The Darkness Rolling (6 page)

She smiled. “Not now. But, if you’re a good boy, I’ll show you in the morning.”

There it came, another corkscrew of guilt. I’d arrived just before dark, would be gone as soon as the sun came up, and I still hadn’t said a word about it. My mother was right. We weren’t always great about being honest with each other.

“Are you excited to be home?” said Iris. “You are, right?”

More and more guilty.

Mom got up and went to the kitchen. I knew she didn’t, could not, see the big rejection coming. Or what would feel like to her as rejection.

I faked a grin. I said, lowering my voice as if I was some newscaster on the radio, reading the latest from the front:

“Headline:
WAR SURVIVOR KILLED BY BOREDOM

“Subhead:
OVER ONE HUNDRED SHEEP ARE SUSPECTS IN DEATH OF SEAMAN GOLDMAN
”

Iris threw her arms high, and Cockeyed slid into the crook of her neck. “Why not follow my lead?” she said. “Get delirious to be here. This place is pure magic. Maybe you need to see it with fresh eyes, not with your memories.”

I didn’t know what to think about that. Iris fit on the rez like an Arab at Yom Kippur. Navajos are soft-spoken people, always patient and courteous, and we go to any length to avoid dispute. A New Yorker? That’s probably as far from Navajo as you can get.

Passing the food, we started filling up our bowls and plates. The scent, the steam. It was pretty close to heaven.

“You want to tell me about the world war?” Iris said. “You know, the one our country didn’t get into until Hitler had killed half the Jews in Europe?”

“For me, what war?” It was good to have an audience. “When I enlisted, which was ’thirty-nine, no one really expected a war, at least not in Asia. They sent me to San Diego, and I got a blue-water assignment as a seaman. Water to the east of us, waves to the west of us…”

“Oh, poor baby.”

“Hey, I signed on to see the world—‘Go Navy!’ What I saw, total, was Pearl Harbor for a refueling stop. We got eight hours of liberty and hopped right back onboard. I didn’t get to see one grass skirt.”

“Bet you wanted to do more than see,” said Iris.

Grandpa made a coughing sound that seemed to either be his try at laughter or putting a lid on it for Mom.

“When we got back to San Diego, I asked for shore patrol duty. A lot of sailors hate it, but I thought it was good work and good times. At first it’s just patrolling, you know, the bars and—”

“Whorehouses,” Iris chipped in.

Jeez, what a tongue on a woman. I fumbled my way forward. “… And finding sailors who are drunk and getting them back on board before they get into trouble. Sometimes you have to rap a head with a baton, but usually nothing much. Made me think that maybe, when my tour was over, I might want to be a cop. Something like that.”

“Such talk,” Mom said. “Let’s think of a nicer topic for the dinner table.” Meaning no talk about anything but me spending the rest of my natural life at the trading post.

Cockeyed curled up in Iris’s lap, fifth diner at the table. Even before her first bite, Iris asked me, “You ever fire your piece?”

Mom glared at her. Evidently, Iris didn’t put much stock in “nice.”

“I shot into the ground one time. That put a quick stop to a scrap that was brewing up. That was about it.

“Something good came along, though. Two things, actually. One, I asked for long-term duty on shore patrol. For most guys, it’s just the duty of that particular day, but having one sailor in every patrol who has a lot of experience works well. So I got what I wanted.

“Then came my real break. I showed some of the NCIS guys—that’s Naval Criminal Investigative Service—I showed them that I wanted to learn how to investigate crimes and do it right. You know, like suppose a real crime was committed, let’s say assault or assault with a deadly weapon, and the perpetrator, or the victim, was a sailor. In comes NCIS.”

“A cop? No kidding?” Iris tore off a small bit of lamb and fed it to Cockeyed on her lap. My aspirations didn’t seem to impress her.

“Almost all the NCIS guys are officers, you know, above everybody else. But one man, a warrant officer, took to me and offered help. He said if I passed the exam and went up one more grade, he’d ask that I be on his team. I passed and got the duty. So guess what? I got to be a real cop.”

Iris leaned her forehead into her hand. “Oy vey.”

“I loved it. Actually, my thought was…” Normally, I wouldn’t have said this—why did Iris make me talkative? “Actually, I’m thinking with that experience, maybe I’ll look for work as a railroad dick.”

