by Gwen Florio
He will go, Lola noted. He will come back and work for the tribe. She hoped Thomas was on board with the program.
As Naomi spoke, she pulled things from the refrigerator, assembling the meal with an efficiency Lola envied. She peeled plastic wrap from a bowl of pasta salad heavy on vegetables and light on dressing. Lola ran her hands, useless, unoccupied, over the counter’s polished moss-green surface. Granite? She realized that she wouldn’t know.
“Refill on that?” Naomi lifted her chin towards Lola’s lemonade glass.
“Sure.”
Naomi refilled her own glass as well. She glanced over her shoulder and took from the cupboard a large bottle of clear liquid, hand-labeled as almond flavoring.
“I didn’t know that came so big,” said Lola. She was pretty sure that somewhere in her own cupboards, among all the other unused things, she had some almond flavoring, albeit about a quarter of the size of the bottle in Naomi’s hand. She wondered if she should be putting almond in more things—especially given that she’d never put it in anything at all.
“It doesn’t.” Naomi flashed a conspiratorial grin and waved the open bottle under Lola’s nose—whatever was in it wasn’t almond—and then gestured toward the window, where the sky glowed orange and gold, a final burst of glory before the sun slid behind the rampart of butte. “Sun’s over the yardarm, I’d say.” A slug of “almond” went into her lemonade. “Lola?”
Lola thought of the tension between the brothers, of the girls on the ground, of the bomber possibly lurking somewhere on the vast reservation. She could have kissed Naomi for her offer. She held out her glass.
“Between us,” said Naomi.
“Definitely.” Lola filed that away for future reference, too.
Naomi called to Edgar and handed him a pan of lamb kabobs marinating in olive oil and fragrant herbs. Lola held her breath as he brushed past her in the kitchen, even though she probably didn’t need to. She was pretty sure the “almond” was vodka, less incriminating than gin.
“You can grill these now,” Naomi said to him. “From our garden,” she told Lola. “The herbs, the vegetables, all of it. Edgar built raised beds and rigged up a drip irrigation system. And the lamb is from our own sheep. My family ran them on the mesa until—” Her face darkened.
“Until?” Lola prompted.
“Let’s wait until dinner. Or after, when the girls have gone to bed.”
Lola picked up the bowl of pasta salad and carried it across the kitchen. She bumped the door open with her hip and turned toward the shade house. The sun already was gone. Dusk shrouded the yard. Movement caught her eye, a blur of gray against the dun of desert. She froze and waited. Sure enough, a coyote trotted from behind a rock. It stopped and turned toward her. Then it stood on its hind legs, barely visible in the fast-deepening gloom. Lola gasped and stepped back. The salad bowl tilted in her hands. She checked to make sure none had spilled. When she looked up again, the coyote was gone.
Silence, broken only by the hiss of flames in the fireplace, fell over the table after the girls departed. With full nightfall, the shade house grew cool and then cold, surprisingly fast. Chairs scraped across the flagstones as people dragged them from the table to the fire, which provided the only light. The wavering flames threw faces into high relief and deep shadow, exaggerating dominant features. Charlie looked fiercer, Edgar haughtier, Naomi lovelier. Lola didn’t want to think what she looked like. Haggard, she imagined. Thomas sat apart from the rest, alone in the shadows. The fountain’s murmur, subsumed during the evening’s conversation, asserted itself. Lola remarked upon it.
“Like the creek at home,” Edgar said to Charlie. Crick. “Remember how Mom always yelled at us? ‘You boys keep away from that crick.’”
Affection softened Charlie’s voice. “Told us the Under Water People would get us, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, told us the herons were Boy Eaters. That they’d spear us with those long beaks and roast us over a hot fire.”
“No!” Lola and Naomi chorused.
“Yes,” Edgar said. “And not just at the creek. There was water everywhere at home.” Lola saw the motion that was Charlie’s nod. Finally, the brothers, whatever strain had kept them apart for so long, were in sync, united by memory. “Sloughs, the Two Medicine River, all the lakes in Glacier,” Edgar went on. The Blackfeet Reservation, bumped up against Glacier National Park, had even encompassed it at one point until whitemen decided they knew best how to manage the land—and make a pretty penny from tourism, too—where tribes had roamed from time immemorial.
