by BK Loren
And then, nothing. No gunshot. No bullets.
He sits up, still pinning Chet, and looks at me, smiling again. Just then, Chet rolls out of Zeb’s pin. Everything’s a blur again, and next thing I know, Chet’s standing up and pointing Zeb’s own gun at Zeb. He’s pointing it loosely, dangling it from his skinned hand. “I can tell your future, too, boy,” he says. “You got none.” Then he laughs softly, tucks Zeb’s gun in his pocket, and walks away.
Zeb stands up, wipes the blood from his hands onto his blue jeans. It looks like an oil smear there, like after he’s been working on a car.
Willa
I CROSSED OVER THE New Mexico-Navajo border about noon, when the sun had shrunk to a white hot dime at the top of the scorching, October sky. Red spires of rock stood sunburned and shadowless on the roadside, the black tar beneath my tires half melted and soft, even in autumn. “You can see this red rock as holy, or you can see it as bloodied.” That’s what Brenda’s biological father, Raymond Kabotie, said the first time we met. I was in high school by then. Zeb was gone already, and Brenda had run away from home, too. I hadn’t seen either one of them in over a year. But Raymond had driven to Colorado from the reservation, looking for Brenda, because once she found him, she ran away from him, too.
I’d always figured Brenda would runaway from her adopted home because she’d never talk about her real family, and if you brought it up to her, anger spilled out of her like lava. It seemed pretty clear that she was going to have to find her family roots if she was ever going to be at peace. So sure enough, when Brenda turned sixteen she ran away from our neighborhood, seeking out her own flesh and blood.
What I didn’t predict was that once she found Raymond, she’d run away from him, too. I’ll never forget the first time I met him, when I opened our front door that day and he said, “You’re Willa Robbins?”
I nodded.
“She talked about you all the time. You’re her best friend. Have you seen her? My Brenda?” He had this expression on his face, a smile so hopeful and full of pain at the same time that my chest almost cracked open just talking to him. I invited him in, and he met Mom. Dad was on the road.
He stuck out his hand to shake Mom’s in greeting, but when she couldn’t respond, he said, “Parkinson’s?” No shyness about it, no turning his head away from Mom’s crippledness. It was something no one but a doctor had ever said to Mom before.
For a second I worried it might make her feel bad, but her eyes lit up, and she said, “Yes,” as if it was a relief just to have someone call it what it was.
“Evil disease,” he said. “My own mama had it.”
Mom’s voice had shrunk to a mere whisper by then, and it was hard for her to hold her head up. She looked like a baby bird sometimes, her head too big for her bony body. But her spirit was still intact. You could see it leaking out of her, all that life that had no way to express itself in her weakened body. Raymond kept on talking to her about his mother, the days he’d spent helping her. “I learned a lot about it, watching my own mom trying to fight that beast off,” he said. Raymond stood up then and went to Mom’s side. “You mind?” he said, taking her hand.
Mom nodded to let him know it was okay. He explained to her that the Parkinson’s made her think she was falling forward. “Yes,” Mom whispered, “That’s the way it feels,” and Raymond said, “But you’re not falling. It’s a trick your brain’s playing on you. If you can trick it back, pitch your body backward a little, get yourself a pair of old boots like mine,” he looked at the worn down heels that made him walk with his weight pitched back and his body low to the ground, “it might help you walk.” He prompted her to stand up, and she did, and he wrapped his strong arms around her, her face pressed into his leather vest. He looked at me. “And you,” he said, “You can help your mom walk by tapping the top of her toe with your own foot.” He lowered his cowboy boot gently onto Mom’s toe, and sure enough, she picked up her feet and began shuffling forward more easily than she had in months.
Raymond smiled. “Sometimes you just gotta remind your brain that your body is bigger and stronger than it is.” He and Mom walked across the room like that, and then pretty soon it seemed like they were dancing. He wrapped one arm around her shoulder, and they moved almost gracefully together. I fell in love with Raymond right then and there. He led Mom back to her seat in her chair. “Evil disease,” he said, “Downright evil,” and I could see Mom feeling grateful for his blunt understanding.
