“And they never came?” Debbie whispered. “That’s so sad.”
“Nope, never did.”
They sat without speaking. Debbie saw a gentleness in Ellen’s face.
“You’re really a big softie,” she said and smiled.
Ellen returned the smile. “No,” she said. “I’m not.” The smile was gone.
11
When she first arrived in the city, a rental agent showed her an apartment in a complex, gushing on about all the people she could meet there.
“It’s incredible,” she said. “They have all these pool parties and movie nights. There’s lots of people you can meet, lots of things to do.”
“That’s not important to me,” Ellen told her. “I see people all day long. I don’t want to see anyone when I get home.”
She rented a furnished condo, two bedrooms. She kept the second one dark, using it only once for a visit from her mother.
“You like living like this?” her mother asked, staring around the sterile rooms.
“It’s okay.”
“Yes, well …”
That about described it. She did add the two artist-signed posters bought after too many glasses of free art show wine. The framing cost more than the posters. But, they pleased her. Her only concern was how much trouble it was going to be to move them when the time came, and it would.
She had nothing more than a nodding acquaintance with her neighbors. They included an older man from New York who seemed to be bleary-eyed drunk every day by noon, two homosexuals from Indiana, well-dressed and tight-assed, and a middle-aged man who appeared to have money but no job. The people living next to her spent almost all of their time traveling in an RV the size of a small house.
Some nights the clicking sound of high heels running down the concrete paths would bring her out of her bed. She would go to the window to see who ran in such a panicked steps and once caught a glimpse of a brown, red, and gold print dress as it curved out of sight around a corner of the building.
There had also been the incident with a skinny, rodent-faced renter who brought all of them out of their beds one summer night with the shouts of, “I’ve got a Three-Fifty-Seven in here. I’ve got a Three-Fifty-Seven, man, a Three-Fifty-Seven.”
He screamed it at the police in their light beige uniforms. Screamed it at the tenants who stood in their doorways or behind the dark windows of their condos.
“What the fuck, man. Can’t a man do what he wants to his own wife? You got a law against it or something?”
What he wanted to do and did do to his own wife was beat her up at two o’clock in the morning. When she tried to run from him, he caught her and dragged her by the hair across the grass and back into the condo.
The policemen spoke to him in whispers while he taunted them. Then, he saw her, or she thought he saw her, standing, arms crossed, in her doorway. That’s when she knew that sooner or later he was going to shoot her with the Three-Fifty-Seven, man, his Three-Fifty-Seven. He disappeared soon after with his wife and, she surmised, with the gun.
For the most part, it was a quiet complex where she only had to acknowledge fellow residents with a short smile and a nod. In the winter, it was dark by the time she got home from the station. In the summer, it was too hot to go outside even at night. For over a year, she came home to sit, read, drink wine, and watch television.
She tried to explain to Paige Allen why she didn’t go to parties.
“I can barely stand to work with those people. Why would I want to party with them?”
“Come on,” Paige insisted. “You really should. It’s a birthday party for Kim and you like Kim, don’t you?”
She did like Harding’s assistant. Kim was young and funny. She had none of his depression and horror-filled stare at yet one more newscast to fill.
“Okay, okay,” she agreed in defeat. “I’ll go.”
She dressed for the night, tight jeans and a white silk blouse. She knew she looked good. She liked the strong, sexy look of her short hair. That haircut cost her a job in San Diego.
The news director called and told her that, after seeing her tape, he only had one question.
“Is you hair long or short now?” he asked.
“Short,” she said. “The way it was in the prison escape story.”
“It really looked good long.”
“Yeah, when I first got here it was long.” She waited, knowing what was coming.
“So, are you growing it?”
“It does grow,” she replied.
“Well, yes.” He gave a little laugh.
“Are you saying the length of my hair has something to do with the job?” she asked evenly.
“Hey, we’re not talking jobs here. I was only wondering. You did look great with long hair.”
There had been no second call, no offer of a free flight out for an interview. The tape came back one month later without a note. She kept her hair short.
At the party, they all turned when she came in the front door. Everyone in the room filled with sitting, standing, talking people, glanced over or up. No one missed her entrance, as silent and as uncomfortable as it was.
The new weatherman from Across the Street stood completely still, his six feet two inches giving him enough height to be seen in a perfect pose with a slight smile, his eyes looking over and beyond her. They were all like that, all the other media faces, frozen in the moment. Even their breathing stopped for the few seconds needed for the self-recognition they knew would come.
Then, snap, the movement began again as they realized she was one of them. Only the weatherman from Across the Street held his pose. He could hear the sounds of someone else coming up the front walk.
She elbowed her way to the kitchen and the jugs of cheap white wine. A few people nodded and smiled. The network reporter from New York leaned against the refrigerator. He was in town using the Best’s editing equipment for a story on water use in the Southwest.