Iris grinned at the word.

“I’ve always loved the sound of that train coming in and out of Flagstaff, and add that to my cop experience? It seems like a natural.”

Mom interrupted, and she dismissed my talk with one wave of her hand. “Enough of all this. Time for dessert. You three adjourn to the sofa.”

Grandpa settled his wheelchair at the end of the big leather couch. Iris and I found seats at each end. Mom cleared the empty plates. I took Cockeyed, held him, and studied his crazy eye. Weird and sort of hypnotic, both … kind of like a New York aunt being here in Navajoland.

“Where do you think that off-eye looks?” said Iris.

“Into the great unknown,” I said.

She was pleased by that.

Just then Mom came out from the kitchen with a cobbler made of dwarf peaches. I’m sure the Anasazi didn’t have anything like that peach cobbler. I’m also sure they enjoyed the dwarf peaches, the sticky juice running down arms, as much as we do. She was really putting on the dog for me, and I loved it. Grandpa had gotten our trees from a Hopi trader as saplings decades ago. We stored the dried peaches in the root cellar over the winter and reconstituted the slices in water for treats. Mom handed us full bowls and sat facing us across the coffee table.

“Ummm, this is pure bliss,” said Iris. Then she eyed me. Eyebrows arching, she said, “‘Dick’ is exactly the right word, isn’t it?”

It’s like I’d erased my mind when we left the dining table, and my face went hot. Then I remembered. The railroad. “You’re having way too much fun razzing me.”

She tilted her head and pursed her mouth, trying not to smile. She took a big bite of cobbler. I decided that waiting for her to have a mouthful of food was the perfect time to talk.

“And, yep, that’s really what they’re called, the railroad detectives—‘dicks.’ And, yes, I really want to work on the Santa Fe Super Chief.”

“The Super Chief!” Mom practically yelled. “You’ve gone
degeez
!” She looked sideways at Iris. “Sorry, it means ‘crazy.’”

Ride the Super Chief! Travel like a rich man. Explore L.A. Chicago!

I could see it. I could taste it. I wanted it.

I went on before Mom went completely wild. “Mom, if I got that kind of job, I could pay off Grandpa’s medical costs. Which otherwise would take forever.”

Mom waited, then drew herself as tall as a five-footer could and acted out her high-style queen of the roost. “You will stay here and run this place. Iris is sweet to help out, especially with Grandpa being like this, but it’s temporary.”

Iris said, “Why shouldn’t I stay? I love it here.”

“Yes, but you want to paint, paint, paint, and not the kind that needs doing—house painting.”

I was trying to avoid conflict, acting calm inside, but it was getting hard to carry off. What was Mom going to say when I told her I was leaving tomorrow morning? So I said to Iris, “You paint?”

She shrugged in a way that meant ‘Later.’ Cockeyed rode up and down Iris’s shoulders, one eye fixed on me, the other seeking the mysteries.

Mom came at me again. “You want to lose the horses? You want rain to ruin Grandpa’s rugs? And rain in our beds? What on earth are you thinking?”

Mom wasn’t acting a bit Navajo. But she was raised by a man who could get in your face as well as anyone. Second, she never knew her own mother. And third, she was a trader. She could talk tough to white people as easy as act nice with Navajos. This was that lightning part of her, and it was damned hard to stay clear.

“I’m waiting,” said Mom.

I gave in. “Okay, sorry, but I can’t talk about this. Not right now.”

Everybody sat in the silence that is rightly called dead.

*   *   *

Zopilote watched the talk, the fun, the intimacy, with acid in his throat. He mouthed one word over and again—“family.” Family was what they had cheated him out of. All those years he had never realized. When his wife and the old trader sold him out, this circle of relationship, this warmth, this hearth of affection—
this is what they stole from me.

He had never understood. Not clearly.

In county jail, during the trial, and during the years in prison, every day Zopilote replayed that awful picture of her, legs spread wide, hips rising and falling, until she shrilled out her pleasure. Then his enemy flipped her over, quick and hard, and climaxed inside her.

Zopilote raged at the theft of flesh, the flesh of
his
woman.

The Mexican’s life was no payment for her treachery. Nor had she paid for the twenty-five years of Zopilote’s life slain, sunrise by sunrise.

