by Gwen Florio
Had she stuck with the Baltimore newspaper’s assignment of a stateside post once the Kabul bureau was shuttered, she still might have ended up in Window Rock this very day. Might have talked her way out of that stupid suburban job the paper offered her and into one that at least let her roam the country, if no longer the world. She felt a tug of longing so sharp she bent her head toward her knees.
Maybe, she thought as she studied the weave of faded denim across her thighs, she should try to snag herself a freelance assignment on the bombings, possibly to one of the foreign news services like Agence France-Presse. She didn’t dare approach an American outfit. A year earlier, she’d written a story from Wyoming for a national website, but it ended badly when Lola herself became part of the story in the showdown that had threatened Margaret’s safety. The memory tripped the old fearfulness, set her heart to hammering, and forced the air from her lungs. Around her, people turned. Lola faked a cough, braced her hands on her thighs, and talked sense to herself.
She’d been alone on that story, alone but for her daughter and a vulnerable, traumatized friend. Not surrounded, as the journalists were here, by dozens of her own kind. Safety in numbers, the mantra that had governed her years in Kabul. She took an experimental breath. It came easier. Her heart steadied, lub-dubbing away like an old reliable horse clopping along a familiar route, no surprises to send it shying and skittering across the track. A familiar seduction whispered. The bombings on the Navajo Nation were a story, a big one, the kind of story she used to own. The notion like a sweet hot breath against her ear: Like riding a bicycle. You could do this one with your eyes shut.
The story could not possibly involve Margaret in any way. Just a few phone calls on Lola’s part, maybe a couple of in-person interviews. Something to fill the time, given that they were going to hang around for a while. Not to mention some extra money besides. Lola’s salary at the Express was a fraction of what it had been at the Baltimore newspaper, and Charlie, like all local government employees, was woefully underpaid.
Charlie. His hand tightened on hers. She saw him following her gaze, his own quizzical and concerned. Too late, she looked away.
“You miss it.”
The compassion in his voice startled her. For a very long time after Wyoming, there’d been only anger. She’d spoken brave defiant words then, had insisted to him that her work as a journalist defined her as much as her role as Margaret’s mother. She wouldn’t give it up, she told him. But then the nightmares started, the face of the man who’d threatened her taunting her in her sleep. And, too, Margaret’s own face, distorted in terror. So she’d given up the big stories after all, easy enough to do in Magpie, and gradually the dreams had faded. She’d never talked to Charlie about them.
Now he awaited a reply. The room’s lowering volume saved her. The meeting was about to begin.
SEVENTEEN
The man on the other side of Kerns stood. “Tribal president,” Naomi whispered.
“Shik’éí dóó shidine’é,” he said.
“My family. My people,” Naomi translated, leaning close. Once again, Lola inhaled Mary Alice’s perfume. Her heart clenched, reminding her that no matter how many years passed, she’d never stop missing her friend. She forced herself to pay attention to Naomi’s whispered, disjointed translation.
“Our treasured elder murdered … and now another man, a tribal member, supporting his extended family by driving truck for the mine … Our people, our nation, are under attack.”
He spoke on. The silence in the room was absolute. Even the children sat motionless. Lola wondered if they understood Navajo. Margaret had the glazed look she hid behind on the rare occasions that demanded the family’s presence in church. Lola couldn’t tell if Juliana was paying attention. The girl pressed her face against Thomas’s shoulder and clung with both hands to his left arm. Good thing Thomas was right-handed, Lola thought as he continued to fill pages of his pad with notes.
The silence deepened. Lola looked back toward the dais. The tribal president sat. Kerns rose and addressed him. “My friend.”
A translator leaned toward a microphone, maintaining the meeting’s Diné-language integrity. “Shi’kis.”
Thomas’s pen scratched across the pad. Lola’s fingers itched for pen and paper of her own. She slid her phone from her pocket, sat it on her knee, and hit the record app in hopes that it would preserve at least some of the speechifying.
