Stealing Fire

by Win Blevins

  We were on the rez, and I wanted to make it clear that the guy was threatening me, make sure anything that might happen was a case of self-defense. Last thing I wanted was to break laws that would bring the Feds onto reservation land. That would be a tangle we didn’t need. Whatever this guy’s beef was, it needed to stay on the rez.

  “Hey, you trying to get us killed?” Mr. Wright hollered at me.

  Cool as a cucumber, Grandpa said, “He’s just putting up the Goldman portable blockade. Good brakes, Yazzie.”

  I barged out of our truck, ran to the car, pulled the driver from behind the steering wheel, and whammed him against the hard metal of his hood. Then I shoved him facedown onto the dirt on the side of the road.

  There was also a passenger. He scrambled out and rolled into some brush near his partner. When I saw him reach for his weapon, I pulled my .45. Grandpa was right behind me with his ancient pistol.

  “Better not,” I said to the passenger, the man with the weapon, lying in the brush.

  He decided he had better not, too.

  “We have no quarrel with you,” the driver said. “Let’s not make one.”

  “Who are you people?”

  The driver gave me a gaze that sliced like quicksilver. He said, “We’re FBI.” They flipped out their J. Edgar IDs. Being tricky, not saying that to start with.

  “This isn’t your fight,” he said to me.

  “Damn straight it is. You’re following me. Endangering me and my guests, and on my reservation. My sovereign nation.” Sometimes a little drama goes a long way. I didn’t know exactly what authority the FBI might have on the rez, but it didn’t include bumping my truck.

  I pulled them both up by the shirt fronts. They were the same color as the sand. Well, not exactly. The guy who I’d introduced to his hood ornament had splotches of drying blood beneath the sand. He was also a bit lumpy.

  I shook them a little and kicked the passenger’s gun into the dust. The driver tossed his to the side, and my grandfather picked it up. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I bought some time. Not a bad idea to play up the savage thing, put some scare into them.

  I spoke to Grandpa in Navajo, and he answered back in the same. We talked about what month is best to put in the squash, and we spoke in a tone that was fierce. I growled a few more words in Navajo, this time about my boots, and switched back to English when they looked appropriately worried.

  “What are you doing here?” I said to them. “You have one chance to convince me.” They were both kind of tall. And wearing suits in the desert? Only the Feds …

  “Our business is with Mr. Wright.”

  I spoke to Grandfather again in Navajo. He preferred dried peaches to apricots.

  I leaned inside the truck. “Mr. Wright, do you know these men?”

  He didn’t.

  I said, “Get in and go home.”

  “We have the right,” said the driver.

  “Not on Navajo land you don’t. And you’re acting like thugs. Why?”

  “Mr. Wright is a subversive wanted by the FBI,” said the passenger.

  I hid my surprise, and Grandfather broke into a heated Navajo conversation about which was best—elk jerky or beef jerky—followed by Navajo words that meant What the hell is this about?

  “Hand Mr. Wright over and we’ll leave,” the driver said.

  “Right now,” the passenger said, dusting himself off, “you’re looking at a federal offense.”

  Grandfather hollered at me, again in Navajo, and this time it was relevant. Something I already knew, but he wanted to remind me.

  “Agents,” I said, “I didn’t attack you. I was defending myself. You are driving an unmarked car on an Indian reservation. You deliberately rammed my bumper.”

  “But you assaulted us, federal agents.”

  “I defended myself against your vehicular mayhem. You’re lucky we kept our tempers in check.”

  Grandfather cleared his throat, and he spoke to them in perfect English. They both wore surprise like a spotlight.

  He said, “Look around you.”

  They did.

  Mose Goldman snarled at the Feds as if they were bones stuck between his teeth. “This is a very big desert.”

  They looked around them again.

  “We have relatives,” I said, “lots of them, and they live close by.”

  “What are you going to do?” the rumpled driver said. “Get out the tom-toms? Send up smoke signals?”

  That did it. I picked them both up by the backs of their shirts and tossed them at the side of their car. I asked for their badge numbers. I took their license plate number down on a notepad. I’d already written it down on a gas receipt when I first spotted them, but this was more official-looking.

  Mose said, “You do not want to find out what happens when a person gets lost out here.”

  “This gentleman”—I motioned to my grandfather—“is leaving out the details. Coyotes, mountain lions, rattlers, and at the end buzzards. No help in sight.”

  “And if you rile me anymore, I’ll drain your radiator.” Tanned and fierce, Grandpa was old, but he was the warrior who concerned them most. He stood, no more words, his feet apart, looking like he was ready to pounce.

  “Let’s calm down,” the FBI driver said. “We’re all American citizens here.” This was a different tack. They were graciously reminding us that we were buddies, part of the same United We Stand.

  “Correct,” I said.

  “So, being the Feds, we’re the good guys.”

  I wasn’t exactly in agreement about that, especially after all this mess, and I wasn’t going any further with them.

  “What is it, exactly, that you want?”

  “Mr. Wright.”

  “You already said that. Why do you want him?”

  Frank started climbing out of the truck, and I told him to get back in. I didn’t like how this was headed.

