The Darkness Rolling

by Win Blevins

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  Table of Contents

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

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  Dedicated to the rolling light that lives in every one of our grandchildren.

  Ruth, Aletha,

  Caleb, Sienna,

  Bailey, Blaire, Liam,

  Chloe, Henry, and Peter.

  This one’s for you.

  Acknowledgments

  Hozho, or beauty and harmony, weaves the pattern of the lives of those we love. The people we take care of, and the people who take care of us. It is the great balancing act of living a peaceful life.

  We would like to thank Barry Simpson and Steve Simpson of Twin Rocks Trading Post for firing our imaginations. Also, of course, as invaluable sources of story, joy, and friendship.

  Thank you, Jen Mouton, for a place to write and dream, bonne terre cottage. We are ever grateful for your love and support.

  Bob Diforio, agent extraordinaire, is our champion and more. Kristin Sevick Brown, our editor, thank you for your energy, enthusiasm, and brains. And to Bess Cozby, ever good-natured, for making certain we are on track.

  Finally, we thank our bighearted community—a strange and wonderful brew of Anglos and Navajos, always on the edge, always opinionated, irascible, loving, kind, loyal, and smart. We are two of the luckiest people alive to count ourselves as among the 300 Bluffoons.

  Win Blevins

  Meredith Blevins

  Bluff, Utah 2015

  The First Holy Wind

  Saad T’áálá’í Diyin Nílch’i

  Holy Wind comes from the place life began, it is said.

  Shí, Diyin Nílch’i, nishlí aádóó iina silíí, jiní.

  Wind is the same within us all,

  Nílchi át’é t’áá nihii,

  But there is an evil wind-part called Darkness Rolling.

  Jó éí díí nichoó ei chahalheel yimasii wolyé.

  It runs the large, bad thoughts within us.

  Ii’háhejeehée, baahágii nitsékeestsoh.

  If it happens that a person dies, it is said,

  Éhooníilgo diné ádin,

  There was one moment when their heart stopped listening,

  Jiní Nihijéíyée niiltli’,

  And they let the Darkness Rolling come inside.

  Áko kodóó Dinétah dine sodiszin, yéilti’.

  We listen to this earth from where life first began.

  Aádóó iina silíí,

  Good and Evil, Sun and Darkness Rolling,

  Aádóó iina silíí,

  We remember—Holy Wind made them all.

  Ya’at’eeh nchó’í ako doo yá’áshóo da.

  Holy Wind comes from the place life began, it is said.

  Shí, Diyin Nílch’i, nishlí aádóó iina silíí, jiní.

  Traditional Navajo prayer

  translated by Meredith Blevins

  One

  I was itchy. Tingling. My skin felt like foaming surf breaking on sand, and my brain was buzz-busy, just like the soldiers who had decided to stay in San Diego after the war. Possibilities. Worlds of them. I felt them, too.

  Women who’d traded their love for gasoline and stockings walked the singing sidewalks. High heels clicked, and the sun raised their red lipstick to a promise. Happy to have their young men back home. High times.

  I stood on one foot, then the other. Yes, itchy. The radio operator tried again, and this time I heard her voice. After the official shortwave palaver, he said, “Mrs. Nizhoni Goldman?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have Seaman Yazzie Goldman here for you.”

  I leapt in, probably too loud.

  “Hello, Mom.” I hadn’t said that in six years. Hard for me to get in touch while in the service, and no phones at home on the rez.

  “Yazzie!” Her voice was a cry, the kind that’s elation and tears at once.

  “Mom, this has to be quick. It’s against regulations, and the last thing I want to do right now is get tossed in the brig.”

  No words, but I could hear her, so far away, out in the red rock desert where silence has the muted voice of a monsoon. I got the feeling she couldn’t speak, so I kept on.

  “I’m mustering out on Tuesday, Mom. I’ve got my railroad ticket, and I’ll be in Flagstaff at 7:14 Wednesday morning. Can someone pick me up?”

  I heard a sound in the background, something between a bear growl and a coyote yowl.

  “That was Grandpa, saying the biggest yes, in his way. Jake Charlie will be in Flag for you.”

  “Hi, Grandpa!” I hollered into thin air to the man who was my compass. “Then it’s home Wednesday night, Mom. Gotta get off now, before I get caught.”

  “Wednesday night!”

  “You bet.”

  The radioman broke the connection. He looked up at me, grinned. In an imp tone, he said, “You paid back now, Yazzie?”

  “We’re square,” I said. I ran out the door, raised my arms, and whooped. Then I whooped some more.

  Two women, wearing polka-dot dresses that blew in the breeze, walked arm in arm chattering with each other. They turned their bright faces to me, shiny as a cloudless sky.

  I bounded off. No particular direction, just my feet wanting to take my heart and body for a dance. The war was over—so many terrible stories I knew—but my home was still standing firm. Still welcoming. Waiting for me. How lucky I was.

  * * *

  “How you gonna get to town?” the guard said.

  Zopilote said, “Steal a car.”

