by C. J. Howell
The poncho was a good move. He was picked up by the first vehicle he faced down, a late model Range Rover. It wasn’t lost on him that with the poncho on, he might not look like a bum. He could be anybody with the bad luck to have to hitchhike in the rain.
The passenger side window descended automatically and a friendly voice asked where he was going. Tom didn’t know, because he didn’t know exactly where he was, but he knew he was in Arizona, so rather than scare the man with something like, ‘down the road,’ he said ‘Phoenix,’ the only town he could think of in under a second.
Hop in.
He looked at the upholstered interior, clean, practically manicured. He could smell the freshness of the air inside, the new car smell of another class, another world that he dimly remembered.
Hold on, I don’t want to mess up your car.
He pulled off the poncho and unstrapped the pack. He got in the front seat and awkwardly pushed his pack and poncho into the narrow back seat.
He shut the door.
Safe.
The car started to move.
Don’t worry. Been camping for the last two weeks, gonna clean it out when I get home. The car didn’t look like it. Tom felt like he’d been camping for two years, and there was no getting clean.
Paul.
Tom.
They shook hands. The truck bounced back onto the highway and accelerated. They cleared the last remnants of the town in less than a minute and headed out into the desert. Out of town they rounded a hill, the few trees faded to none and they settled on a flat plain stretching to sights unseen. Towns always seemed to be placed around some feature with a benefit, no matter how slight, a hill, a clump of trees, but the spaces in between were truly no man’s land.
So where you been camping?
Chapter 10
Despite Lorne’s obvious deficiencies, he was not an uncharismatic man. He was young, but he almost always got along with people with all manner of experience. To his credit, he never misused this ability.
About the time that Hailey was being harassed by Larry McCabe and made her escape from the Barking Spider, Lorne sunk into his chair, the small room in the small house somewhere in the wasteland smelling like burnt aluminum, his eyes as glassy as the stuffed elk’s head hanging above the door at the Tavern, and he felt fear akin to the same fear Hailey was feeling, not fear exactly, but dread. The one who’d been sitting on the couch named Chevis was wheeling around the room with a .357 magnum. He stalked in circles with long strides stepping on the couch and then leaping back onto the floor talking with his hands and jabbing the revolver at whomever he was talking to like he was shanking them in the gut, sweat pulsing from his closely shaved head. At least the gun wasn’t loaded, Lorne thought, or it hadn’t been before; now there was no way to be sure.
They had all plateaued. They weren’t going up anymore, but they were a long way from coming down. Lorne couldn’t remember when he’d stopped talking about Tom and his mission and when the others had picked up the trails and woven them into a plan, a philosophy that became a plan. It was a plan that could only be hatched at four in the morning, that only was ever hatched at four in morning. They would go intercept Tom at the Hoover Dam. Help him defeat the terrorists, or at least witness the fiasco. It all made sense. And they had nothing better to do.
Lorne took another hit of meth off the pipe, and the feeling of dread passed. And then it came back. And then it was gone again.
We should to get his car running, Pam said, gesturing with her thumb at Lorne like she was hitchhiking.
That sounded good to Lorne.
We have an obligation to uphold…a duty…a tradition, Chevis said, spinning toward Lorne and pointing the .357 at his chest like he was working a Powerpoint presentation. Lorne stared directly into the barrel. It looked dark and wide. A bare light bulb reflected off of the silver chamber.
I know someone who’s good with cars, the boy said.
It’s probably just out of gas. Pammy rolled on her axis. Why else would they stop here?
Do you know why we Navajo are the first to sign up for the army and fight in all of the wars? Chevis shook the gun at Lorne like he was trying flick dogshit off his finger.
You’re warriors, Lorne said, finding his grin, and then not sure if he was being respectful, tried his best to look stoic.
Bullshit. It’s because we signed a treaty. The treaty says there will be peace between the Navajo nation and the United States of America and that either side will come to the defense of the other in war.
Jimmy, the Indian at the end of the couch who moved little except to touch knuckles with Pam and looked like he had never cut his hair, not once, croaked his only words of the evening.
That’s why each tribe sends soldiers to the army. We are holding up our side of the bargain.
