Stealing Fire (11 page)

After a fine dinner of cow knuckle stew, Grandfather, Mr. Wright, and I shared a cottage. Two twin beds and a couch. I took the couch. Each bed was covered with an Eye Dazzler blanket, my favorite pattern. The two old juvenile delinquents whispered back and forth to each other, and every once in a while they laughed out loud. I thought of Iris by herself, curled up in our warm bed, and I couldn't imagine what I was doing here. When we were apart, it felt like I was a man walking with just one shoe. The earth wasn't balanced right.

*   *   *

Up before dawn, Hambler made sandwiches for our road trip and brewed coffee. We were the only ones awake.

“Mr. Wright an old friend of Mose's?”

“They just met.”

“Seems like they've known each other forever.”

“I know. It's kind of spooky.”

I gave Hambler the
Reader's Digest
version of who Wright was. He was flustered and worried. Said if he'd known he was entertaining a celebrity, he'd have put out the good dishes and wouldn't have sworn so liberally. I told him he was a breath of fresh air for Wright. That he had plenty of people treating him like he was special. That he didn't need it, and, in my opinion, it was crushing him.

“I wish my son had been here. He would have enjoyed the whole evening.”

“Maybe not the whole evening,” I said.

“You mean the Ute? My kid would have taken care of him, and that's part of the problem. He's tired of taking care of trouble, and he's got a notion that life will be simpler in Albuquerque.

“He's in love with a Mexican gal down there,” Hambler said, “and they want to open up a tourist restaurant that serves Mexican food—I don't know how anyone can tolerate that stuff. Anyway, I only met her once, but she seems real nice. Got a temper, but any good woman does.”

“Why can't you take your art?” said Wright.

“I'm getting on, and I'll be living with them. She can't stand this stuff.”

“Hates Navajo art?”

“Nope, just hates Navajos, like lots of Mexicans in the Southwest,” Hambler said. “People are crazy, you know that?”

“I'm getting a crash course about it.” Wright needed one.

Hambler loaded me up with canned peaches, and cobbler, and sheep sandwiches. Thermoses of coffee and cold water. I'd miss the man. We promised to visit each other when he moved to Albuquerque and I was back in Santa Fe. But it felt like one of those things you say that you don't believe, even while you're saying it.

He got out a paper and scribbled his phone number on it. It was 0124. “I'll be here a while yet. You need anything, get ahold of Harry Goulding and tell him to call me. I'll be there fast as I can.”

I was overwhelmed by his kindness, and stood without finding the right words.

“It's no bother,” he said. “I might not be alive and talking to you now, complaining about Mexican food, if you hadn't come when you did.”

I didn't know how late Grandpa and Wright had stayed up talking, but it was time to hit the road. I rousted them out of their beds, they waved a bleary
Good-bye
and
Thanks!
to Hambler, and I poured them into the truck. Chilly outside, again. Come autumn, the days get short fast, and cool too soon. I never notice the slow progression of dimming light—the summer just seems to shut down one day.

I started up the truck, she was purring, and we turned north with our headlights on in the still-gray morning. We crossed Coyote Wash. The two pals leaned against each other, snoring. We were deep into Navajoland, and all the trading posts and gullies and hogans were friends. We passed Long Goat Springs. My grandfather and I had gone there on regular trips for their extraordinary baskets. If we had any trouble around here, we'd either run into a friend or I could talk our way out of it.

And if anyone was after Wright, they'd be white and would stick out like a sore thumb. I'd stop in Shiprock for gas and food, turn west, and head to Oljato. We'd be home for dinner. I'd stop at Goulding's for supplies, just in case Eno hadn't left any.

The first hazed-pink light slithered across the bottom of the bluffs. I shook my grandfather and Mr. Wright awake, pulled over, and turned the truck facing east.

Dawn busted the seams of the new day wide open with more kinds of orange and red, pink and purple, than Iris has on her palette. The hills pulsed their delight at another chance to taste life.

