Blue Rodeo

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  He tuned the radio to KNAV, where after a long interlude of musical chant, the announcer broke briefly into English.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, that was ‘Last Year’s Dancing Partner,’ coming to you from the Four Corners Singers, and this here is KNAV radio, all Navajo, all the time. We got some R. Carlos Nakai on the Native American flute coming up with his fine group, Jackalope, so stay with us.” Then he repeated the same information in what Maggie guessed had to be Navajo.

  “Every hour or so they set aside time for open mike,” Owen explained. “Good or bad weather. People needing to get messages to family and neighbors can go to the station and talk on the air.”

  “Why don’t they just phone each other?”

  “Well, some of them are a little bit like you when it comes to the telephone. You need power lines to install phones. Money to pay for both, something the rez sadly lacks. You know, I can just about fold the Shiprock phone book up three times and fit it in my back pocket. Radio’s a lifeline on days like today.”

  Maggie couldn’t make out a single word coming from the dashboard. Every once in awhile Owen laughed out loud at what was being said.

  “Maybe I ought to go on down there myself, leave Joe a message.”

  “Does he listen to the radio?”

  Owen looked back at her doubtfully. “If he forgot to turn it off three days ago, he might. Joe’s mind isn’t all that…straightforward, sometimes.”

  “What direction does it take?”

  “Well, sometimes he’s fighting old Charlie in Thanh Hoa, and the next minute he’ll be a kid selling corn to the tourists, dreaming about getting rich. You never can tell when what’ll hit. Something’ll trigger it, and he’ll go so deep inside himself I couldn’t exactly tell you where.”

  “Because of Vietnam?”

  “Oh, partly. Some of it, sure. But Joe never was one to let things fester. He speaks up. He might not’ve been born early enough to get involved with the AIM uprisers or bury his heart at Wounded Knee, but you’ll sure enough see him out waving complaints against Columbus Day. He’s got himself good and arrested a few times.”

  “Every time I’ve seen him he’s been a sweetheart.”

  Owen tuned the radio volume down. “That’s mostly how he is. But Joe’s been stubborn from the get-go. The way he tells it, they tried, but nobody could make him to go off to Indian boarding school. Later he had to know why it was Indians couldn’t drink alongside white cowboys in the bars. Shoot! Wanted to be able to drink like them and have the same good times. But it turned out he couldn’t handle it any better than his own momma, who died of alcohol poisoning out at the clinic when he was a teenager. He never got much from his daddy except a smack in the head now and then. Verbena’s Minnie said he used to run with a different blond girl every week, just to rile the old man. Trouble was, pretty girls only wanted him until the dance was over or he stopped making them laugh. Then they were back with the white fellows, and Joe was just one more pretty-faced Navajo.”

  “That’s rotten.”

  “Yeah, it is. His engine runs a little better when he takes his pills.”

  “If they’re so much help, why does he stop taking them?”

  “The Diné aren’t keyed into this medicine thing the way you and I are. And Joe fancies himself an herb doctor, thinks everything he needs is growing right there in his backyard. He remains, as they say, to be convinced.”

  Beyond the casual talk, she could sense how worried Owen was. There was a good friend inside this sheeprancher/stock clerk at Rabbott’s Hardware, this man driving her car. The hardware store had begun to carry a small line of Winsor & Newton gouache, Maggie’s favorite paints—Owen’s doing. She’d said nothing about her preferences; one day she walked in to pick up vacuum cleaner bags and there were the white tubes on the art supply shelf, all the way from England to Blue Dog, New Mexico. All night he’d held her close in his arms, good strong arms that wanted her—tears, bad mother, and all—making love, he’d told her so with every movement of his body. He hadn’t refused to see her as her son had, after she’d driven through narrow roads and freezing rain to Riverwall with nothing more than a Thanksgiving truce in mind. Owen had shown up on her doorstep at the lowest point of her evening, had made her go upstairs, lie down in bed where she belonged. Perhaps all along his intention had been to get into bed alongside her, use her to relieve his own tension, but if that was so, his patience was on a grander scale than Job’s.