Even though he had been on story for three days, most of the footage he sent back to the network came from the station’s files. He did manage to cut the necessary stand-ups while out in dry fields and along the canals. He gave her a unblinking stare.
“So, what is it you do?” he asked, his dark eyes demanding.
“Report, mainly. Some documentary work.” She tried to smile and relax. “I get the mass murders, when we have them,” she said and laughed, to show him she understood how he might see that, giving a woman those types of stories. “They give me the good stuff.”
As she spoke, his eyes moved from her face to the other faces in the kitchen. She saw the movement, the checking out of the audience, the possibilities. Slowly, reluctantly, the eyes moved back to her.
“Yeah,” he said, “but what is it you really do?”
She left.
Back in her apartment, over a glass of scotch neat, she studied the poster on the wall in front of her. It was the drawing of a tough-looking woman wearing a black top hat, a cigarette hanging out of one side of her mouth. Orbs of neon-colored lights fanned out behind her. She knew she bought it because it reminded her of herself when she was younger. The colored lights, she thought, could be the lights of a circus or a stage.
12
By August, Debbie had her Indian story. A phone call from a newsroom friend in Albuquerque gave Ellen the lead and she passed it on.
“Radioactive leak or something up on the Navajo reservation. The thing is nobody is really covering it here. It was in New Mexico, close to the Arizona border. Might be a good story if they let you do it.”
“Don’t you want it?”
“Hell no. I’ve got enough to do.”
Debbie started making the calls.
“The thing is,” she told Ellen, “this dam broke up by this milling operation, something they do with uranium, and all this contaminated water ran into this river. But, this is what’s so interesting, the river runs into our state.” Her face was flushed with excitement.
“
That’s your hook,” Ellen told her. “Give it to George.”
“I can’t,” George told her. “Everybody is on vacation. Maybe in September.” He tried to turn away.
“September? It won’t be a story then. Nobody has it yet, George. Nobody. Please. I’ll set it up so we can get it in three days. Please. I’ll do some interviews here. I’ll do it on the weekend. Please, George.”
“Three days?”
“Three days, maybe four.”
“I don’t have anybody to send with you,” he kept trying. He couldn’t afford to lose a reporter and a photographer and a van for even one day.
“Clifford said he’d go. He said he’d do it on his days off.”
She wasn’t going to back down on this one. This was a good story and nobody in the state had it or seemed to care about it.
“Well,” the government man in Washington told her, “it would be different if somebody lived out there.”
“Do you believe that?” she shouted to the newsroom. “He said it would be different if somebody lived out there. I told him they did, Navajos.”
“Not the same,” someone called back.
It took her three days of phone calls made in the few minutes she had between stories to find out who was monitoring the spill, who was testing the river water, and where the tests were sent. She spoke with people across the country, in Dallas, San Francisco, Santa Fe. Even if they did know something about the spill into the little river, they seemed confused by her questions.
“We’ve told them not to use the water from the river for drinking or washing.”
“What about their sheep, their livestock?” Ellen asked Debbie.
“What about their livestock?” Debbie asked the people.
“They shouldn’t drink from the river either,” they told her.
“God,” said Ellen, “those bastards.”
*
“Man, I am glad to be getting out of town,” Clifford told Debbie as they drove the long hours it took to get to the reservation.
“We are really going to have to move fast,” Debbie told him. “We only have three days.”
Ellen had laughed at the timetable.
“You’ll be lucky if any of them show up for interviews. I mean, Indian time is different. It’s a whole different animal.”
Debbie passed on the warning to Clifford.
He nodded. Outside of movies, the only thing he knew about Indians was that somebody used to make them go to school in the city. He did see people he thought were Indians walking downtown, tall, thin, hawk-faced men. The women he saw were short and fat with long black hair and tight dark pants. Could be Mexicans.
“Ellen says they’re good people,” he told Debbie.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “The Navajos were real fighters, warriors, but now they are more farmers than anything else, or they have cattle, sheep, you know.”
“Still live in tents or what?” He was only half-joking.
“Never did. That was the Plains Indians. All that war bonnet stuff and teepees, that was on the prairie. Ellen was telling me that.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know that.” He sighed with pleasure.
This is what he liked about television, being able to get out, to see the land, to meet new people. Best of all, he liked leaving George and his whiny ass behind. And, he liked Debbie. She was easy to be around.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. They were sure to get some looks when they checked into the motel up in Gallup. This was cracker country, the whole state. He knew that. He wondered if Debbie did.
At the motel, the only thing they cared about was that Debbie and Clifford were from a television station.
“You need some help?” the desk clerk asked him.
“Nope.”
The next morning the sky was crystal blue, the land dry and brown.
“Man, it’s empty,” Clifford said as he drove the van down miles of dirt road.
“Yes, but isn’t it beautiful,” said Debbie.
“We’ll have somebody out there to meet you,” the tribal officials told her. They were waiting, a young woman and a boy.