  “He has been a thorn in the backside of the U.S. government for decades now. He is a subversive.”

  This made no sense at all. I said, “The man designs buildings.”

  “He is also a pacifist,” said the driver. “More than half of his interns were conscientious objectors during World War II, and he makes no bones about talking down our government.”

  “That’s it. Yazzie, I am getting out of this truck right now.” Wright struggled to get over the stick shift.

  “No, just stay—”

  “If you want to take me to jail, do it,” he said as he slipped to the ground.

  “Mr. Wright, don’t.”

  I had no idea what legal standing Frank Lloyd Wright had, or did not have, on the rez. Pacifism was new territory for me. I don’t think it’s a word that exists in the Navajo language. Wright walked in front of their car and stood there, his wrists stuck straight out. He was plenty regal, I’ll say that.

  “Put the cuffs on me.”

  “Cuffs?” the driver said to him.

  “Yes. I am tired of you dogging my every move. Put me in jail or leave me alone.”

  “You need to change your attitude toward the U.S. government.”

  He moved closer to the Feds. He may have been shorter than those guys by a long shot, but he had it over on them. “When,” he said, “were you two idiot children born?”

  They stuttered and looked at each other.

  I was catching on. They’d been told to harass Wright, intimidate him, but had no authority to arrest him.

  “Never mind. Apparently it’s too difficult for you to remember. I was born just after the Civil War. My parents were immigrants from Wales. I love this country, and I cannot abide war. Little is honorable about taking care of our homeland anymore. It’s all about business. By the way, you aren’t my good guys, and you never will be. So,” Wright said, “make up your mind. Take me in or leave me alone.”

  “Until you change your attitude, we’re watching you.”

  “They are mad dogs,” Wright said to the sky.

 
; “We’ve noticed that a time or two,” said my grandfather. Then he spoke with me in Navajo again for the benefit of the Feds. This time he really cranked it up.

  “What? What is he saying?” said the passenger, the guy who’d rolled into the sage, and had just pulled himself together after being flung at the car door.

  “The old warrior thinks we ought to keep you,” I said. “Wright is our friend, and as long as you’re going to be assaulting us, he figures we may as well take prisoners.”

  They elbowed each other, whispered back and forth, shook their heads, and the driver finally spoke up.

  “We’ll leave for now.”

  They got in the Pontiac and I slammed their doors.

  “We’ll follow you south toward the main highway for a ways,” I said. “Wouldn’t want you to get hit by flaming arrows.”

  I walked to the truck with Mr. Wright and helped him climb in. Then I stood tall and leaned against my door, cowboy boots crossed at the ankles. Grandpa stood next to me. He was wearing knee-high moccasins. Mr. Wright, thank God, stayed put and kept quiet. They backed up their government-issue car, turned southeast toward Grants and Albuquerque, waiting for us to follow them. We hung back a little so as not to eat their dust.

  After about seven miles, I flipped a U-turn and traveled north again. I was shaking like I’d had too much coffee. Grandfather lit up a cigarette. He’d found an old pack in the glove compartment.

  I started to speak.

  “Don’t say anything,” he said. “I want a cigarette. One damned Lucky Strike is not going to give me another stroke.”

  Mr. Wright was a man who had done some superb things and some stupid things. No disrespect intended, but I was pissed as hell at him. I had served in the military, and I didn’t have any beef with the U.S. government. My grandfather did, on general principle. But no one in their right mind wants to be on the FBI’s radar, and that included me.

  Wright spoke. “Yazzie, I have a few words to say.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Again, I’m in the position of owing you an apology. I admire you tremendously.”

  That didn’t grease my wheels. “Mr. Wright,” I said, “how the hell did you manage to make the FBI so mad that they made the mistake of following you right into the middle of nowhere? Onto the reservation, no less?”

  He looked straight ahead as if my voice were wind whistling through the window. He coughed, small, into his hands. “I disagree with them.”

  I sat, couldn’t think of a word to say. Not one.

  “I have voiced my opinions loudly.”

  I had nowhere to go with this.

  “Yazzie, you can sit without words longer than anyone I’ve ever met,” he said.

  I’d let him fill the silence. He couldn’t do without sound for long.

  “Do you believe we truly have a government of and by and for the people? I think we’ve lost that or soon will.”

  I sort of agreed with Wright on that point. Sometimes the government has been my friend, also the friend of many of my relatives. A lot of times they interfered in stupid ways. A long time ago they’d been enemies. But the past was gone. Even if they did herd people on my mom’s side of the family around like livestock, it didn’t make me angry. Not my mother, either, and she is 100 percent Navajo. It infuriated my grandfather and still does.

  “Mr. Wright,” I said, “I respect your viewpoint, but you need to reel it in, especially while it’s not just your own safety that’s at stake.”

  “Agreed.”

  “My grandfather and I want no part of your fight with the U.S. government.”

  “Understood.”

  My grandfather slung his arm across the bench seat of the cab and drilled me with that voice. “Hey, do you think we’re now on the list of people who are enemies of the state? Genuine subversives?”

  “You wish,” I said. But I was glad we hadn’t given our names. I’d heard about the lists they were putting together.

