by Win Blevins
Grandpa raised—of all the goddamn things—his belt.
“Answers,” I bellowed at this fake father.
Then, with his good left hand, Grandpa slammed sharp the tip of the belt into the father-monster’s throat.
Twenty-four
The father-man was breathing. I wanted to memorize his face, to hear his voice, to get his words. I sat on the floor next to him. Bright arterial blood spouted from his neck.
“That man is about out of time,” Janey said.
So I had only a couple of minutes, out of a lifetime, with the man whose blood ran in mine. I said, “Why?”
His eye, bloody, stared into mine. “It was me raped your fancy woman.” His voice was a rasp.
“Why?”
“I hate your mother,” he whispered.
“Why?”
“Betrayal,” he wheezed.
“I am your offspring,” I said. That word seemed better than “son.” “Do you have anything to say to me?”
He racked with coughing, and his blood splattered my chest. A gift for his son.
He squeaked out, “I curse you for being born.”
His face contorted into something strange and terrible. Maybe elation, maybe horror. Maybe the real face of evil arriving from a place we know nothing of.
He tried to clutch at his throat, twisted, and convulsed.
And was still forever.
Twenty-five
Mom was weeping, lying in a ball. A torrent of quiet pain, fear, and humiliation ran from her eyes to her neck.
“Are you hurt?”
The volume of my voice jolted even me.
Mom shook her head no.
Next, Iris.
“Never mind your modesty,” I told her. “I’m pulling up your blouse.”
She raised her arm on the side of the wound. No sign of penetration into the chest. I felt carefully along—
“Ow, that hurts!”
Janey’s hands pulled my arms away. She said, “Let me do that.”
She palpated the length of the wound. “Nothing but ribs,” she said. “X-rays will show whether any of them is cracked, and that would be the worst case. Very lucky.”
It was hard to live inside this scene and think that anything could be called lucky. But I hoped Janey was right.
I bent over Grandpa, who seemed half in another world. His left leg was still bent and crooked. I couldn’t imagine how he managed to crutch his way into the house. His will. His amazing will.
I looked at Janey.
“He did it by himself.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t stop him. I yelled at him, but…” Some embarrassment on her part. I guessed she was thinking, A small woman, but a crippled man—why couldn’t I control him?
I took off my cowboy boot and found two pellets just below my knee. Several more had gouged the top of the boot. I flipped the two out and said to hell with all that.
Another look at Mom. She was murmuring to Janey, voice soft as birds’ wings, her breathing rhythm ragged, saying that she was all right. Janey was bending over her, making comforting sounds. “She’s okay, physically,” Janey told me.
Which meant the damage was emotional. And it was serious.
* * *
The ambulance got there in time to confirm what we already knew. My fake father was dead, and Grandpa would have to go to a hospital to get his leg set, but Iris could be patched up right there.
I told her, straight out, no time for delicacies, “Colin’s dead. Broken neck.”
A flicker of shadow streaked her face at an angle, like a storm-tossed sky’s gray sheet through a windowpane. Then it was gone. She squared her shoulders and became a force.
“Mr. Goldman is not going in any ambulance,” she told the driver and Janey, “and he’s not going to Flagstaff. I’m taking him to Santa Fe myself.”
Grandpa nodded and grumbled his approval.
“But your ribs…” I said.
“Yazzie, I’m sure nothing is broken. I am taking Grandpa to Santa Fe, and do not argue with me.”
“You,” Iris said to Grandpa, “you’re going to get physical therapy while you’re there, and there’s no arguing about it.”
Grandpa made a raspy “O” sound, which may have been an attempt at no. But he wasn’t going to win this one.
The ambulance guys forced pain meds down his throat. On their way out, I asked them to bring us news of Jake Charlie. Dead or alive, he had to be close by.
Sitting up on the bed, Mom spoke her first words. “While we drive, we’ll talk. And eat. And be thankful for our true family. And then I will tell you a story.”