  As if it were a Catholic notion, her mother had always set the topic of sex on a level with wifely duty. Whenever Maggie had asked her questions about sex, Colleen met them with steadfast impatience—“There are areas of marriage that are more important to a man.” The subject, like the Lenten obligation of giving up your favorite vice until Easter, was no more open for discussion than that. Nori insisted sex was mutual friction that worked on the body like a good massage, and seemed to be in the process of making her life’s work one endless backrub. Women’s magazines claimed the need for touching and joining deepened and grew with age, but Dear Abby insisted if all you were dealt was comfortable companionship, that could be enough.

  Comfortable companionship was no substitute for passion. Making love with Owen had made Maggie feel as if her feet were once again meeting solid earth, the horizon before her level enough to trust. Yesterday the highway had been skewed, untrustworthy, like a landscape in a Dalí painting. It took more than a marriage to make sex good between two people; it took willingness to open yourself, because who else besides a man could cut your confidence to ribbons by turning to another woman, dispensing with you when a younger and more fertile model came on the market? Even her own son was a man in training. She rubbed away the fog her breathing had created on the car window.

  Late summer, when she’d driven this way to see the monument, as per guidebook suggestions, she’d carried in her own food and water. But Owen knew the area in ways she didn’t. What looked to her like a dirt road to nowhere was a shortcut as far as he was concerned. She pressed her forehead against the icy window. Snow everywhere. For all her years in New England, shoveling frozen gray slush from the sagging porch steps, suffering the feel of soggy wool against her chapped hands, California had erased all but the wonder of winter from her memory. It lay pure white and chaste against the rocky earth, lending grace to ramshackle houses and weatherbeaten trailers they passed, cloaking everything in silence as if to say, Wait a moment, look here, God has put his hand to this landscape, see how he loves his own creation.

  Then Owen hung a U-turn at the crossroads and turned back toward town, slowing as he neared the trading post. Outside, a nearly new blue dual-axle Ford truck was parked beside a battered Dodge. Snow dusted the bumpers of the blue truck; the Dodge didn’t sport bumpers at all. Owen led her inside, and she wondered if there was some kind of coffee shop around back she’d missed on her previous visit. Pawn turquoise hung on the walls, dozens of necklaces in fat sky blue and sea green nuggets, the yellowed claim tickets fluttering in the forced-air heat. Past the exterior room with its predictable tourist fare of boxed Taos moccasins and mass-produced pottery, they entered a smaller back room where blankets hung or lay everywhere, beginning with turn-of-the-century Germantown in faded brown and beige wools, museum-quality, interspersed with the occasional Chief’s Blanket North Phase, the odd pictorial, or a circular rug woven on an old wagon wheel rim. Here, beyond the larger blankets, chained off from the tourist crowd, was a tiny nook filled with newer weavings, more patterns than she knew existed from her books. A Burntwater design, woven in pale pinks and greens, undoubtedly the end product of vegetable dyeing, which she’d read some of the weavers were turning back toward in an effort to reclaim their craft. On the wood-paneled wall at the rear of the store, a massive Two Gray Hills was displayed over pine dowels, its brown, black, gray, and white colors so finely woven into the geometric stairstep design that Maggie thought she might trade everything she owned to possess that rug just for one moment in time. Th
e pattern dated from the early 1900s, when women from the Crystal area, north of Gallup, went to visit their fellow weavers in the Chuksa Mountains. It somehow reminded her of that game she’d played as a child, where you folded paper to create a four-sided fortune-teller, and beneath numbered choices your fortune was revealed in the unfolding. Maggie could see how stretching the design out, lengthening it, perhaps talking as the women wove experimentally side by side at their looms, had led the weavers to create the Two Gray Hills pattern. Easily twenty feet across, and incorporating a complex geometric design into the border, depending on the weaver’s name, the rug could be worth as much as the sailboat she’d sold to her friend Deeter.

  Though the transaction had taken place on the same day she’d discovered the woman Ray was leaving her for was pregnant with his child, the memory of that bad day now made her smile. At Deeter’s suggestion, they’d each drunk two glasses of Ray’s oldest and most expensive cabernet, toasting first each other, then wishing Ray twin daughters who would reach puberty early and give him ulcers. Then, for what had surely been the umpteenth time, Deeter looked longingly out at the Catalina sailboat tethered at the dock and said, “Thirty-six feet of fiberglass hull, Loran-C computerized navigational systems sitting there idle. She’s Bristol, and Ray ought to go to jail, not just for what he did to you and Pete, but also for criminal neglect of that boat.”

