's mine, no one else will touch it."

"You sound like you have a real respect for these people."

"Where else in America could you drive around in a new truck with nearly thirty thousand dollars in your jeans and expect to come home alive?"

"Good question," Meg answered, choosing not to comment on the presence of that much cash. She certainly wouldn’t have dared that in Oakland.

They arrived at a homestead outside Steamboat just before dusk and Jim drove through the gate, finally pulling up in front of a hogan where smoke from a cooking fire curled into the evening sky. A slender, dark-skinned woman came to the door. Meg admired her crimson velvet skirt and gold satin blouse, her squash-blossom necklace and thick, plaited hair, wound up in a knot at her nape. The woman saw Jim and stepped back inside, speaking rapidly. Moments later she came out with a moccasined man at her side. They walked to the truck together and greeted Jim in Navajo.

"Meg, I'd like you to meet Raymond Yazzi," Jim introduced them, "and this is his wife, Opal."

"It's nice to meet you both," she said, extending her hand.

The Yazzis looked at each other, and then Raymond, looking somewhat abashed, quickly gripped and released Meg's hand. Meg made a mental note to ask Jim what custom she had broken with.

The man spoke to Jim and Jim nodded. Then he turned to Meg. "They've invited us to eat with them."

"Oh, I couldn't impose."

Smiling and nodding as if agreeing with her, Jim explained, "The rules are different here, Meg. You'll insult them if you don't eat their food."

Meg smiled bravely. "Tell them I'll be delighted."

Jim said something that sounded like agreement and Raymond nodded, and then Opal led the group into the eight-sided, earth-roofed home where the two men quickly squatted down on some of the most exquisitely loomed Navajo rugs Meg had ever seen, cast on the bare earthen floor. Meg knelt beside Jim. Opal brought bowls and spoons, a canteen, and four tin cups. Meg helped distribute the utensils while Jim and Raymond chatted. Opal went to the cooking fire and returned with a pot of soup and a plate of flat bread, plus water from a drum in the corner. Opal served the men, dished up for Meg, and then helped herself.

"Mmm, this is good," Meg said when she tasted it. "Dare I ask what it is?"

"It's a sort of shepherd's stew," Jim answered. "Raymond's uncle killed a lamb yesterday."

"Oh." Meg smiled weakly, trying not to think of murdered lambs and remembering that the daily realities of life and death were closer to these people than to her sanitized world. "The bread's good," she mumbled.

"Navajo frybread," Jim murmured. "Don't think about the cholesterol and you can really enjoy it."

"So who's thinking about cholesterol?" Meg dipped the bread into the stew as Raymond had done.

When they had eaten their fill, Meg helped Opal with cleanup and was astonished at how little water she used. She made another mental note as the women rejoined the men. Just as she was beginning to wonder where she and Jim would spend the night, Raymond gestured toward her and spoke to Jim. Jim answered and Raymond laughed—politely, Meg thought, behind his hand—but there was something about the conspiratorial looks the two men were giving each other that made her face color again. When Jim turned to her and began to translate, she knew he wasn't telling everything.

"Raymond says his brother's summer hogan isn't far from here. His brother is working in Phoenix until August and we are welcome to use the hogan if—" His eyes twinkled. "—we'd like some privacy."

Meg's blush deepened. She cleared her throat. "And what did you tell Raymond?"

"I told him we'd be pleased to accept his brother's hospitality."

"I see." Meg hesitated. "Just tell me one thing."

"What's that?"

“Where had you planned for us to sleep?''

"Sorry, but I never plan where I'm going to sleep when I travel on the reservation. Someone always offers me a place. In fact, it's rude to turn the offer down. I’m used to sleeping pretty much wherever and, well, I hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

"I see," she said, wondering what she'd gotten herself into.