Mom and Iris may not have been related by blood, but they sure were by courage and determination.
Mom sat at the table while I threw together a meal for the drive. I suppose it was some kind of therapy for me. I wanted my mother to rest. I wanted to be the person taking care of her. After all, I had left her alone. I wanted her to scream or give voice, in some way, to the horror that took place inside our house. For myself, I could find no words, no cries. I was dry as the desert.
Iris and I shouldered Grandpa to the pickup. Mom carried the basket of fried Spam sandwiches, potato salad, and gherkins.
As we walked out, Officers Cly and Etcitty spun their squad car into the yard. I didn’t ask where the hell they’d been. Simply said, “We’re leaving, no questions now.” I pointed to my grandfather. “Look at that leg.”
They saw.
“We’ll give our statement to the cops at the hospital.” I didn’t say which hospital.
“But—”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. At the hospital.”
They nodded and left.
With four people in the pickup, the front seat was crowded. I drove, and Grandpa sat with his back against the truck’s passenger window and his legs across Mom’s and Iris’s laps. Somehow it was comfortable, all of us jammed together.
No one knew what to say.
Iris spoke first. “What the hell happened there?”
Between Mom and Grandpa, looks of emotion passed that I couldn’t decipher.
Finally, Mom told the story in a bare-bones, dry-fact way. The man who was not my true father, who was a rapist, a killer, a destroyer of lives, who was another reason I would have to do an Enemy Way ceremony—this monster was Adikai Begay, which in Navajo means Son of Gambler. The name explained Grandpa’s mangled utterances, “odd” and “dick.”
My so-called father came from the Chuska Mountains to the east, a handsome fellow when he was young. A man who liked the ladies. Though people in our part of the rez didn’t know him, he was a bronc rider, and a hell of a good one. Mom met him one weekend at an Indian rodeo, went to another rodeo the next weekend to be with him, and the next day married him in Flagstaff—a rare non-Navajo wedding that had county paperwork attached to it. Grandpa never met him until she brought him home to share her bedroom.
“My declaration of independence,” Mom said, words awash in irony.
I could hardly believe she’d been such a rebel, or that she was able to form the words to tell this story.
Her new husband didn’t do a lick of work around the trading post. He disappeared most weekends to go rodeoing, and then he’d be gone for two or three weeks to play poker and get drunk.
Mom added, “And probably to whore around.”
Before long he disappeared for six or seven weeks, and finally for three months. After nine months and four days of marriage Mom agreed with Grandpa to put his belongings outside the door. Navajo divorce, and screw the paperwork. Grandpa would play papa to the unborn child.
A curator from the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe, a friend of the family, came up that summer to see the post’s art, go out and meet artists, and acquire quality items for the museum. Mom fell in love with him. He proposed. They would get married at our family home in Santa Fe.
Except that Adikai Begay killed him.
Both Mom and Grandpa testified at the trial. The sente
nce was life in prison. They thought they’d never see him again. And they took an oath never to speak his name again.
“Family secrets,” Iris said in a voice curdled with anger.
Both Grandpa and Mom nodded and touched each other’s hands.
Mom’s going to need more than that, I thought.
Twenty-six
Grandma Frieda was waiting for us at the hospital in Santa Fe. She was a complete surprise. I’d have taken her for a Gypsy, not a Jewish lady, and for forty-five years old, not sixty. All her clothes seemed to be scarves. I wondered if she was entirely decent when the wind blew. Plus, she spewed words like a machine gun. Spewed instructions, I should say.
Two of the three women played commanding officer, Grandma Frieda and Iris. Just try to talk back to women like that—even Mom couldn’t. Half the Navajo men I knew had more than one wife. I couldn’t figure how they survived it.
We all sat in a waiting room while the doctors X-rayed, poked and probed, and then repaired Grandpa’s leg. I could hear his protests all the way down the hall.