  Maggie’d asked how much money he had in his pocket, and Deeter’d answered, typically, that he didn’t know for sure, forty or fifty dollars, but she was welcome to it. She’d asked for the wallet, extracted a one-dollar bill from the twenties and fives, held up the dollar, thinking that of all the foolish acts her soon-to-be-ex-husband had done, putting the boat in her name had to be near the top of the list. “A down payment,” she’d said. “Deeter, go kiss your new boat.” And he had, but not before shaking his head and giving her a long hug that, midway, turned into an embrace. He might eventually have become more to her than a friend, maybe even have gone so far as to fill the position of what Nori referred to as “transitional man,” the one you slept with as an experiment while you were healing, then shrugged off in search of a more permanent fix—something that sounded easier in theory than practice. The boat was a dream come true for Deeter, a small act of rebellion for Margaret. That was all a lifetime ago, when she lived in a bay-front house she’d scraped and scrimped to revive from the foreclosure bargain they could afford. You couldn’t sail a boat like that by yourself. The only material item she really cared about was the thrift-shop rug she’d found at Secondhand Clothes—forty dollars, one corner looking like a puppy had teethed on it. When things got loud between Ray and Peter, she’d walk down to the guest room and fix her gaze on the weaving, imagining how the maker had taken time to thread the loom carefully, choose her yarns, develop the pattern in her mind. Once Ray had walked in, screamed at her that it was her fault their son had turned out belligerent, and then punctuated his outburst by throwing his drink at her rug. Gin and tonic. The stain was as much a part of its history as the single ragged edge. Maybe all along it had been a case of cost versus quality—if your husband wanted a younger woman, a new family—fine, let him go. You could turn to your child. Concentrate on raising him, find a way to numb the other pain into something tolerable. But if your son opted to dwell with strangers rather than his mother, well, then. You could make your life in the shadow of a rock in a small town on the edge of nowhere. If you chose to bed down with strangers, no one would bother to accuse you of poor judgment, ridicule your choices, or christen them with drink.

  Now, standing there in the trading post chatting beside Lulu, it seemed to her that Owen’s kind smile might take her years to grow tired of watching. It was genuine, solid, even if it happened so infrequently you wondered if something inside kept him permanently sad. Was she throwing her last few shreds of respectability out the window, taking him into her bed? Lulu Mantooth unabashedly adored him. Joe Yazzi, sound of mind or not, ate dinner with this white man every week, called him brother. People warmed to Owen, no questions asked. Maggie Yearwood? All she knew for certain was that she didn’t want this day to end without feeling him move inside her once again.

  All three of them were pretending not to watch the Navajo weaver argue with the shopkeeper, each holding a corner of the beautiful rug.

  Owen motioned her over. “This here is the real thing. Once Benny gets to dealing, the price starts dropping quicker than last night’s barometer.”

  “Hah,” Lulu said. “What you call dealing, I call foreplay. Them two both end up satisfied as two fat nursing puppies. Don’t let any of this fool you, Maggie. I’m going to make some fresh coffee. You could waterproof fence posts with this other—we’ll save it for tourists. Now don’t you two leave without saying goodbye, promise?”

  Owen put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. The sheepskin was lightly covered with melting snow at the collar, and Maggie ran her finger across it to chase the wet away from his skin.

  He whispered, “Thanks,” and she blushed at the intimacy in his lowered voice. This cold, snowy day seemed to call for that kind of speaking, extra blankets, a nap.

  “This Storm Pattern extremely fine work,” the weaver said. “You take a look, Mr. Benny. Tell me rug won’t sell.”

  “I don’t know.” He pretended to examine it for flaws.

  The weaver was dressed in sweat pants, a crinkly maroon velvet blouse trimmed with white rickrack and buttoned with silver conchas, a large blue-and-yellow L.A. Rams jacket draped over her shoulders. Her heavy hair was wound into a bun, which was secured with a silver-and-turquoise barrette styled in the needlepoint design. Though she was only a little over five feet, her weight more than ample, she held herself with elegance.

  “Fine work deserve good price. I think thousand dollars about fair.”