“We at Conrad Coal grieve with you for your losses.” Pause for translation.
“Because of course they are our losses, too.”
Lola watched the room as he spoke. With each sentence, faces hardened into pitiless lines, the younger people reacting to the English, the elders’ expressions shading darker with each new translation.
“Ben Yazzie.” The room stirred. “Everyone who worked at the mine drove past his signs every day. Most of us stopped to see those dinosaur tracks at one time or another.
“And Daniel Tsosie.” Small sounds of dismay again flowed along the benches. “He was one of ours, as well as yours.”
The truck driver, Lola thought. She wondered why Kerns kept drawing the distinction between yours and ours. Unnecessarily divisive, she thought. “Man needs a better PR pro,” she murmured to Charlie, only to attract a flash of Naomi’s spider-eye. She pressed her lips together lest more words escape.
“One of our Conrad Coal family, just like hundreds of other members of your tribes,” Kerns went on. “I don’t have to remind you that the mine is the largest employer on the reservation. Both reservations.”
Lola winced at the clumsiness of it all. Whatever Kerns was trying to say, his words only underscored the sense that the tribes owed their financial well-being, such as it was, to this whiteman-owned enterprise.
“I think we”—Lola sighed in relief as Kerns belatedly turned to inclusiveness—“need to avoid a rush to judgment.” Too soon, she thought as her spine stiffened. In her experience, the words rush to judgment usually preceded some world-class ass-covering. “Two terrible things have happened,” Kerns stated unnecessarily. “One, the tragedy that befell Mr. Yazzie. We don’t know the cause. And the second, ah, incident could have been anything. A truck malfunction, perhaps.”
“Bullshit!” Lola’s exclamation was, thankfully, covered by the collective rustle and murmuring of a very large and crowded room. She’d never seen the actual moment of a roadside bombing in Afghanistan, but she’d viewed the immediate aftermath enough times to know that the stricken vehicles looked exactly like the front-page photo of the mangled remains of the Conrad Coal truck. Also, in a room full of Indian people, who proportionally had the highest representation of any ethnic group in the armed forces, she’d bet there was more than one person who’d witnessed such bombings firsthand, maybe even suffered terrible wounds as a result. Kerns, she thought, had picked the wrong place to float his crap theory.
Amid the hubbub, the cop rose and introduced himself as Special Agent Fred Jardine. Lola had been right that he was from the FBI. By the way he beckoned the Navajo officer beside him to stand also, Lola deduced he’d worked on the rez for a while. Kerns could take lessons from this guy, she thought as the two lawmen gave the necessarily bland legal description of their efforts to track down the perpetrator or perpetrators—“in the event, of course,” Jardine said with a grim nod toward Kerns, “that the second incident turns out to be more than a malfunction.” He pointed with his chin—another small but welcome sign of cultural sensitivity—to someone in the audience. “You have a question?”
The woman who rose to speak was so tiny that her head barely topped those of people who remained sitting. She wore traditional dress. Lola wondered at the weight of all that fabric and wondered how the style had evolved. It looked hot. Then she remembered her time in Afghanistan, where she had encountered a sun so cruel that the only defense against it was to put on more clothes, layer upon layer bet
ween its rays and easily burned flesh, rather than strip down to the barest essentials. As the woman collected herself, the resentment that had permeated the room after Kerns’s speech leached away, replaced by a sizzling air of expectation.
Lola jumped when the woman finally spoke, so firm and self-assured was the voice that issued from such a small person. She spoke first in Diné and then translated her own words, sentence by sentence. “My question is for the man from the mine.”
She didn’t use his name, Lola noted, even though she had to know it. The mine, as he had so thoughtlessly just pointed out, probably employed some of her relatives.
Fred Jardine sat down with palpable relief, proportionate to Kerns’s obvious discomfort as he stood again.