  The fool guard grinned and put his hand to his forehead to protect his face from the sun, as if that was possible. “Don’t steal a new one. The first just been made since the war started, and they’re conspicuous. Lots of metal.”

  Zopilote, the “buzzard man,” didn’t bother to fake a grin. He took his packet of ragged belongings, wrapped in newspaper and tied up with string. He turned away. March 1, 1946, he saw on the front page. He would remember that. May as well have been a different century.

  On the side of the highway he felt a warm wind on his neck, and it shivered along his skin. His insides prickled with hatred. His mind was blood-soaked. Finally, trudging through the dust alongside the highway, he was free. Free to act out his treasure-lust of dreams, the ones he’d been hoarding for twenty-five years.

  He’d be damned if he’d look back at the Arizona State Prison. So much time lost. Years eaten. Plenty of reason to hate and to get even.

  The yearning for revenge had grown until it filled every corner of his soul, assuming he still had one. He intended to kill those who had betrayed him—his own family!—and who had locked him away in prison.

  An early-season dust devil whipped his feet, rising from the dit
ch beside the highway. That was all right. Let the dust devil lick him—maybe it had come spinning in from his home to greet him. No paved highways on the Navajo rez, but plenty of dust devils. He felt sort of like a whirlwind himself, a being that roiled with primal chaos. Home would be good. Plenty of red-orange dust and plenty of buzzards.

  It was behind bars that he’d given himself the name Zopilote, the Mexican word for the black bird with the red head. Scorched Buzzard, that’s how he liked to think of himself now. That’s who he was.

  A Mexican, a guy he talked to a lot, this Mexican said to him, “You’re like the zopilote.”

  “What?”

  “The zopilote. The buzzard.” The Mexican had pointed to the piercing sky, where several of the big birds circled.

  “That huge vulture with the bald head, like it had been burned—that thing?”

  “Yeah. The zopilote, he’s like no other living creature. People kill, all creatures kill, and then they eat. The zopilote, no, he eats only things that he finds already dead.” The Mexican looked at him and smiled. “So he eats death to create life, his own life.”

  Then the Mexican guy shrugged, waited for some words from the Navajo. Didn’t get any. “You, you’re one crazy Navajo. You keep yourself alive by feeding on the death of these people you hate, whoever they are. Not their real death, but your thoughts about it.”

  You never have true friends in jail.

  But he took that story back to his cell with him. He liked it. The next morning he told the other prisoners to call him Zopilote. Forced them with his fists when necessary. He’d learned a few things in prison. To speak English and read it. To pick a lock and break into any building. To fight really mean. To kill with bare hands when he wanted to.

  To change his name? No problem.

  He also learned, later, that the zopilote sometimes is like human beings and other predators—it kills first and then eats. But that was rare, a last choice. It might, sometime, be his first choice. He could hear the future’s drumbeat and the rhythm made his days. Most avidly, he dreamed of his wife’s death.

  Over and again he heard the words she spoke against him in court. He also spent hours remembering her father’s testimony against him, word by daggered word, and he pictured knife-blade revenge.

  Sometimes Buzzard thought of his child. At the trial his wife had been big with his offspring, but he had never known whether the child was a boy or a girl, alive or dead. He didn’t dwell on this child, because it confused his feelings.

  So back to images of his traitor wife and her turncoat father. He would descend upon them and bring terrible deaths to each.

  In the Navajo way, to touch a dead body was taboo. The part of the dead person that was evil, the chindi, might enter your body and spirit, might take you away from the good path. An Enemy Way ceremony was required to heal the ill, to restore hózhó to the victim—harmony, beauty, balance, and health. Men returning from war especially needed this ritual.

  The thought of deliberately consuming death—how much more horrifying that would be to his clansmen. That’s why Zopilote relished the idea. Revenge was the shrine in his heart. He gave himself wholly to it, he made it the sole devotion of every moment of his life, he prayed to be transformed by it. He rejected hózhó. He cursed harmony, beauty, balance, and health. Zopilote, Scorched Buzzard, sought evil. In turn, evil had befriended him.

  Two

  Jake Charlie and I had been bumping along the dirt road headed north out of Flagstaff all day, baked by a murderous sun, racked by every rut and rock in the dirt road. A few times we got stuck in the sand and had to shovel out.

  All that day I’d been worse than restless. My thoughts churned inside my chest. I wanted to sound off, to banter, to tell jokes and ask questions, but Jake Charlie, at the wheel, had a way of neither listening nor speaking.

  Was going home supposed to be this kind of hard? Good question. Being here, in red rock country, after living so close to the ocean? My body had started feeling like it was salt water and driftwood instead of blood and bones. And from where I sat, next to a quiet Jake, this world seemed like it couldn’t be home to anything except lizards, bluffs, and buzzards.

  Except for one thing. A squirmy part of me was excited to be here. Home echoed. I felt it to the very center of my heart. All in all I was a Ping-Pong ball going over a red-dirt net, and it was no wonder.