In all his years behind bars, Zopilote got only one communication from the outside world. It arrived shortly after he was locked up in the state pen, a letter from the old trader. It was written in English and had to be translated for him. After he learned to read, he looked at it and mumbled the words over and over, until the paper crumbled.

Yes, your ex-wife is with child. She knows it is your child. So do you.

But you abandoned her, and she threw you away as a husband.

This child’s father will be me.

It is my great pleasure to slap your face with this knowledge. You will never see your own offspring. You have no wife. You have no child. You will spend your life in a cage and have no solace.

—Mose Goldman

Zopilote dismissed the letter as a vain attempt to squash his spirit, and he resolved to make it do the opposite.

Now he grasped the meaning of the letter in a more tortured way.
I have been robbed of family.
This truth burned hot.

*   *   *

I stroked Cockeyed. He purred on my lap, the only sound in the room. But the cozy comfort started to feel like a cold ocean. I was swamped, awash and drowning in guilt.

And so I came right out with it. “Listen up. This is a hard thing to say. Mr. John hired me today, while I was on my way home with Jake Charlie. Tomorrow I’m going all the way to Seligman and then on to Winslow. Then I drive back.”

“What are you talking about?” That was Mom.

“Mr. John hired me as a bodyguard, from the train all the way to Monument Valley, for an actor who’s coming in for his new movie. I’ll be gone about four days, maybe less.” Although, I was hoping maybe more.

Mom marched around the coffee table and plopped on the couch next to me. She almost sat right on my hot cobbler, but I fast slid it away.

“You’ll be back as soon as possible, you say, and all of this”—she motioned with her chin to take in our entire property, inside and out—“has to wait for a few more days. I hope,” she said, “he’s paying you enough to make up for the time you’ll lose here.”

“Mom, we need the money.”

Her face went white. “You’ve been gone so long that you think money answers every problem.”

I was ashamed for being a bad son. What had I been thinking of? Myself. Gone six years, and I turn around and leave. She wrapped her arms around my neck, and I felt her tears, wet against my skin.

She pulled herself together quick and made a little distance between us. She spoke low and flat. How long would I be gone this time? Exactly? Who else was going? Why did I need to do this thing? Exactly? Why now?

Grandpa’s look was impossible to read. He was waiting for the whole story before he got out the scales and weighed the worth of my actions. The cat got up, stretched, and padded onto Iris’s lap. She stroked it, but its tail curled and uncurled, over and over.

I put an arm around Mom, and she brushed it off. She let me rest my hand on her shoulder, and I answered her questions. I told her the truth, most of it.

“Mom, I’m trying to do what’s best. I’ll make a lot of money working for Mr. John. This place needs fixing, the money will pay for that. The medical bills, money will take care of that, too.”

Mom’s voice sizzled. “I need you here. I’m counting on you. What if you decide not to come back? What if you head straight from Mr. John to a train job?”

“Mom, you need to listen.”

“No, you need to listen. I have shared you with the government of the United States. You wanted to go, and it was also a duty. Mr. John is not a duty. The war is over.”

“I have a present for you,” I said.

“And here is something else you may not have thought about, while—”

Grandpa uttered something garbled. He raised his good left arm and flailed it. His garbled talk was hyped-up. I didn’t understand it. Mom either. More flailing. He pulled out his chalkboard.

He pointed to his daughter, and then to me.
GIFT
+
LISTEN
.

She pulled back a little. Nizhoni Goldman studied her father’s face. He urged her with his eyes.

“You have a gift for us,” she said. “I will listen to you.”

I plunged in with enthusiasm. “I hired Katso and Oltai Neez to do the fix-up work for you. Ten days of labor. I promised them five dollars a day each.”

“Five dollars!”

“If you need them longer, just say so. Here’s enough to pay them.” I fished out the five twenty-dollar bills Mr. John had advanced me and tucked them into her hand.

She crumpled them up and tossed the wad onto the coffee table. She leaned her head on my chest, and I felt her body go inward. Her words came out and echoed inside me. “Yazzie, are you remembering that you and Grandpa are my home? Home is not a place, it’s my family. It’s your family.”

“I know, Mom.”

No more words, her head still rested on my chest, and she started patting me.

Grandpa, Iris, and I said nothing.