  “A thousand dollars? Jesus Christ, Verbena honey, you been watching too much ‘Price Is Right.’ Who told you old Benny would pay out that much?” The man shook his head and laughed. “How about a cup of coffee so we can get normal? Lulu, what are you doing back there? Helping Juan Valdez pick the beans?”

  The weaver smiled, showing even white upper teeth and wide expanses of pink gum on the lower half of her jaw. She tried again. “Nine-hundred-fifty dollar keep my horse in hay, my grandchildren in Pampers, buy me a few skein of halfway decent wool to make you another, maybe, if I find energy.”

  Benny, his Lucchese cowboy boots with the pointy lizard toes and high heels trying in vain to make up for his bald head and beer gut, skinny imported cigars sticking out of his suede vest pocket, looked up from the desk, where dozens of color photographs, rugs, and papers threatened to topple to an equally crowded floor space. He wriggled a finger in his ear. “Excuse me? Must be time to flush the wax again. It’s a nice weaving, Mrs. Youngcloud, but she’s no nine-hundred-dollar rug. Let’s get serious here…” He took out a tape measure and began to calculate.

  Owen’s shoulders were shaking with mirth. He fiddled with a box of cassette tapes offering lessons on speaking the Navajo language, and Maggie wondered just what it was he found so funny. She’d seen the poverty on the reservation. Yes, the rug was small, but it was beautifully crafted, nearly dizzying with its diamond points and sawtooth border. The Navajo people lived on land so barren nobody else wanted it. They received little in the way of compensation for having been moved from their homes, and as far as Maggie could see, they complained about the whole deal even less. In Southern California a rug like Verbena Youngcloud’s would have gone for two or three thousand dollars easily.

  But Benny the rug dealer held firm. Maggie and Owen drank coffee with Lulu, heard who was cheating on whom in town and out, listened to the latest gossip from the Chamber of Commerce—It seemed Lynda Yellowhair was angry with Mary Begay, who wouldn’t acknowledge her son now that he was marrying that Las Vegas showgirl he’d run off with. What good could come of leaving your family behind for a man-made city of devil liquor and neon lights? One of them sin
hotels had a gas-fired volcano now, trying to copy nature just so tourists would stay there and spend all their dollars…. By the way, had anyone thought to check on Joe Yazzi, now that it was snowing good and hard? She’d heard he’d wrecked his truck the day the cops returned it, and maybe you could go a lot of places muleback, but the clinic was far away, and that was one Navajo white man’s medicine had done some good, providing Joe had pills within reach, not sitting around gathering dust in some bottle in the pharmacy….

  Maggie listened to Lulu’s news report with curiosity, though some of the names meant nothing to her. Owen promised her he’d look in on Joe. Then the telephone rang and Lulu was momentarily distracted. While she talked Owen gave the pawn watches some consideration, and Maggie turned back to study the dealer and the weaver.

  A hundred years ago dealers like Benny had given the Navajo weavers commerce, influencing them to switch from weaving strictly garments to rugs, which the tourists were keen to own. Bastard or shrewd businessman, Mr. Benny chewed the price all the way down to three hundred dollars, which the woman accepted. Then he asked Owen if he would mind taking two Polaroids of himself and the weaver with the rug.

  “Why not?” Owen answered. “Just show me which button to press.”

  The weaver took off her glasses for the picture and smiled at the camera as each of them held on to a corner of the now-sold rug.

  “What’s the point?” Maggie asked. “After all that bickering, it seems like the last thing either of them would want is a picture of the other.”

  “Like signing a contract,” Owen explained. “Mrs. Youngcloud gets a copy, so does Benny. That way it’s proof they made a deal, in case one of them suddenly gets amnesia.”

  Lulu cackled. “I wish I could get me some amnesia, particularly where my daughters are concerned.”

  Owen laughed politely, and Maggie wondered about his daughter, Sara Kay, who seemed to have done just that—forgotten she had a father entirely. Maggie watched them proceed from the dealer’s office to the area of the store that stocked yarn and load up on “top of the lamb” skeins. These the dealer didn’t charge her for, though at the cash register they came close to a hundred dollars. It was Verbena Youngcloud, the weaver he’d pointed out to her months back, at Blue Dog Days.