“You miss it.” The way Charlie said it, it wasn’t a question.
“Be crazy not to. All that water, so clear and cold and good. And not just the water itself. The grass, tender and green in the spring before summer fries it. And the air. It’s softer back home. Doesn’t attack you the way it does here, sucking you dry. And the way the sage smells after rain.”
“The best,” said Charlie. He and Lola each liked to break off bits of sagebrush, crushing the leaves in their palms, holding their hands to their faces, breathing in. If water were nearby, Charlie would dip sage sprigs into it, intensifying the scent still more.
“Speaking of home,” Lola said. “I saw something tonight that reminded me of Montana.”
Charlie and Edgar looked into the darkness beyond the shade house, as though they could still see the distinctly un-Montana-like rock formations. “What’s that?”
“A coyote.”
Charlie shot her a warning look that Lola couldn’t interpret. Naomi and Edgar locked eyes for a moment. Thomas made a choking noise.
Lola soldiered on. “It was so strange. It stood up on its hind legs. I’ve never seen one do that before.”
Naomi bent in a spasm of coughing. Edgar pounded her back. “You were mistaken,” he said. Not allowing for any possibility that maybe she wasn’t.
Naomi rose and ran to the kitchen. Lola and Charlie followed in time to see her scoop something from a container on the counter. Naomi opened the door and looked at Lola. “Where was he?”
Lola pointed with her chin. Naomi stepped into the yard and sprinkled something on the ground. “Corn pollen,” she said as she brushed past Lola on her way back to the shade house.
Charlie put his hand to Lola’s arm to hold her a moment in the kitchen. “Coyote’s a trickster here, just like at home, but he can be bad luck, too. He likes to set the world on fire.”
Lola dropped her head in her hands. Yet another reminder of her whiteness. Gratitude washed through her when, with everyone back in the shade house, Naomi returned to the subject of Charlie and Edgar’s homeland.
“At least it’s still there, your creek.” The words sliced knifelike through the conversation, all the good feeling leaking away like blood from a wound not yet recognized as mortal. “Your creeks, your lakes.” She threw Edgar’s own words back at him. “All clear and cold and good. You can still drink it. And you can go back there. Spare me your nostalgia.”
Thomas rose from his chair and joined their circle, crouching beside her. The firelight flickered across his face. “It’s okay,” he said. “He loves his home just as much as we loved—still love—ours.”
“You see,” Edgar said, “Naomi and Thomas, they’re from the mesa.”
Lola didn’t see, and said as much.
So Naomi told her.
NINE
Both the Navajo and Hopi lived on the mesa, the Hopi clustered in their traditional high-rise adobe dwellings to the south, the Navajo scattered about, a few still in hogans but most in the trailers and BIA bungalows that replaced them, tending sheep. Both groups depended on the profusion of springs that seeped from the desert rock, the Hopi for their ingeniously irrigated agricultural plots, the Navajo to water their sheep. And, of course, all the people for drinking water.
“It was so for centuries. Millennia,” Naomi said, wo
rds easing into a singsong. Lola thought of the elders at home reciting Blackfeet history, passing it down among the generations, rhythm and beauty given equal weight with facts in their choice of words. The fire flared and receded, underscoring the cadence of the words.
“The whitemen at first found no value in the land. Too high, too dry. If the Indian people wanted to scratch a living from its surface, then let them. The whitemen laughed and went away.” She paused and drew a long breath. A piñon log collapsed into radiant coals, throwing out a shower of sparks along with its beguiling fragrance.
“But they came back,” she whispered. Thomas took her hands. She bent her head to his, the circle of their bodies forming a sort of sculpture, graven, unmoving, until the fire’s glow highlighted the tears sliding down Naomi’s cheeks.
“But they came back,” Thomas echoed. “And this time they looked below the surface. They peeled it back with their giant machines, machines larger than even the dinosaurs that roamed the land without destroying it. Their machines bit into the earth, into the black rock beneath.”