  “Are we going back to your Santa Fe home,” Mr. Wright said, “or are we going straight to Taliesin West?”

  He knew the answer, but he’d gotten confused. The hopeful tone in his voice was kind of pathetic, and I was still rolling through my options.

  “I would like to know my destination,” he said, “and it seems I’m at your mercy.”

  Oh, hell. As long as I was on this horse, I was going to ride it out. I got into this rodeo called Mr. Wright because of the purse at the end and the once-in-a-lifetime rides.

  “I’ll take care of you. You’re going into the boonies. That’s enough for now.”

  “Yazzie,” my grandfather said, “you’ve got to admire someone who has aggravated the entire federal government. That’s quite an accomplishment.”

  I shot him a look.

  “Mr. Wright,” I said, “I would like to have heard about the FBI when you were running down your list of enemies.”

  “Look around you,” he said. “How many acres does it take to graze cattle here?”

  “Twenty-five acres per cow. About.”

  “It takes about a square yard in Wisconsin. Difference between white land and Indian land. So you might know the government is no friend of yours either.”

  Grandfather had tossed his smoke out the window and was lighting up another.

  “Hey, do I have to throw that old pack away?” I said.

  “No, it’s just that being with Frank makes me feel young again, almost like an outlaw. Alive. I like it.”

  Fourteen

  Only another forty miles of driving with the two nineteenth-century juvenile delinquents, and we’d hit Sam Hambler’s trading post.

  I had planks and a shovel in the bed of the truck in case we needed to dig out. August monsoons had been heavy, and the air hadn’t blown the earth around enough to fill in the gaps. The Hamblers had a few small cottages in the back for guests. Trading season was about over, so they’d have room to put us up. I was looking forward to quiet time and good talk with old man Hambler by his fire. He was a normal guy, exactly what I needed.

  He’d installed a Delco generator, so there was a refrigerator going and he’d have cold beer. Like I said, I don’t take to drink. But it’s not every day I toss FBI agents around and pull a gun on them.

  I had backtracked and turned up the road that heads through the Chuska Valley to his trading post. A familiar and raggedy-worn road to Indian people. I had it in my mind to keep as far inside Indian land as I could.

  Around here, roads are measured by time, not distance. Forty miles on Route 66 is not the same as forty miles on any Indian Route. And when you’re on a one-track road making stops to dig out, that’s time automatically figured in.

  I topped off the oil and water the one chance I got. We were doing fine on gas. Late afternoon, and it was getting chilly. I pulled over, we relieved ourselves, and I took the blankets out of the back of the truck, tucking them around my grandfather and Mr. Wright. They both resisted, and they were both glad of the warmth.

  Silence stretched across the hills and rippled into the ruts of the road for over an hour. It had relaxed into a comfortable silence. I wasn’t thinking about that beer anymore, and Grandpa had stopped smoking stale Luckies.

  It was him that broke the silence. His voice was gentle and strong.

  “Yazzie, you’ve had several chances, and several reasons, to leave this job of taking care of Mr. Wright.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “You decided to stay on. I respect that—it’s the decision of a good man. But I have a few words to say about it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He turned to Wright. “Frank,” my grandfather said, “I did not survive a stroke, and I did not work like hell to recover from it, so that I could die because of some predicament of yours.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to.”

  “I’m enjoying this part of my life, and I want to keep enjoying it.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “You are pur
e genius, you have a grand life, but the same is true for me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Yazzie has a child on the way. This child will have a father, something my grandson never had.”

  I looked at my grandfather. Was he making this up?

  He caught my look. “Believe me, Iris is going to have a baby. I raised you without a father, and I need you alive. I haven’t got the juice to raise another boy, okay?”

  “You’re dead wrong on this one.”

  “I’m not sure she knows yet,” Grandpa said to me.

  “But you do?”

  “One hundred percent sure.”

  “Yazzie, your grandfather’s right.” That was Mr. Wright. “Your grandfather and I—”

  I said, “After you get to be a certain age, and birth and death have walked together through all the roads of your life?”

  They looked at each other. “You know,” they said with one voice.

  I said, “You two could drive a person around the bend, that’s what I know.”

  Grandpa said, “That hope is what keeps me going.”

  Mr. Wright laughed and spewed out, “Hey, take a long walk off a short pier!”

  I took my eye off the road for a minute. Grandpa and I both looked at him as if he had a few screws loose.

  “I heard one of the students say it. The image stuck with me,” he said, “and I’ve been waiting for a chance to say it.”

  “And I was the one who had a stroke.”

  Fifteen

  We pulled into Hambler’s trading post just as it was coming on dusk. Old man Hambler was sweeping off the porch, and we could smell dinner cooking. It was the cozy feel of a hidden home and spices and sage—many things I missed when in Santa Fe.

  I pulled up to the gas pump and filled her up so we’d be ready to hit the road bright and early. Also filled my cans of oil and water. Not too much radiator trouble this time of year, but you want to avoid car trouble—too much distance between here, there, and anywhere else.

  My grandfather and Mr. Wright got out, stretched their legs, yawned and arched their backs like a couple of old lions. We waited to be invited inside, to sit by the fire, to eat.