Right on brother, Lorne said, sliding away from the hot glare of the revolver and pointing at Jimmy with both his hands, thumbs up and index fingers out, in the shape of pistols.
Jimmy smiled yellow teeth and pointed back at him, a little glistening trail of spittle winding its way through his scraggly goatee.
This shit’s not funny.
Chevis pointed the .357 at the ceiling and pulled the trigger a half dozen times inducing a half dozen dry clicks. The gun wasn’t loaded. Lorne had been right the first time.
We’re gonna fuck those terrorists up.
Chevis was born Charles Wilson Begay, but for as long he could remember people called him Chevis. Also for as long as he could remember he knew why people called him Chevis—because his mother drank Chivas Regal whenever she could get someone to buy her a drink at JJ’s Roadhouse on highway 160 a couple miles off the res and a couple more miles outside of Second Mesa. That way people could say, boy that woman really loves her Chevis in clear conscience, a Navajo sort of joke. Chevis knew his name was meant as joke, but he never tried to get people to call him anything else. He figured there were worse things to be named after.
He had many memories of JJ’s Roadhouse from his youth, or at least of the backseat of his mother’s Chevy Nova parked behind JJ’s Roadhouse, which was his playpen for the long hours of the evenings and, more often that not, his bed. Whatever else that experience did, it fostered a love of cars, which lead to the seminal event of his life. When he was sixteen he stole a tourist’s Ford Mustang left idling at the Second Mesa Gas and Gifts and was arrested twenty minutes and thirty miles down 160 West. He was unlucky in that he was pulled over a dozen miles off the res, so rather than being pulled over by Navajo Tribal Police and taken to Navajo Tribal Court where the incident may have been treated differently, he was arrested by a State Trooper and tried in Mohave County as an adult and sentenced to fifteen months in Florence State Penitentiary. It was the defining moment of his life because it meant two things. First, he couldn’t get into the army, since even though the army had drastically relaxed their recruiting standards because of the shortage of troops needed for Iraq, they still weren’t taking convicted felons, and second, in prison he learned how to make and use methamphetamine.
Upon his release he found he had sole ownership of his mother’s small house and his little brother, whom he only called Junior. Unbeknownst to Chevis, he had spent the last three months of his sentence less than a hundred yards from his mother who had begun serving an eighteen year sentence at Florence for vehicular manslaughter. She had fallen asleep at the wheel after an evening drinking Chevis Regal at JJ’s and hit a minivan head on, killing the other driver and two of the three children in the backseat.
Junior didn’t have Chevis’s childhood, mostly because of Jimmy and Pam. Instead of playing by himself in the back of the Chevy Nova, Junior walked the hills and explored the mesas and canyons with Jimmy, hunting rabbits, and whitetail deer if they were lucky, and looking for antlers or uniquely shaped pieces of wood to carve into bottle openers and other trinkets. They also looked for turquoise, topaz and obsidian to make jewelry, sometimes with cheap silver if they had eno
ugh money, otherwise with thirty-gauge copper wire. They also looked for peyote and mushrooms that grew briefly after the monsoon rains, if the rains came. Pot they had to buy or trade for.
Pammy worked as a cook at a Barbecue joint in Tuba City midweek, driving the two hundred miles round trip to come home on the weekends with bags of pulled pork, baked beans, and black-eyed peas with dirty rice. On weekends they ate and she smoked meth, or glass as it was called at present.
Meth didn’t affect Junior as it did the others, it was just another way to find his center, calmed him, but without the hallucinations and perversions of reality that peyote and mushrooms caused. It made the others act like they were tripping when they weren’t. Sometimes this amused the boy, but mostly he stayed out of the way, especially when they’d been up for several days on end.
When Chevis returned, he was happy to find the home occupied by Junior, Jimmy, and Pam. Of course he claimed the only bedroom in the house—after fifteen months in the joint, he deserved it. But he’d also grown accustomed to not being alone. He was hurt that his mother was not there, but the hurt was vastly overshadowed by the feeling of freedom and violence that surged through him upon his release from Florence. He had always been pretty good at school, Junior too, but the idea of a straight job was ridiculous now, even if there were any jobs to be had, which there weren’t. There was only one thing to do, make meth, which could be made out of ingredients that were readily available: Sudafed, baking powder, liquid Drano, and rat poison. Prison had taught him one thing, he didn’t owe anybody anything, and getting out of prison gave him the most incredible feeling of his life—that he could do anything. Anything.