“That mine there.” The woman’s tone was severe, accusatory. Her eyes, sparkling black within the collapsed foundations of a face that had endured decades of harsh sun and scouring wind, shone with intelligence and that most dangerous of weapons, humor. Lola guessed it would be a foolish man who underestimated her. She also guessed the woman had run across a lot of foolish men in her life, one of whom visibly sweated as he now confronted her.
“Conrad Coal, you mean.” Kerns, so cool and composed moments earlier, blotted his high forehead with a snowy handkerchief. Lola squinted and gave an audible snort, drawing another venomous glance from Naomi. Was that a monogram? All the men she knew used bandanas and called it good.
“I know what I mean.”
Chuckles ran around the room. Even Naomi’s glare softened.
“No mine, no troubles,” the woman added. “Nobody killing people no more. No reason if the mine is not here.” She paused.
“Now, Betty. Mrs. Begay.”
Lola’s eyebrows shot up. The fact that Kerns knew the woman’s name, and that he’d used it—switching quickly from the familiar to the formal—when she’d so deliberately snubbed him, indicated the woman’s stature went beyond even the usual respect accorded an elder.
“The mine is here to stay.” Kerns’s tone, all hearty indulgence, was dropped from the translation. “And as we’ve just noted, the second incident may very well have been a tragic accident.”
“Ac-ci-dent.” Mrs. Begay drew the word out, let it linger awhile before speaking again. “Same thing applies. No mine, no more accidents. You go away. Nobody else dies.”
The response crackled through the crowd, not a chuckle, not given the subject matter, but appreciative nonetheless. Lola studied people’s faces and reassessed. Some discomfort there, most apparent among the men but in some women, too. Mine employees and their families, Lola figured, torn between their loyalties to their people and their land—the two inseparable, after all—and the knowledge that, should the mine vanish tomorrow, they’d be shit out of luck on the job front. One of them, a stocky fellow in his thirties, shuffled to his feet, even as the woman sitting with him tried to tug him back into his chair. She held an infant to her breast. Two other children squirmed in the seats to either side of the couple.
The man ducked his head toward Betty Begay in shamed acknowledgment of the fact that he was about to contradict an elder. “The, ah, the thing is.”
“Yes, Rich?” Again, Lola noted that Kerns knew the man. Probably a mine worker, although he lacked the subtle air of authority that would have marked him as a supervisor. Unusual, then, she thought, that someone so highly placed as Kerns would be on a first-name basis with him.
“The thing is, if these things keep happening, what happens to people’s jobs? What if, ah … ” The man paused, then forced the word in a rush. “What if something hits the mine itself? What if the mine has to … shut down?”
Kerns flung his arms out in approval. Lola thought that if Rich had been any closer, instead of deep within the crowd, Kerns would have enfolded him in a hug. She wondered if Rich’s next paycheck would contain a little extra something, or if that deal had already been made under the table. The latter, she guessed.
“Exactly, Rich,” Kerns said. “What if the mine has to shut down?” Although Rich had practically whispered the words, Kerns nearly shouted them, adding a layer of fearful certainty. “How many people will be out of work? How many children will have nothing to eat? How many car loans will go unpaid?”
“And if mine stays open?” Betty Begay again, the spark in her eyes flashing anger now instead of humor. “How many people die?”
Rich sank into his seat as Betty’s accusations continued. “How much more water poisoned? How much more ash from the sky?”
Kerns ran his finger around the inside of his collar, twisting his neck like a man trying to wiggle out of a noose. “Any other questions?” No one spoke.
Mrs. Begay, summarily dismissed, remained standing anyway, through the meeting’s formal ending by the tribal chairman, even as people began to file from the room. She swept the rows with her gaze as people retreated. Her eyes stopped at Lola, took in Charlie and Margaret, and noted their proximity to Naomi and Edgar. She nodded a greeting, then turned and followed the others toward the door. The skinny white guy Lola had noticed earlier hurried after her, apologizing his way through the crowd.