Finally, a white-coated guy came out and introduced himself as Dr. Such-and-So. After the navy and the FBI, I had to squelch my impatience with uniforms and assertions of rank. His summary was compound fracture of the right leg, which we knew. Now the skin was stitched up and the bone set. Probably two months in a cast. And then?
The doc introduced a physical therapist who asked us questions about how much Grandpa tried to talk, how often we could understand his sounds as words, how active he was in the walker, how much he was using it, and on and on. Endless, all of it.
When we’d told him, he said that the partial progress indicated Grandpa could recover from the stroke a lot more than he had. Then he began a recitation of the treatments Grandpa needed.
Frieda and Mom took turns interrupting the man. The gist of it was that Grandpa would stay in Santa Fe as long as needed and show up for his therapy every day.
“Mr. Goldman doesn’t seem to want to do that,” the therapist told us.
Mom spoke quickest. “Mr. Goldman isn’t running this show. How long?”
“Probably six months.”
Frieda said, “A full house.” She grinned at us. “Won’t that be fun?”
When the PT guy left, I said to Mom, “It’s okay with you to close the trading post that long?”
She said, “What trading post?”
They gave Mom an appointment with a psychiatrist in two days. She shrugged. I wondered how many times she’d actually go to see him.
* * *
I was charmed by our family home. She was one block off the plaza, a dowager of fading grandeur.
“I could fix her up,” said Frieda. “I have the money but not the time.”
“The time!” Mom said. “What are you doing?”
“Hey! You don’t know … Saint Michael’s College,” Frieda said. Her tone changed. “So exciting. We do music, creative writing, theater, art, graphic design, movies, costumes, sets, and photography. With the talent I have, it’s perfect. I love it. And, oh, our string players.”
She embraced the whole house with spread arms. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry, you beauty, you old darling.” She shrugged. “I’ve neglected you, and you take care of me still.”
Frieda walked Mom through the rooms, one by one, Iris and I trailing behind them. There was a grand living room with a fireplace made of petrified wood from the Painted Desert. Also a genuine crystal chandelier that looked like it hadn’t been dusted in centuries, a more private sitting room, a kitchen where you could cook for fifty, a library that would serve a department of professors, a dozen bedrooms, and best of all, a walled garden with a fountain and shaded chairs. Grandpa had always wanted a walled garden at the trading post. He claimed that “walled garden,” in the language of Persia, was another expression for paradise. Mom said that a walled garden would do her more good than any psychiatrist.
She spoke of putting one of Grandpa’s rugs here and this one there, a certain pot here and a certain one there, a ceremonial basket over every door, with the traditional weaver’s path in each basket pointing east, naturally.
She would like it here.
Grandma Frieda showed me to a small bedroom on the third floor that had a panoramic view of the town.
“Beautiful,” I said.
While I was reading on the bed in the late afternoon, I heard Iris unpacking in her room, which seemed to be across the hall. I liked that. For a while I would live in a fine house in a real city.
Why make plans in this life? As soon as you do, the currents change, the wind shifts, the waves come up, and off you go where the ocean wills, for better or for much worse. But you ride the waves, you stay afloat, you survive, you thrive.
Twenty-seven
I hurried down the hallway. A rug from Belgium ran its length, and a small carved table sat in the center under a mirror.
“Seaman Goldman, please.” It was a female voice of some authority, probably a secretary to a bigwig.
“This is him.” A telephone in the downstairs entryway—imagine having a phone in your own house.
She said, “Mr. Leland Chapman, as you may know, is director of security for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad.”
“Yes.” Jack Ford had called an hour ago to tell me about it. He had called the president of the railroad to recommend me as a security officer—a railroad dick! In a tone of amusement, Jack added, “Howard Hughes made the same call for you.” Probably after Jack suggested it, I thought.
The secretary continued. “Would you be available at the depot office in Lamy, New Mexico, on Tuesday next at ten A.M.? Mr. Chapman would like to speak with you.”
‘Tuesday next’—that was how ritzy people talked. I said, “Sure.”