  Yes, yes, I had not walked in harmony, as my people say. I’d enlisted in the navy and been gone from Dinetah, our land between the Four Sacred Mountains, for six years. After the first two years I’d gotten caught up in a conflict that killed many human beings, so many human beings. A planet-wide combat. Mother Earth was waist-deep in the gore of her children. A terrible thing.

  So, an Enemy Way ceremony would be planned for me, and then I would listen to the deep, quiet part of me that knew, that part I didn’t have words for yet. So far, that quiet part had told me only, “Live your life the way you want.” I damn well meant to.

  I would answer my own questions—how did I really feel about my people’s traditional ways? There were other questions that were hard to speak out loud, hard to put into words.

  I’d grown up at a trading post in a place near Monument Valley called Oljato, which means Reflection of the Full Moon on Water. The water was the spring that persuaded my grandfather to build his home and business there. I was expected to take it over. But now I’d changed, I’d seen some of the big world. And I had been on shore patrol, a different kind of job that gave me ideas, ones that maybe leaned into the future. Maybe not.

  Shore patrol wasn’t a big deal, but I liked keeping order, and I liked seeing inside people’s minds. Thinking about what they might do before they did it. Did I want to go back to hanging out in the post, jawing endlessly with other Navajos about how many sacks of Bluebird flour they could get on credit? Those memories didn’t frost my cake.

  But Monument Valley? The land was a glory. Straddling the Arizona–Utah state line, it is in every photo that people see when they think of the word “west.” Horses, courage, isolation, cutting lose, outlaws, being wild, and layers of geologic time peeled back like a naked lady strutting her stuff. Yes, it is home. Yes, it tugs at me in a way no other place does. But, those sandstone monuments, no matter how magnificent, they are always, day after day, unendingly the same. My taste of city life, the possibility of a different kind of life than the trading post, plus a whiff of the glamour of being around movie people … I doubted that the glow of a full moon on water could satisfy me, but doubts come and they fly off. You cannot trust your doubts.

  Altogether, my soul was in trouble. I didn’t know where I belonged.

  As we came around the curve that river-winds between orange and rust cliffs, and I knew I was about to see the long vista of the huge stone gods of my homeland for the first time in six years, I took a deep breath. This was the test. Was it a joyful homecoming? Or was it drinking from a pond turned to scum?

  Suddenly, there it was, unexpected and magnificent. Another mile or so and I saw something new, yet familiar. Pushed upside the folds of Monument Valley, and laid out perfectly, stretched the false-front street of an Old West town. A big gang of white people crowded up together near the road, there was a camera with some guys working beside it, and lights mounted all around. Beyond them stood two circus tents, the white canvas tinted orange at the bottom from dust. My pulse soared, and it thumped two words, movie crew, movie crew.

  Jake Charlie cracked open his jaw and squeezed out in Navajo, “Mr. Ford and them, they come here right before I pick you up. You remember ’em.”

  “Remember” was a weak-tea word. Mom must have given herself a secret smile by writing me nothing about the shoot and telling Jake Charlie to let me be surprised. He hand-rolled a smoke and clamped it between his lips.

  The first movie that was ever shot in my homeland was Stagecoach, a couple of years before the big war. I had watched every day of the filming and had worked on it, and the movie tu
rned into a big hit. Now, with the war ended, John Ford and his crew were back.

  I felt like hollering for joy, right out loud. Yes, I was glad to think of the money the movie people would bring our trading post. Mostly I was beside myself because Mr. John had told me he’d have work for me when he returned. Also, I admit, I was starstruck.

  “Stop!” I said.

  Jake Charlie slitted his eyes and lip-pinched his smoke in disapproval, but he braked. I got out and edged my way down the shaley slope, knowing Mr. John would be right by the camera. He picked me out first off with his good right eye and waved me over. He wore a patch on the left eye, I never knew why, and sunglasses. He called over the heads of several people, “Howdy, Groucho.”

  I went into Groucho Marx’s funny chicken-lope of a walk.

  As I got close, Ford said, “Mrs. Goldman, why do you have so many children?”

  It was an old routine of ours.

  In a falsetto voice I said, “Because I love my husband.”

  “I love my cigar, too, but sometimes I take it out of my mouth.”

  Everybody around Mr. John burst into laughter, me the loudest.

  “Welcome, Uncle Miltie,” said the man next to Mr. John, who was his brother-in-law and assistant director, Wingate something. Wingate was calling me out to do one of the bits from the Milton Berle show Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One.

  I responded on cue, “You monkies is the cwaziest peoples.” It got a laugh. All silliness leftover from the last shoot years ago, and I almost felt light-headed.

  I’d started out as an extra playing a red savage chasing heroes on horseback. We were supposed to be Cheyenne Indians, never quite sure about that, but they painted us up in ways that no one in the Southwest has ever seen. I hung around—listening, learning—until the actors noticed the curiosity that is me, Yazzie Goldman, a tall muscular Navajo with a Jewish last name, able to speak three languages fluently—Navajo, English, and Spanish—and pretty hep to white people’s ways.