Lola curled her fingers around the edge of her seat, anchoring herself against a fierce impulse to follow Mrs. Begay outside, to take her by her twiglike arm, to gently steer her away from the others to a place where she could ask all the questions bursting from her brain.
The woman’s words echoed. You go away. Nobody else dies.
With their implied promise: Stay and more will die.
Lola wanted, badly, to find out why Mrs. Begay was so very sure about that.
“What’s Betty Begay’s story?”
Lola twirled pasta around her fork, waiting for Charlie to stiffen at the word story, at any hint that she might find a way, no matter how unlikely, to work on a newspaper article during their honeymoon. But he leaned over his own plate of pasta and echoed Lola’s question. “I was wondering the same thing. Who is she?”
After the meeting, Charlie and Lola had met Edgar and Naomi, along with Thomas and the girls, at an Italian restaurant in nearby Gallup, just over the state line in New Mexico. “After all,” Edgar said, referring to the main fare in the tourism-focused restaurants in the rez towns, “you can only eat so many Navajo tacos.” Lola didn’t necessarily agree. Navajo tacos heaped spicy meat atop fry bread, a lard-and-carb bit of heaven forbidden in their household but guiltily permissible on vacation, when Lola ordered it at every opportunity.
A trompe l’oleil harborscape covered one wall of Trattoria Amalfi, its depiction of fishing boats and waves lapping at a beach incongruous given the window view of rocky bluffs scoured bare by the wind. A mishmash of a fountain, with a miniature Michelangelo’s David poised in seashell, burbled in the center of the room. In all her years in Montana, Lola didn’t think she’d seen a single fountain. In the past few days, she’d seen two. A bulwark against the desert, she supposed, the audible trickle a soothing denial of reality.
“Betty Begay,” Naomi said now. She and Thomas traded long looks. “I guess you could say she’s our hero.”
Lola sensed another wrenching tale. She got one. Betty Begay grew up tending sheep on the mesa, as had her parents and their parents and grandparents before. But for the addition of motorized vehicles, it was a way of life virtually unchanged for centuries. No electricity or plumbing. Nearby springs provided adequate fresh water, given their sparing use by the people. As Naomi sketched the outlines of Betty’s life, Lola thought back to the rural villages she’d visited in Afghanistan, so steeped in ancient times that the appearance, say, of someone on a bicycle jolted her with its reminder of modernity.
“Not a lavish life,” Naomi said. “Nothing like ours. But it was enough. Sometimes I wonder if we’d all have been better off if we’d just stayed that way.” Edgar paid sudden close attention to his eggplant Parmesan.
“But we couldn’
t stay that way.” Thomas chased a meatball around his plate, stabbing at it with furious concentration. “The mine made us move.”
“As we told you the other night,” Naomi said, “they relocated people. Promised them all sorts of things—houses, wells, new corrals for their sheep—then never followed through.”
Thomas sliced his meatball into quarters and swallowed them fast, one after the other. “Betty, though. She was smart enough not to go anywhere.”
Naomi took up the tale again. Betty lived just far enough away from the mine site that her hogan—she still lived traditionally—was beyond its borders. Still, the mine wanted her gone, holding out ever-increasing incentives over the years.
“Like what?” Lola asked. “What is there beyond the house and the rest of it?”
Naomi rubbed her fingers together. “Money. The only thing the whiteman understands.”
Lola squirmed, again feeling that impulse to hide her hands, her face, with their damning light skin.
Thomas’s laugh was short and sharp. “They don’t understand that money is meaningless to her. She already has her sheep, her home, her water, everything she needs. What else would she buy?”
Naomi tag-teamed again. “So they started taking things away. Even though they might not have realized what they were doing.”
Lola poked at her salad, a few leaves of wilted iceberg lettuce topped by pale tomato wedges and mushroom slices going black and curled around the edges. She picked up a supermarket crouton in her fingers, popped it into her mouth, and crunched. “What things?”