We’re gonna fuck those terrorists up.
Chevis was feeling the inner power that comes from prison and meth, and what he wanted at the moment was to be the soldier that the United States government wouldn’t let him be. Prison gave him the strength. Meth made everything draw into this singular moment and make the present be the past and the future too.
Come on motherfuckers!
Everyone laughed.
Chevis had an evil grin. Lorne knew what it meant. He was feeling good now. Time to saddle up.
You want to hit the road? Pammy had bloody eyes. She shook her head like she was saying no but she was saying yes.
We need to get his car working, Junior said with a distant smile, nodding at Lorne.
Junior, go see what’s wrong with it. Chevis gave the order like he was platoon commander.
The boy went out the front door, letting in the first rays of dawn.
We’ll need money, Chevis said, holding the gun flat against the side of his face, as if the feel of cold steel helped him think.
How much money do you have?
Lorne flipped open his wallet.
Thirteen bucks.
That’s it? I thought Junior said you had money? Where’s Junior?
The boy was outside.
Well, I gave you my last two twenties for the shit, you know.
Chevis nodded his head vigorously and waived at him dismissively, already digesting and plotting.
Yeah, yeah, don’t worry, we’re good. But shit, it’s not enough.
How much shit you got?
Plenty, why?
Sell it.
Shit, Pammy jumped in, don’t you think we would if we could? A few tweakers come by to score, but most of the people who are into it out here make their own. It’s not rocket science. I mean we get by, but it’s no empire.
I know a guy who’d buy. As usual Lorne’s mouth got ahead of him. Another surge of dread hit Lorne, panic almost, but then it passed. He always heard the voice that warned him not to do things, and he almost always ignored it.
Chevis cocked a wry smile.
I knew you came here for a reason.
Lorne was thinking of Bullfrog Frank who ran a small bar in Alpine, a good hundred and fifty miles to the south east, not far from the Arizona/New Mexico line.
The screen door slapped open and shut, and they all snapped their heads. The boy was back.
I think it’s just out of gas. I’ll go siphon some out of the weed whacker.
The gas powered weed whacker along with a saw and two pairs of work gloves had been Jimmy’s idea to try and get some work clearing the brush and undergrowth around the tourist cabins and second homes in the mountains around Pinetop, where there was a casino and a ski area. People had to create fire-safe spaces around their homes to make them defensible against forest fires. If they didn’t they would be the fire fighter’s last priority, not worth the effort and resources. A huge fire had swept through the year before, burning over a million acres, and there was plenty of work. But when Pammy’s car died so did the plan. No way to get there. The weed whacker primarily served as a fuel storage container; this was not the first time they’d siphoned gas from it, although Jimmy kept the brittle yellowed thistle stalks trimmed for twenty yards around the perimeter of the house so they’d be safe from brush fires, even if there wasn’t enough desert grass here to spread a fire. Too much rock and sand.
Chevis sent Junior out to get the car started. When they heard the Chevy’s big 350 roar to life they poured out of the little house, shielding their faces from the daylight and donning sunglasses. Chevis got behind the wheel. Lorne figured it was because of his foot, but Chevis hadn’t asked. Pammy rode shotgun on account of her size. Lorne was relegated to the backseat in between skinny Jimmy and a skinnier Junior.
Chevis plowed through the wind blown sand bar that had built up around the Malibu over the last day and fishtailed down the dirt and gravel road. They had just enough gas to make it to the nearest town where they hit rain. They bought a five gallon red plastic container of gasoline from the General Store. There were no pumps in town. Chevis emptied the container into the tank, smoking a cigarette and thumping his hand on the roof of the Malibu to Snoop Dogg pumping from the dashboard tape deck—As the sun rotates and my game grows bigger, how many bitches want to fuck this nigga?