When he quit paying all the attention to Mom, he turned to me. “So—” He stalled a little. “You haven’t seen hide nor hair of Brenda, huh?”
I’d been hoping that he had news for me about her when he first introduced himself, and the emptiness it caused when he told me she’d left his place agitated me to the bone. “She give you a reason for leaving?” I asked.
He looked around the house, cast his eyes upward in that way that tough men do when they’re trying to keep their eyes from watering. “She had her reasons,” he said. “I just—I tried to keep her there, with me. But she just turned eighteen. She’s got a right.” He stopped again and stared hard at the ceiling, blinking with his huge chest stuttering a little. “She’s got a right, but she doesn’t have anything else. No skills. No money. No way to make a life for herself. And she doesn’t like it when I say it, but she’s innocent, so innocent. She doesn’t understand that sometimes a man has to do something he doesn’t believe in just to make his way in the world.”
I could see Raymond looking out the window toward the field, searching for some way to get himself out of a conversation he’d never planned on having. “That house out there, that’s where Mom was born,” I told him.
It gave him a chance to gather himself back up. He looked at me with knowing thanks. “That right?” he said.
“Eminent domain,” Mom said to him.
He laughed a little. “Took it right out from under you, huh?” It was the first time I saw Mom light up when she was talking about the land, another relief because Raymond understood things right along with her.
“We could go walking out there if you want,” I told him.
“I’d like that,” he said.
That afternoon, Raymond and I walked the field, and he showed me how alive the place still was, even though we thought it had been ruined when the house was condemned. “No,” he said, “Look at all these stories, all this sign!” We spent till dusk studying the afterimages of all the animals that had passed through there, animals I’d never seen, even though I spent almost every summer day there: field mice, voles, rabbits, quail, pheasants, foxes, coyotes. He showed me how to find owl pellets with the bones and fur of prey clumped into a tight little ball, and he showed me the remains of the nests of meadowlarks on the ground, when I thought all birds lived in trees. We walked farther than I’d ever walked in the field, and we saw prairie dogs, burrowing owls, and the first rattlesnake I’d ever laid eyes on. Raymond pointed out how its scales tiled themselves along its body like a bird’s feathers. It was like seeing a whole new world in a place I thought I knew well already.
Right then I was hooked. I knew I’d someday learn to track animals, and I dreamed of being as good as Raymond.
Before he left that afternoon we made a pact to keep in touch, to tell each other if we heard anything from Brenda. It was twenty-some years later now, and Raymond’s hair had greyed, and I’d grown up, but I still got the kid-jitters before seeing him. He was a man I admired, a mentor, a friend.
UP AHEAD, BLURRED BY a wave of midday desert heat, sat the Snack-n-Pump, the familiar convenience store where Raymond worked, the word GAS painted in bright turquoise on the stucco, and ghosted behind it: CAFÉ, then CIGARETTES, then SOUVENIRS, each word still visible in a sketchy outline. No one had bothered to cross out one word before painting over it with another, and so this timeline of American vices greeted tourists to Indian land. I turned my blinker on by habit, no one else driving this desolate highway, and pulled into the dusty lot wh
ere I was surprised to see a white and gold Lexus SUV.
From my truck, looking in through the smudged, plate glass windows, I saw Raymond and his skinny friend, Simon, standing side by side behind the counter. A well-coifed, middle-aged blonde woman made her purchase: gasoline, gum, an arrowhead souvenir or Kachina keychain, something from the kitsch bin. I walked into the store, waved huge, and Raymond smiled and jutted his chin toward me to say hello. He kept his attention on his customer.
I grabbed a bag of red licorice from the shelf, a bottle of water—five bucks—from the cooler. By the time I got to the counter, Simon was bent at the waist, his wiry arms wrapped around his belly, laughing without making a sound. Raymond gave him a big, friendly slap on the back. “And my friend here, Grandfather Simon, he’s the most spiritual one of all, completely in touch with nature and everything. He never wastes any buffalo he kills.” Raymond all but lifted Simon by his thin black T-shirt and turned him around to face the woman. “Do you, Grandfather Simon?”