Without words, we got out and shared the wonder. It felt like being in a cathedral with a never-ending-high ceiling.

Finally Mr. Wright said, “Here it is. The real God. Nature with a capital
N
is what the real God is made of, just like we talked about, Mose. Isn't it glorious?”

It was glorious, and I was proud to have taken Mr. Wright's breath away practically in my own backyard.

There was surely trouble at hand, but there is never so much trouble that it should blind us to beauty.

*   *   *

I followed them until they turned off Route 66 just near Grants, New Mexico. I had no idea where they were going, but following an Indian guy onto reservation land—What was a reservation, anyway? A low-rent boarding school?—that wasn't on my agenda. Only an idiot would do such a thing, and I was no idiot.

Plans had changed, and I needed time to get my bearings. I checked into the one motor court on Route 66 that had a pay phone. Each room was a separate little cottage. Each cottage was shaped like a teepee with an arrow through it.

What a miserable little speck on the road. It doesn't cost that much more to build something beautiful as opposed to something hideous. That was something I'd learned, firsthand, from Mr. Wright.

I used my real name to check into the motel. I got a lot of nickels from the desk clerk, walked to the pay phone, and called Taliesin West.

My hands shook, and so did my voice. “Hello, may I speak to Helen Fine?”

“Just a minute, okay?”

I recognized the voice, but couldn't place it.

“My mistake,” said the voice from Taliesin. “She hasn't arrived for the winter yet.”

I knew the sound of a lie. I'd catch up with her soon.

“This is Payton Wood. Would you please give her a phone number where she can reach me after she gets in from Wisconsin?”

“Oh, sure, Payton.”

Helen would call me.

*   *   *

The dawn's beauty, though, couldn't soften what I had to tell Mr. Wright.

“Mr. Wright,” I said, “Olgivanna left our house in Santa Fe shortly after we did yesterday morning.”

“What? How did that happen?”

“Your wife wasn't a prisoner, and evidently she felt compelled to do what she thought was best.”

“She disappeared? Simply vanished?”

“No. She left a note. Frieda found it before she went to work in the morning. Your wife wrote that she was taking a cab to Albuquerque and getting on the train there. She arranged to be picked up at the Flagstaff depot and go from there to Taliesin West.”

“But who is watching her now?”

“She declined protection when she left Santa Fe. Her call.”

“I know that, but … it's been twenty-four hours, and I hate not knowing about my own wife.”

“I had no business withholding information about your wife,” I said. “I heard about it last night when I spoke with Iris. My intentions were good, but I treated you like a child. Please, forgive me.”

Wright took a deep breath. “Give me a minute to collect my thoughts.”

I did. He had questions.

“Did anyone see the cab she supposedly took?”

“As I said, when Frieda found the note, your wife was gone. She'd written that she'd called a cab and was waiting for it.”

“So, in the middle of all this trouble, my dear wife is alone.”

“I'll call the cab companies and ask about a pickup at our house. Damned few cabs running in the early morning, and damn few fares all the way to Albuquerque. Easy to find the driver. Third, I can check on the purchase of a train ticket from ABQ to Flag.”

“Will all that help?”

“I don't expect any trouble. This seems in character for your wife.”

“It is. I can only assume she's safe. Can we find out who picked her up in Flagstaff, assuming she made it that far?”

Oh boy, here we go. “You can call Taliesin West.”

“Thank God!”

Right about then I wished Mr. Wright had a few antennae of his own.

Poor Frieda and her viola, a beautiful instrument that looked as if it had been lynched. I wondered if it occurred to him that our home had been a haven for over a century. I was glad I was not the one who had destroyed our sanctuary.

I couldn't figure out what to make of Olgivanna leaving in such a way. Her timing was perfect. She had no intention of being stopped. And taking off with a mere note? A general note, not one written especially to her husband? Mr. Wright may not have been the sole target in this mess. Perhaps he was being manipulated. I recalled him telling me on our train ride—it felt like that was years ago—his wife knew where every cent came from and where every cent went. I didn't know how that fit into this, but it was worth keeping tucked inside the folds of my brain.