Lamy was eighteen miles south of Santa Fe. Crazy but the main line of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe didn’t go to Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico. The last eighteen miles of mountains, they’d decided, were too steep and too rough. Either that, or the railroad magnates didn’t have what it took to build that track.
* * *
Somehow, during the next few days, Iris and I found time alone together to talk about what we had seen, heard, and felt. About the horrible deeds that had smashed the peace of our home, about almost losing Grandpa, Mom, and about Iris’s own near brush with death. It was all just too much to think about at once. What we both needed was comfort from another person who’d also gone through it. And that’s what Iris was—comfort, home, and warmth.
And what about her painting dreams? She had left her painting haven behind, a land that inspired her and energized her. I had left future dreams and also my past behind. New dreams were being born, but they still had small voices. I had gained Mr. John. My feelings for him crept up on me and were a surprise. Truth is, he felt like an uncle.
At noon, the day before my railroad interview, Grandpa came home from the hospital. After that, he would go to the hospital every morning. Otherwise, he was at the house. Unable to use his walker yet, but he was home and he could soak up the beauty of the walled garden, the paradise.
I had gone to a wonderful shop in Santa Fe and bought a surprise for my grandfather to keep on hand when he came home. Grandma Frieda brought out a bottle of champagne. “Welcome home, Mose!” she declared, and popped the cork.
A couple of lifts of champagne flutes all around, and the bottle was empty.
Now I brought out his real homecoming gift, a gift that was his alone. “My turn to welcome you home, Grandpa.”
I walked across the room, and I pulled it out of the closet. It wasn’t wrapped, because Grandpa couldn’t do much about wrapping paper with only one good working hand. It was a brand-new Underwood typewriter. I set it right where his plate had been.
Grandpa’s hand dived straight for his chalkboard. He wrote, CAN’T.
Meaning he couldn’t type.
“You’ll learn,” I said.
Iris pulled a stack of paper from bene
ath her chair, her collaboration with my surprise. “One-handed peck,” she said, and rolled a blank piece of paper into the Underwood.
“And after a while two-handed,” I pitched in. “Your therapist says typing will be good exercise for your right hand.”
Grandpa studied the keys. I thought the look on his face was more surrender than eagerness. He wrote on his board, WHAT?
Meaning, ‘What on earth would I write?’
“Write whatever you want to.”
Grandpa pulled out his chalkboard. NO IDEAS.
“Then start here: Tell the adventure of you and The Monster.” I had decided to call my nonfather by that name, having promised Mom never to say his actual name, although I said it in my head a few times and then pushed it away. “Adikai Begay” sounded too human, too real. The man was a monster. Let him be called that.
I went on, “Tell how Monster kidnapped you, took you out to that place on the slickrock, tied you up, and abandoned you to die, slowly, of starvation and thirst.
“Then how you freed yourself, struggled one-handed and one-legged up that hill, then cut loose on a crazy ride downhill, crashing and breaking your leg. After you’d gotten near the road, where we couldn’t help but find you.
“It’s a heroic story, Grandpa. One that everyone in the family should know about and remember.”
He tried to say something. “Kah” came out. He tried again and managed, “eroh.”
I couldn’t guess it.
On his blackboard he wrote, QXTE.
“Right. Exactly so. Don Quixote, sometimes comic, sometimes heroic.”
Always heroic, that seemed more like the truth to me. He gave his nutty grin.
I spread my hands. “You are the Don. Overcoming all odds, you kicked the windmill down.”
He pointed a finger at me. “Pan.”
I bowed to him. “And I, at your service, am Sancho Panza.”
With his good hand he clapped the lame one.
* * *
That afternoon Grandpa and I played chess. We talked. Or I talked. So many feelings to get out, dreams, stories. I would have loved to hear his voice. But some part of me liked talking and getting nothing but nods and wise looks in return. Left me free to do my own thinking, and get his nods, growls, or cheers.