Simon wiggled out of Raymond’s grip now, stood up stiffly and looked straight at the woman. I tossed my purchases on the counter. The customer nodded, sad-faced. “It’s a shame what we’ve done to your people,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me?” Simon said.
“And thank you so much,” she said. She held up her gum and arrowhead.
Raymond dipped his head in one nod.
“Oh, and how far is it into Sedona?” she asked.
“Sedona?” He looked at me and chuckled. “Why are people always going to Sedona?” The woman sized me up, and Raymond raised his thick arm, pointed north. “Up the highway, about two hours, longer on the scenic route, either way you take the exit just after Oak Creek and then Bob’s your uncle.”
“Bob’s my uncle?”
“Yup. Bob’s your uncle. You’ll be in Sedona.”
She forced a smile, and I was glad Raymond hadn’t undone her mercilessly, his usual habit with tourists. But then, as she opened the door, he called out, “Ma’am, you’ll see lots of my namesake along that highway. Might interest you.” He pointed to the name tag on his blue shirt, his initials.
The woman placed her hand over her heart in thanks and looked closer at his tag. “RK?”
“Road Kill, Raymond to some, but my Indian name’s Road Kill.” He offered a handshake.
I could see her pulling back instinctively, but there her hand was, sitting limp inside his grip. He squeezed tighter now, and she smiled harder. “Road Kill.” She practiced his name, and he kept up his wide smile.
“This here is Simon Goes-Extinct. We try to keep up with the times, you know.”
I leaned on the counter, shook my head. The man would never change. His deep chuckle echoed over the click of the woman’s shoes as she hurried across the floor, out the door.
“So how the hell are you?”
“You’re such an ass, Raymond.” I smiled.
“Raymond Road Kill.”
“Raymond Pain-in-the-Ass.”
Simon got a howl out of that one, and Raymond opened his arms and wrapped me in one of his smothering hugs. “What’s news? Got some wolves ready for freedom today?”
“Not this time. I’m heading home.”
“Lucky chica. Give Cario and Magda my love, will you? Damn, I gotta get down to their place. I owe Magda twenty bucks, and a lesson at poker,” Raymond said.
“The other home. Colorado.”
His smile went hollow. He waited to see if I had something else to say. I didn’t. So he started sorting the buffalo jerky on the end cap.
“So, how long you gonna be there?” Simon asked, trying to fill the silence. His arms fluttered from cash register to counter to the cigarette rack. If he’d been born in more traditional times, he’d have been named for some kind of small flitting animal, a hummingbird or bee. “In Colorado, I mean, back where you were from a long time ago. You’re just visiting there, right? Not staying. She’s just visiting Colorado, Raymond. She’s not moving there, or anything.”
Raymond hissed.
“You know, Raymond,” I said, carefully, “She’ll make her way back someday. Brenda will come back around to you.”
“Well, she’s doing it on granny time. Going on how long now?”
“So maybe she takes after her father? Slow and easy.” I tried to nudge his arm, but he dodged me, then started sorting the candy.
“You know, I never chose to give her up for adoption.”
“I know. It was a government decision. She was taken from you. It’s fucked up, Raymond.”
“They had no right. No reason. It would never have happened that way outside the reservation.” He talked through his teeth, stayed focused on this task. “I have no idea where my own daughter is.”
“I miss her, too,” I said. “And I know she misses you.”
“Not bad enough, eh?” He forced a new topic. “So, anyway, same road going into Colorado is the same road coming out. We’ll catch you on the flip-flop, right?”
“Well, yeah. I’m hoping there is a flip-flop.” His look questioned me. “I’m tracking some rugged terrain.”
“You always track rugged terrain.”
“Not usually tracking my own brother, though.”