The road worsened outside of town, turning muddy and deeply pitted. Chevis scarcely lightened up on the pedal, the weight in the car helping to keep it on the road. Mud splattered the length of the car and completely covered the back window. The air inside the Malibu was thick with condensation broken only when Pammy cracked the window to vent the continual exhalations of white smoke.
When they reached State Route 160 they turned left and headed east. The were not far from where Chevis’s life had taken its fateful turn in the stolen Mustang five years back, and not far from Tom, who was at this moment heading the opposite direction on 160 West.
The desert was gray and desolate, and in the cocoon of the car it made Lorne feel as if they were hidden somehow, even if in reality four Indians and Lorne passing a glass pipe in a rusted and mud sprayed Chevy Malibu was far from invisible. As they ate up miles on 160 East, the rain lightened and eventually stopped. They passed through Kayenta and Dinnetiotso without slowing down. The only landmark at Cow Springs was a gas station that had burnt down, blackened walls uneven, left to melt, a fire that had been allowed to burn itself out. A thirty foot blue and white sign read $1.17 a gallon. They turned south at Navajo Route 59 just short of the truck stop town of Mexican Water, which they rode to the intersection of State Route 191 at Many Farms. To the right mountains potted with red cliffs and stunted pinions, to the left an occasional trailer and hogan adrift on a sea of desert expanse. A half dozen cattle stood in a sliver of shade against a sandstone butte not more than fifty yards off the road. They cruised along at an even eighty, bouncing on the rolling gray asphalt with no centerline. A few miles before Many Farms, a black and white Arizona Department of Transportation road sign that would have read:
REDUCE
SPEED
AHEAD
had letters strategically blotted out with white paint so it read:
RED
PEE
AHEAD
Many Farms looked like a dozen reservation towns they
had passed, with its government built houses with alternating blue, red, and green roofs laid out in a repeating pattern. No other buildings. A town with no stores. A suburb without shopping.
They turned right on State Route 191, and traffic slowed though Chinle, a clog of tractors and pickups in no hurry on the two lane double yellow-line. At Chinle they had to slow down as half a dozen cows crossed the road, or rather, began to cross and then stopped to stare at the cars, unattended, before meandering back to the shoulder to graze on the sprouts of snakeweed and brittlebush. The only traffic light in town, at the intersection on Navajo Route 64, was blinking yellow. Jimmy elbowed Lorne, who was in the middle backseat riding bitch.
Down that way’s Canyon de Chelle.
Canyon de what?
Nevermind.
Seventy miles past Chinle the landscape transformed from barren desert to grassy prairie leading to pine forests. Basalt, red mesas and jagged rock outcroppings were replaced by mountains steeped in evergreens arching to blue sky and fast moving white puffy clouds. They steadily gained elevation and rolled down the windows to take in the fresh air—at eight thousand feet it was cool and crisp. Junior smiled. Jimmy nodded in agreement.
The road cut into trees along the mountainsides following a river down below.
Chevis snuffed out another cigarette in the ashtray.
This guy’s going to be there, right?
Should be.
He don’t have a cell phone? You can’t call him?
Hell, I don’t have a cell phone.
Me neither.
They all laughed. It seemed funny at the time.
The woods thickened and the tops of the pines obscured the sun. The trees cast long thin shadows across the road that washed over the car at dizzying speed, creating a strobe light effect in the back of Lorne’s dilated pupils that he found paralyzing. For a moment that lasted a lifetime, Lorne forgot where he was. And then the mountains parted, and the river widened into a long meadow that filled the valley. The road pulled away from the river and through the meadow to the town of Alpine. Alpine sat on the tip of the meadow in the crease of a new mountain range that guarded the border with New Mexico, at the intersection of 191 South and 180 East. A small collection of buildings along a single street, 180 East, which lead to New Mexico fifteen miles away. There were no stoplights, or sidewalks, or any indication that any one lived here except for jeep trails and wagon tracks that led to homes somewhere in the forest. They slowed down to take the turn onto 180 East. The meadow sloped downward all the way to the river, and 180 East was a steep rippled street, with a bar, two restaurants, a gas station, and a souvenir shop in lock step up the grade. They drove uphill through town and pulled onto the dirt shoulder.