“Coal,” Lola breathed.
“The more they took, the hungrier they became. And to take even more, they needed water.”
Naomi freed her hands from Thomas’s grip and pushed herself up from her chair. Indian people normally spoke in low, quiet tones, almost a whisper, which made Lola, however she tried to match it, feel loud and unmannerly in comparison. Now Naomi’s voice rose to a white level, a shout by Indian standards, a raw, ragged thing. “The springs dried up. The water that was left became brackish. Crops withered. Sheep sickened and died. Babies, too. Our precious children. No longer did they need bullets to kill us.”
Thomas unbent himself to stand beside her and again took up the narrative. He was taller than Naomi and his presence beside her had a visible calming effect, her rigid shoulders relaxing by millimeters, fists unclenching. “But the people persisted. They drove hundreds of miles every week to the towns, bringing back clean water. Tried to hold on. Until—”
The silence lengthened liked a stretched rubber band, the tension unbearable with the knowledge that the pain to follow would be worse. Lola held out as long as she could. “Until?”
“Until the whitemen went after the people, too.” Naomi again, her voice back to normal, if anything so layered with anguish could be considered normal. “Ordered them to leave the lands that were the pathetic remnant they were allotted as reservations.”
Lola struggled to put it into some sort of historical context. Tribes all around the country were only a few generations removed from the genocide that had accompanied the arrival of Europeans. Even so, Naomi and Thomas’s torment seemed unusually intense. “They tried to move your grandparents? Your great-grandparents?”
“Not my grandparents. My parents! Me! I was born on the mesa. I lived there until I was a teenager. Thomas was a toddler, but still he remembers.”
“My grandparents wouldn’t leave,” Thomas said. “We went to visit them there. All alone in a hogan, no electricity, no plumbing, hanging on in the old way. We’d bring them water, food, driving in at night with no lights so the whitemen wouldn’t get us for aiding and abetting the trespassers.”
“The land where they’d lived forever. Trespassers.” Naomi again.
Lola couldn’t make sense of this new information. The history of the reservations was one of relentless betrayal. In recent decades, though, tribes had turned whitemen’s weapons back on them, wielding the law as a far more effective defense than guns had ever been. And when white lawyers let them down, they sent their own young people to faraway law schools, trusting that they’d come back and advocate on behalf of the tribe. Edgar and Naomi would have been among that first wave, Lola knew, Naomi with her work for the tribal courts and Edgar on the corporate front, making sure the tribe, even though its people were not his own, got the money coming to it from the companies investing in its resources.
“How could this happen?” she asked. “Surely there were lawsuits. Congressional hearings.”
“Of course there were. And in most cases, they’d have been effective.” Edgar spoke quickly, quietly, a foil to the raw emotion emanating from Naomi and Thomas. “But this is Conrad Coal.”
Lola had heard of it before, vaguely. One of those big corporations whose names showed up regularly in headlines on the financial pages she never really read. “I take it they have money?”
“More than God. ExxonMobil type money. Walmart money. Aramco money. They’re not just national but international.”
“Oh, no.” No matter how many smart Indian lawyers the tribes threw at the case, no matter how many high-priced white lobbyists they hired in Washington, they’d be outmatched. That kind of money trumped everything else, every time. Lola had covered too many lawsuits and even criminal cases that dragged on forever, endless waves of appeals financed by limitless bank accounts, thousand-dollar-an-hour corporate lawyers with their buttery leather briefcases and retinues of paralegals and assistants arrayed against local prosecutors, in cheap scuffed shoes, trying to do justice to the biggest cases of their lives without shorting the rest of their crushing caseloads.
“Like the Russians,” Lola murmured.
“Pardon?”
“Something my father always said. The reason nobody could ever conquer Russia. Not Napoleon, not the Germans. Because the Russians had an endless supply of bodies to throw at invaders. Each time a row of them was mowed down, another row popped up to take its place. They could lose millions and millions and still have millions more left. Of course, nowadays I suppose that theory applies to the Chinese. And to dollars, of course. These companies have millions.”