He stopped stocking the buffalo jerky. “What crazy shit are you into now?” He sat on the counter and leaned in close to me. “Tell,” he said.
I told him about the phone call, said Zeb had turned himself in, a confession. But, crazy as he is, after he’d confessed, Zeb took off into the woods. “They searched for him for a couple of days. Nothing. Now they say I’m the only one who knows him well enough to track him.”
“They got a point there.” He tapped his own head with one finger. “Tracking’s all up here, so you’re a good choice. They’re smart,” he said. “So the cops had your brother right there, confession and all, and he ran?”
“Seems so.”
“Hell, if they fucked up and let him get loose, it’s on them. Right? They got nothing on you, Willa. You don’t owe them spit in a rain puddle.”
“You don’t have to fuck up for Zeb to slip out from under you.”
“Your brother’s pretty wily?”
I nodded. “If he doesn’t want them to, they won’t find him.”
“Sounds like your brother’s a coyote.”
I half-smiled.
“You ain’t catching no coyote, you know that, don’t you?”
“I’m a decent tracker. I had a good teacher.”
“Yeah, I’m a good teacher. And a good tracker. And I ain’t catching no coyote. What the hell, Willa? I don’t get it. Why you chasing down your own blood, putting yourself at risk?”
“Fifty-percent of Zeb is me. If he doesn’t want to come out, there’s no way they’ll get him. At least, not living.” I hoped it sounded like an answer.
Raymond went quiet again, studying me. “Here’s the thing, Willa. Whatever’s going on, whatever real reason you got for going back, it is not good enough. You’re in over your head. You got no reason to go there. You’ve told me a few stories about your brother. Tracking him is stupider than sleeping alone outside with those wolves like you do.”
“Speaking of which,” I said.
“Speaking of which, you are changing the subject, my friend.”
“Ciela and Hector.”
“My wolves? What about them?”
There was little that meant more to Raymond than keeping these wolves alive and thriving on this land. Contrary to the WWA’s findings, Raymond said Mexican grey wolves had been on Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi land since before the Mayflower, and they’d stayed the whole time, no interruption, no extirpation. “Sure, there were animals we Indians might’ve overhunted at times. I’m not claiming tribal sainthood here. But those wolves have been here all along. Thinned out as they got from being shot elsewhere, they never left this ground.”
The WWA had their statistics, and the Indians had their lives, their day-by-day observations across centurie
s, something that no study or pile of statistics could even touch.
But even though they knew Raymond had more knowledge about native wildlife than most of their biologists, Raymond’s credibility with WWA had been dented. He had an unlicensed rehab center, of sorts, in his own backyard—abandoned greyhound dogs, sometimes coyotes or birds of prey that he nursed back to health—and he was part of a small group of folks who volunteered with a handful of big shot biologists from universities who believed in “Pleistocene rewilding,” which meant restoring devastated ecosystems in America with wildlife from thirteen thousand years ago. He’d helped reintroduce the Bolson tortoise, which was fine, according to the law. But when he and two “rogue” professors started trying to make their own connections, hell-bent on restoring jaguars from south of the border back to New Mexico and Arizona—no matter what any law said—Raymond became a “person of interest” to every wildlife agency in the Southwest. So when the WWA found a pack of Mexican grey wolves on Navajo land, they accused Raymond of “importing” them, and they immediately deported the wolves to the established rehab territory. But soon enough, those wolves—followed by Ciela and Hector—were back on Navajo land again, and again the blame went to Raymond.
“I never touched those wolves,” he told WWA, and he reiterated to them that they’d been on this land all along, unobserved by their wildlife officials. It was a constant argument between Raymond and the WWA.
When I told him Ciela and Hector had a bullet with their names engraved on it waiting for them, and that just a couple days back, I’d witnessed them hunt a deer successfully—something that might save their lives, if documented—he forgot all about probing deeper into my reasons for going to Colorado.
“Fuckers!” he said. He slammed the rack of buffalo jerky and Slim Jims. “Those wolves are officially off limits to them.”
