He laughed. “You love these two fingers, anyway. We’ll see about the rest of me.”
Now that she was acquiescent, that he had named her his, he withdrew his hand and took hold of her shoulders. He slid his body over hers and entered her easily, and set about making himself happy.
“If you don’t wake up, we’ll miss our ride.”
“For Christ’s sake, Junior. I’m not asleep. You’re not asleep. Nobody got any sleep.”
“What can I say? We had a busy night. Get your clothes on. All of them.”
“Why all of them?”
He gave her bare butt a playful slap. “It’ll be cold down there. Layer your things. You can always take something off if you get too warm.”
“I’m not good with cold. I’m better with blankets and snuggling. Come here and I’ll show you.”
He looked down at her, sloe-eyed and convincing in the tousled clutch of sheets. Her blond hair was so wild and tangled it would take half an hour to work out the knots. “Later.”
“You’re no fun,” she grumbled.
He sat on the edge of the bed and kissed her a few times, slid his hand under the sheets and touched the now familiar places that made her sigh.
“Well, maybe you’re a little fun.”
He handed her clothes over to her, the jeans over from where they lay on the floor, the bra from under the pillow, and after five minutes of searching, the plain cotton panties that had somehow ended up in the pocket of his beaded jacket. She stood before him, cranky but fully clothed.
It was freezing out front of the lodge. To acknowledge that it was snowing was to invite a storm, but light flakes were definitely falling. Junior could tell Chloe was having second thoughts about the canyon trek. Particularly now that the jolly tourist group who had signed up for the Jeep tour were emerging from the cafeteria. They were clad in matching turquoise jackets with white lettering. Some kind of group-rate thing, he figured. Armed with cameras and sightseers’ determination, they were far too happy for this early on such a fragile morning. He knew Chloe would just as soon spend the day feeding stray dogs. If the seniors started singing camp songs, she’d freak. He spoke a little Navajo with the guide, Jared Tuchawena, cousin of somebody who’d known Jimmy a long time ago but didn’t remember Jimmy ever having a son. He said it was okay; they could ride in the cab with him.
“I got all sidetracked after the war,” Jared explained. “Only been back in Chinlé about ten years now.”
“That’s about the time I left,” Junior said.
“And you?” the guide asked Chloe. “Your first time to the canyon?”
She nodded. “Total newcomer.”
Jared delivered his spiel, explained that, yes, there were two bathroom stops along the way, then warned everyone to hold on to their seats. He maneuvered the Jeep down into the canyon, four-wheeling along the sandy washes, fishtailing in and out of the streambeds, giving the tourists their money’s worth. At the first bend of the road, he stopped and cut the motor to give some background on the route they would be traveling. Junior and Chloe remained seated in the cab as he pulled a hand-loomed rug from beneath the seat.
He stood on the truck’s running board and delivered his spiel. “This here genuine Navajo Yeibichei rug, na’aki, ladies and gentleman, priced far below Trading Post cost. Yei dancers are healing spirits. Great souvenir of your trip to Canyon de Chelly. Instant heirloom. My auntie work a whole year on this rug.
“Well, maybe three months,” he confided as he handed it to Chloe back inside the cab when there were no takers. Three young girls appeared from behind a waiting pickup truck, hoping to sell necklaces fashioned of dyed corn kernels. The tourists bought several, and the girls ran back to their mother in the red pickup, fists full of dollar bills, grinning.
Watching them, Chloe said, “Don’t those girls look happy?”
“It’s not so hard to be happy,” Junior answered her.
“What’s hard,” Jared offered, “is selling a rug to a bunch of bilagáana bargain hunters.”
He drove on. Junior held onto the backpack inside which he’d placed the box of Jimmy’s ashes. With each passing mile, he could feel himself becoming lighter.
Jared said, “Your horses are just up ahead, with my cousin’s nephew, Billy. If you don’t mind, I’ll drop you here. It’s about time for me to have another go at unloading this rug.”
“Thanks, Jared.”
The guide shook his hand and smiled. “Have yourselves a nice ride.”
“We’ll do our best.”
Junior spotted the ponies and the young man waving to him. The boy handed the reins over and rode off on his own horse, a flashy Appaloosa who still wore his winter coat. Their rental horses were true Indian ponies, mixed in heritage, mouse brown, strictly for transport. Chloe took an instant liking to the smaller of the two and went over every inch of his tack, adjusting buckles.
“Everything meet with your approval?” Junior asked her. “Or do we need to send out for fancy replacements?”
She stuck out her tongue and tried to hoist herself into the stirrups. “Ow. Well, that’s not going to work. Give me a leg up.”
Junior came up behind her, placing his hands on her buttocks. “Don’t tell me the ace horsewoman is losing her chops?”
“No, she isn’t, thank you very much. I think I pulled about a jillion muscles last night, that’s all. Which is your fault. Can I get some help or just attitude?”
He gave her a boost. “Sore muscles to remember me by. Guess that’s better than nothing.”
Her face clouded over. “Goddamn you, Whitebear.”
“I was just making a stupid joke.”