 

Seventeen

My cousin Eno Kee had been keeping an eye on the trading post for us while we were in Santa Fe. Making repairs, keeping the place stocked with food. His wife threw him out every three or four weeks, so the post had become his second home. I told him that was okay, but if he took on another wife? He'd have to do that somewhere else. I didn't want any big-deal fights flying around the post. We'd moved the real treasures down to Santa Fe. Others we'd locked in a storage shed that was shady and tight. But still …

I opened the door to my first home, my heart's real home, and the scent of piñon—baked into the walls for fifty years—touched me. The best possible welcome.

I'd gotten backstraps and vegetables in Shiprock and started to fix us a good, hearty dinner. Laid in some root beer, too. Pathetic, but true—all three of us agreed that it was our favorite drink. The fire was going just right to burn down to hot, even coals for beef on the grill.

A voice, then two voices, behind the house. There Wright was, his handyman overalls stretched at the knees, his skin on fine bones loose with weariness, but somehow he still carried a look of supreme elegance. Mose walked him out of the hogan. Wright said he wanted more time inside.

“Nothing more you're going to see in there but scorpions, Frank,” Grandpa said.

“Nothing? The shape rises up, out of the earth. It is a home, but it's still part of the earth. Astonishing.”

“It's very old.”

“It's circular. It's large. It could use windows.”

“It could use bug spray.”

“And your family,” Wright said, “lived in that?”

“Frank, you stayed in the house I grew up in, where my family lived. Nothing like this place.”

“What a shame.”

“Hardly,” Grandfather said. “My wife's family lived here long before I built our home and trading post. Then I built her parents a solid home. Dirt floors get old fast.”

“The woodstove is where it should be, exactly in the middle. Every home must have a center, and the fire is it.” Just like Coyote to say that. He looked around as if he had just discovered God. Again. “But you and your wife lived in this hogan when you started out?”

“No, no, I built our house—chinked every stone myself—before I even asked her to marry me. The country is rough enough. I wanted her to have the best I could give, and she deserved even more than that.”

“May I ask what, exactly, happened to your wife, Mose?”

Large sigh. “It's been decades now. She died giving birth to our daughter, Yazzie's mother. Her extended family still lives on this piece of land, here a hogan, there a hogan. There's one tumbly hogan sitting on the rise above our well.”

“All families on the same tract of land?”

“Yes,” he said. “Some of the hogans spread around here are ceremonial. Only used once, and then we let them fall back into the earth.”

“That's fitting,” Wright said. “It's what we did, oh, fifty years ago and then some, on my family's land in Wisconsin.”

“We ran sheep on tract after tract of her family's old land. I worked within an inch of my life getting this place in shape.”

“We did, too, and it's a hell of a job. But there are some sweet homes there now. An office, too.”

Grandpa offered to walk Mr. Wright up the hill, wanted to show him the well he'd dug himself, mostly through stone. He was still proud of it, had every right to be, but we had to eat sometime.

“Mr. Wright,” I said, “the well isn't going anywhere. Dinner, on the other hand, is going up in smoke.”

 

Eighteen

After dinner we three men went to Grandpa's favorite room. Right off the kitchen, it used to be filled with his most prized, and largest, rugs and baskets—but those went to Santa Fe. There were a few less valuable ones left behind, and some photos, books, and dusty newspaper clippings on dark pine shelves. There was still a cozy sitting area, leather furniture splitting here and there with time.

“This home,” Wright said to my grandfather, “is built on the stories of full lives woven together as a whole. Disagreements, sure, but look at the colors, the richness of the wood, the warmth of the light.” He leaned forward. “Mose, is that a photo of your wife?”

“Taken our first summer here.” Grandfather smiled, a smile that only happens in the half-breath of a dream. “She was the best partner a man could have. My lover. Strong. An extraordinary woman.”