“Billions,” Edgar corrected her. “Many, many billions.”
“You’re so screwed,” Lola blurted. She couldn’t figure out a tactful way to voice her question, so she made it a simple statement. “But you work for the mine.” She thought she was beginning to understand the strain between Edgar and his wife.
Naomi moved closer to the fire. She wrapped her arms around her torso, clad in its thin layer of silk, and disabused Lola of her theory. “It was my idea,” she said, as Edgar nodded agreement. “I thought it would be a good idea to have somebody on the inside.”
Lola was reminded of how Naomi seemed to have Thomas’s career planned out. It appeared she’d likewise dictated her husband’s path. She wondered if the considerable salary Edgar almost certainly pulled down from the mine had played into Naomi’s recommendation.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Naomi added, “given how Conrad Coal doesn’t fight fair. But now it looks as though somebody’s decided we shouldn’t either.”
Maybe it was the contrast between the dancing shadows thrown by the flames and the moonlit desert beyond, the landscape edged in hard bright lines of black and white, everything a little weird, out of kilter. Lola’s blood hummed in her veins. The air felt supercharged, jittery with overactive ions, as though readying itself for a crashing storm still hours from its appearance on the horizon.
“You mean the bombing,” Lola said slowly. “Terrorism. Ecoterrorism, I guess they call it.”
“Not terrorism.” Lola didn’t know if it was a trick of the firelight, but Naomi seemed to be smiling. “War.”
TEN
One minute I’m driving up to Gar and Naomi’s, giving it some gas because I’m late. The next, people are hitting the dirt like I’m one of those World Trade Center bombers. Guess I’d better not make jokes about bombing, though. Not with what happened at the billboard.
There were two of them, Gar’s brother and his white wife. Oh, and their little girl. That’s three. Four if you count their three-legged dog. The brother, Charlie, doesn’t look anything like Gar. Taller and twice as wide. Not fat, though. Solid, the way a lot of our people are. Got that cop look to him. Alert. Makes you nervous, like you’ve done something wrong. Which I hav
en’t. Not intentionally. The wife, just about as tall as he is. On the scrawny side, kind of like Naomi, only Naomi wears it better, always dressed in something stylish. This woman looks like she throws her clothes on in the morning without taking a good look at what she’s pulled out of the drawer. Lots of curly hair, fair skin. She’s not doing well in the heat, you can tell. Neck all red and blotchy. I’ll give her credit for one thing: she’s not all Indianed up like a lot of white women who marry our men. No turquoise, no feather earrings. No T-shirt with an image of armed Apaches and a message reading Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492. Not a dream catcher in sight.
Their little girl, though. She’s all Indian except for her eyes. Those are light like her mother’s, and they drill right through you. Falling off Valentine knocked the wind out of her. But when I went to help her up, she gave me a look and told me she’d get herself up, thank you very much. They’re going to have their hands full with that one. Maybe they already do.
Naomi and Gar acted like it was all a big joke, the way that woman thought my car backfiring was a bomb, or shots, or something. I didn’t think it was so funny even though I laughed and went along. Their being here complicates an already complicated situation. Charlie’s a cop, like I said. Not a Navajo cop, but cops can’t help themselves. Something goes wrong, especially something like this, and their noses start twitching like dogs on the hunt. And it turns out the woman is a reporter. You ask me, that’s worse. Cops, at least they follow rules, most of them anyhow. You get crosswise with them once or twice, as I might have done—stupid kid stuff, no permanent record—and you know how they work. The way they see things. If something doesn’t fit, it’s not like they throw it away completely, but it goes off to one side, ready to be retrieved if something else comes up.
I haven’t dealt with reporters as much; not at all, really. But I’ve seen them at tribal council meetings, the way they sidle up to people afterward, hit them with questions nobody saw coming. Far as I can tell, they don’t have any rules. And, like cops, they’re always on the clock. This woman, Lola. The way she was asking questions after dinner last night, you’d think she was a hotshot for the Navajo Times. And that business about Coyote. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’d made it up just to mess with me. But how can she possibly know about Coyote?