“Stupid’s about the right word for it.”
“Forget I said anything.”
She was quiet for a few minutes. “You know, neither one of us had a wink of sleep, I’m so sore from fucking I can hardly sit this horse. We haven’t eaten breakfast, and nobody’s said word one about what’s going to happen when we finish this ride.”
Junior stopped, waited until Chloe was even alongside him, then leaned across his horse and kissed her mouth. He reached inside her jacket and fondled her breasts. “Here’s all I know. When I touch you, nothing else matters. For right now, I’m going with that.” He pressed a finger to her lips before she could say anything. “Let’s deliver Jimmy and enjoy the canyon. Later on, we’ll eat and figure everything out, talk until we lose our voices. Right now all we need to do is head over this way, ride a couple miles, unload this burden, pray a little. There’s time for everything, Chloe. Trust me.”
“I trust you.”
“Then there’s no problem.”
“It’s me I don’t trust.”
He sighed. “Awéé’, you have more horse sense in your little finger than anyone I know. Your heart knows what it wants to do. You left your worries in the basket and that’s where they belong. No more talking. Just ride with me.”
With his heel, Junior nudged his horse forward. They kept to a trot, their jacket collars pulled upright against the morning air. The canyon walls were high and sheltering, ocher and brick red, streaked dark in places with oxides that marked the various ages of the earth and the blood that had been shed here. Junior adjusted the heavy backpack. He looked forward to feeling it slack against his back on the return ride. The sun filled the canyon slowly, reaching down the walls and glancing off rocks.
“Navajos weren’t the only tribe to wander this canyon,” he told Chloe. “Utes, refugees from the neighboring Pueblos, came and went. Everybody borrowed from each other’s ways. It all contributed to the Dinéh culture. If it wasn’t for the Spaniards, who knows when we would have acquired horses? But horses were a high price to pay.”
“For what?”
Junior pointed out various pictographs decorating the rocks. In the center of a group of the riders was the outline of a tall man, a white cross decorating his dark cape. “Massacre,” Junior said. “Bows and arrows might have been a fair fight, but
Lieutenant Antonio Narbona brought rifles in. He harvested the ears of some eighty-four warriors. He wasn’t after saving souls or procuring slaves, he just wanted to do a little sport hunting. The People took refuge in caves, behind the ledges, like that one, there, far up on the cliff. You can see the marks where the soldiers’ bullets ricocheted off the rock walls. Plucked them off like they were ground squirrels. Oscar would tell you this place is chindee, haunted.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I know that the sadness I feel here comes from prehistoric loss. If it had been Kit Carson carrying out the army’s orders in 1863, there might have been a little less bloodshed. At least Redshirt had some respect for the People, having traded with them. Not Narbona. And General Carleton only had a score to settle.”
“So your people lost the war?”
“You can’t really call systematic decimation of some farmers and their families a war, Chloe. When the daily kill got too small to be satisfying to the army, they marched whoever was left to Fort Sumner, instilled them at Bosque Redondo. It took the army four long years to admit that resettling the Navajo into a land totally unlike their own wasn’t going to pan out. So they signed a treaty, let us come back. Precious little of what’s in the treaty matters when the government decides there’s something of worth on reservation land.”
Chloe reached out and touched a branch of a cottonwood. “It’s so beautiful here. Hearing what you’re saying, the stuff that never makes it into the history books, I wonder how you can stand to associate with anyone who isn’t Indian.”
“You forget I’m not full blood. Lots of people feel the way you’re describing. That’s part of what AIM was about. Where I lived in Massachusetts was Indian land, once. There isn’t any place you can walk in the U.S. that doesn’t fit that description. The Indian part of me alternates between feeling conquered and murderous, but the white part of me, my mother’s blood, can’t quite rest easy there.”
“I don’t see why not.”
He shook his head. “It’s a tribal thing. It’s tribal, and I’ll never be part of that.”
Just past the Mummy Cave Overlook, Junior stopped his horse and dismounted. He motioned for Chloe to take his reins, and then he slipped the backpack off his shoulders. He opened the box that held Jimmy’s ashes, so much grainy dust. Even pulverized, bone contained substance. He ran his fingers through the matter, amazed at how pale was the color of the bones of that dark-skinned man who had made a religion out of beating his wife and terrorizing his only child. By handfuls he scattered the ashes into the wind. When the box was nearly empty, he spat into his palms, poured the remainder of the ash into his hands, slapped his caked palms against the red rock, pressing hard, leaving imprints. It was nowhere near as vivid or enduring as the signature handprints left by the Anasazi, but it constituted a kind of prayer. He bent his head and said some words. The marks would stay for a little while, Jimmy Whitebear’s final upraised hands, never again to land on human flesh.
On the return ride they stopped by a streambed and Junior washed his hands. “I can’t believe how this stuff is sticking to me,” he said, rubbing sand into his palms, trying to scrub away the ashes.
Chloe peeled the wrapper back from her candy bar and took a bite. “Junior, what kind of man was your father?”