They followed the woman, the small boy tagging behind Clifford.
“I will help you,” he said softly. “I will carry that.” He pointed to the recorder.
“Watch the dial,” Clifford told him. “Tell me if it doesn’t move or if that needle goes into the red. Okay?”
“Yes,” promised the boy solemnly, “I will.”
The woman led them down along the little river.
“We have to haul in our water from Gallup,” she told Debbie. “For our water and our animals. Many can’t do it. It is too expensive.”
“It is bad,” a shepherding Navajo told them. “It is bad, very bad,” he sang.
“We sometimes wonder, you know, if anyone cares,” the young woman said.
“They will after we put this story on the news,” Debbie promised.
“Hmm.” The woman nodded. She left the reservation years before for Albuquerque and the university, but not for lack of love of her land. The Chairman’s office asked her to make the trip back to work with the television people. She understood both white man’s time and white women.
“You know I think I might be frightened living here,” Debbie said as they sat together by the side of the slow-moving stream.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. All the radiation. All that. I might be afraid.” She blushed with the words.
“It’s really something,” Clifford said and shook his head. He meant the land and the few people they had seen, but mostly he meant the great stretch of land and the cloudless sky with the red rocks jutting out suddenly from the brown earth and cutting jagged holes in the horizon. He’d never seen anything like it.
That night they filmed the lights of Gallup from the Santa Fe rail yard. They worked as a team, Clifford shooting while Debbie handled the tapes and monitored the audio levels on the recorder.
“Tape,” Clifford would order.
“No sound. You’re not getting any sound,” she would caution.
Both nodded to their work.
In the morning they went to tribal headquarters. Now the softness of the people and the land was gone. Now it was business.
“You tell me if anyone cares,” the man from the Chairman’s office demanded. “You tell me where the authorities are. You tell me if we are going to die from cancer. Do you know? Does anyone know?”
They had what they needed, the anger at the federal government and the company that mined the uranium, the fury at the questions no one was answering. Millions of gallons of uranium-contaminated water had flowed into a river that was the lifeblood of their land and their animals and no one seemed to care.
One young Navajo flung at her, “We are last on the white man’s totem pole. Always have been. Always will be.”
They talked about the story during the six-hour trip back to the station. Three parts, probably, done and on the air in a few days. She drove while Clifford lay in the back surrounded by his equipment.
He was exhausted, every muscle ached, and once back at the station they had at least another hour unloading and spot-checking every tape for bad audio and poor video. Better to know now.
“I want to edit this baby,” he told her. “I don’t want nobody else touching this.”
“I don’t want anybody touching it either. It’s yours and I don’t want to work with anybody else putting it together,” she assured him.
He felt some relief but not enough. There was no guarantee a photographer would get to edit his own work. He mentally traced his shots, the land, the red rocks. He could see them, see them the way he shot them.
“Start with the river,” he said. “That’s where you should start.”
“How? How would you do that?”
“Open with a tight shot on the river, the one where I pull back to a wide shot. That’s where you start talking about the river and the spill, during that pull back.”<
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“Okay, okay, that’s good,” she agreed.
“Sure was a great kid,” he said of the boy who had helped him. “Hauled that recorder all over the place. Wouldn’t let it go.”
He laughed at the memory.
“The thing weighed more than he did. I finally had to tell him it was more important to carry the tapes.”
She laughed and Clifford closed his eyes.
*
She took the tapes to Brown on Monday morning.
“Good work, really good,” he pronounced from his seat in front of the monitor. “You’ve got yourself an award winner here.”
She smiled. It was as good as she thought.
“Clifford did a great job,” she said.
Brown nodded. On the screen, the sheep moved along the river.
“He really wants to edit this.”
Brown said nothing, his eyes on the screen.
“And we can get it together in a couple of days.”
He fiddled with the sound, bringing up the tinkling of the bells around the necks of the sheep.
“Okay?”
He reached out and punched the stop button on the tape deck.
“No.” His lips pushed out the word. “No, I don’t think so.” He shook his head and turned to face her.
“I don’t think that’s who you want on this one,” he said and stood up. He walked back to his desk.
“Yes, yes, I do,” she said quickly. “I do.”
“Not this one,” Brown said. “No, no.” He shook his head again as he sat in his chair.
“But why not?”
“He isn’t good enough or fast enough.”
“He is good enough.”
“No, he’s not, Debbie,” Brown’s voice was firm. “He’s shot some fine things for you but, ah, I want Tim to work on this one. He’s the pro,” he said of the chief editor, Tim Johnson. “You’ll see.”
“You don’t understand. This means a lot to him. It’s his story too. Please,” she begged. “He knows where all the shots are. He knows what he wants to do.”
“Tim will do a great job.” Brown smiled. “You’ll see. You’ll get an award on this one.”
The Best in the West Page 8