He sat back on his heels, trailing his fingers through the chilly water, squinting up at the steep canyon walls. “A drunk, a good card player. Friendly to strangers. The ladies liked him well enough so that he hardly ever slept alone.”
Chloe poked him with the toe of her boot. “What kind of father was he?”
“Amá, don’t go there.”
“Come on, Junior. We drove all this way so you could spread his earthly remains in this canyon. You prayed. I watched your face while you were saying the words. You looked like somebody hit you. Is it taboo to talk about?”
“The Dinéh say so.”
“Couldn’t your white side tell me a little bit about him?”
Junior touched his bracelet, turning it on his thick wrist. Not his best work, but the silver glinted in the sunlight, and he recalled every step of making the piece, of finishing it early one winter morning, then getting up to look outside and seeing Jimmy Whitebear sprawled in the snow, unconscious. Junior had slipped on his boots and dragged his father inside, got him out of his wet clothes and into warm blankets. Then he lit out for Corrine’s. Honoring your elders was one thing, but he hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near when the bear awoke. Later he and Corrine had argued over something. When he returned home, Jimmy had completely leveled his workshop. Overturned anything that wasn’t nailed down. Stomped all his finished pieces to junk. It had taken Junior the better part of a week to get it all back in some kind of order. He couldn’t look at the bracelet without remembering that.
Chloe had taken off her jacket and unbuttoned her shirt halfway, pulled it wide open at the shoulders. One of her bra straps showed. She arched her neck, welcoming the sun on her body while she waited for his answer. She looked so beautiful that he didn’t want to speak. “Jimmy had a sickness inside him, I think. Something that burned like a coal fire. For a long time I hated him.”
“Why?”
“The beatings, the drunks, take your pick. I still can’t fathom or forgive what he did to my mother. But the older I get the more I see how scared and messed up he was. All he knew was booze and fists. Meanness. I think the lesson is for me to always be there for Dog, no matter what he decides to do with his life.”
“Why in hell would he beat you? Were you stealing cars? Doing drugs, what?”
“Let’s just say I enjoyed my share of trouble. Mostly I think he beat me because I was there to beat.”
Chloe folded the wrapper back over the candy bar and set it down on the backpack.
“You’ve been crying hungry since last night. Where’s your appetite?”
“Gone forever.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Between your father and thinking about those mothers and their babies being marched out of here, mourning perfectly decent husbands and fathers, how am I supposed to sit here scarfing chocolate? That letter from my mother was postmarked Tucson, Junior, pretty damn close to Mexico. Take a look at my daughter’s skin. Do the math. Maybe somewhere back there, I’m related to those soldiers, Junior, just like your family goes back to these people.”
“That’s a long way back, Chloe. Don’t go Catholic on me.”
“It’s not. And it’s just as horrible now as it was then. All my life I’ve belonged to nobody, had no history except what I chose to make up. Now I get to feel shitty for the sins of my stinking ancestors. Someday you’ll probably want to throw me off a cliff like that ear-hunting asshole Narbona.”
Junior smiled. “There’s a legend, and probably it’s true, that he went after a Navajo woman who was hiding in one of the ledges, jeering at him, and he found her, fought with her, and they both fell off the cliff together. The cliff’s name is ah tah ho do nilly, ‘two fell off.’ I don’t want to throw you off the rocks, Chloe. I just want to love you.”
“Sometimes I freak that I might be a terrible mother to Reed no matter how hard I try. I mean, I had nobody to show me how to love her, and the stuff that happened to me happened. Isn’t child abuse supposed to be some sort of chain reaction, some unavoidable—”
Junior put his hand over her mouth. “Are you going to let me love you?”
He took his hand away. Her mouth trembled. “I think my heart’s a lot like this canyon, Junior. There’s been so many battles fought in here. It’s weary, untrustworthy. Divided in affections.”
“Seems like a generous heart to me. Room in there for red-haired teenagers, the most beautiful little baby girl I ever held in my hands, every stray dog that walks the earth. You just keep tucking in people and animals and somehow they all fit.”
“Right, and now I’m supposed to fit a long-lost mother in there, too?”
“Why not? And maybe a half-
breed jeweler?”
Chloe leaned against his shoulder. “I want to. Reed fits. Kit fits. I wish you could have met the juvenile felons I taught riding back home, these huge black and Mexican gang boys. They fit so easily. And so many horses. Check this out: A year and a half ago, I was working my way out of major debt, trying to live a regular life, and wham, along comes this professor and somehow I end up in this beautiful, sad canyon in love with two men at the same time. Go figure.”
Junior frowned. “Spider Rock looks like one good wind tearing through the canyon should be able to blow the whole thing down, but it’s still standing. These petrogylphs predate the scientists’ carbon tests. Corn and peaches grow here on very little water. Creeks that run to rivers in the winter go bone dry in the summer, and somehow the people who got forced from their home keep coming back. I have a son who forgives me for not knowing him the first eight years of his life. I’m raising a wolf-dog. All of a sudden the silver is talking to me again, and I did nothing to deserve that. You just spent the night with me. Magic. After that, don’t you think anything’s possible?”
Loving Chloe Page 31
