The Big Wander

by Will Hobbs

  “Oh yeah, and when you leave, be sure to trade the burro and the gear for as much cash as you can get.”

  Then his brother was getting on the bus, waving, and then sitting by the window waving as the bus pulled out. Clay was waving too and fighting back tears. He swallowed hard and watched the bus until it gradually merged with the desert’s horizon and finally blinked out. His brother was gone.

  Those first few days he wasn’t so sure he could make it without Mike, or if he wanted to. At home, days could go by with his brother hardly even being around, but that was different. In the truck they’d been thick as thieves, and now there were thousands of miles between them and not even a trace left behind to show they’d even been on the road together.

  He’d never been this far away from home, that was for sure. As he calculated that Mike must be nearing Seattle he could picture himself hopping on a bus and heading back too. Maybe Mike was right, that’s what he’d do. And Guatemala seemed even farther away than it had before. Maybe he would head back home. Even if he wouldn’t see much of Mike, it would be good to have him close by.

  But Clay held on into the fourth day and the fifth and the sixth. He kept badgering himself to keep believing he could stay on here by himself. Maybe it was stubbornness that kept him going. He didn’t want his brother to think he couldn’t make it on his own.

  When he felt lonely he thought of Uncle Clay leaving home at fourteen. Uncle Clay must have felt lonely too. Even when Uncle Clay got older he still felt lonely—you could see it in his eyes when he’d come to visit now and again. But you could see as well in his grin and in the way those eyes would shine as he spoke of the mountains and the deserts, that he knew life was lived best as an adventure, and he wouldn’t trade his wandering, lonely way of life for any other.

  Even in the clatter and commotion of mealtimes, with thirty or forty tourists all chattering at once, he’d keep glancing at the photos on the walls and lose himself in those big empty places. I still think Uncle Clay is out there, he kept telling himself. He’s not in Canada. He’s out there.

  Right on Mr. Whitmore’s cash register in the trading post, he posted the photograph of his uncle with the notice underneath: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? IF SO, CONTACT CLAY IN THE DINING ROOM.

  A few tourists just wanted to know who the man with the burro was and all, but nobody had seen him.

  With each day that he stayed Clay felt himself growing stronger. Maybe he wouldn’t hop on that bus anytime soon. Maybe he could stay the whole summer as he’d thought. Maybe he would, and maybe he should.

  He’d always been a hiker. When his days off came he took Pal out on long hikes through Monument Valley. No pack, just the halter and lead rope. He discovered that Pal didn’t take kindly to being led; she’d plant her front feet and make you tow her like a ship on dry land. But if you walked alongside she liked it just fine. She wants to feel like we’re in this together, Clay thought. More of a partner.

  Clay wrote letters: to his mother, to Mike, to Marilyn. Marilyn was becoming more important to him all the time.

  He found he could tell her things the way he wouldn’t tell them to anyone else. He could let her know his heart, his innermost feelings. Well, not everything, but the way he felt about the desert, the red cliffs, the sunsets. And he was beginning to explain how he felt about her too. “Write me care of Goulding’s Trading Post,” he wrote. “I’m really looking forward to hearing from you and finding out what you thought of that shark’s tooth. I’ve been thinking maybe a jeweler could drill a tiny hole in it and hang it on a delicate gold chain. Then you could wear it around your neck.”

  Along about the ninth of July, he got a new offer from Mrs. Whitmore. Would he like to go over and help out at the other, smaller trading post at Oljeto twelve miles to the west, where they needed him even more? For a week at least and maybe longer if he liked it? “It’s around the back side of the mesa,” she explained. “A few tourists wander through now and then, but it’s the real thing, strictly trading with the Navajos. You’ll be doing some of everything as opposed to just working in the dining hall here. You could learn a lot from old Weston, maybe even ride the horses.”

  Clay thought about it. He thought hard. It was fun being around the tourists and all the activity, but working at a remote trading post, that would be something to tell Mike about and Marilyn too. “Can I take my burro?” he asked Mrs. Whitmore.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  She found him an old Navajo man to teach him how to pack Pal right. Clay couldn’t tell if Charlie Dilatsi didn’t speak English or just didn’t talk, but he watched closely as Charlie cinched Pal’s forward and back belly cinches and adjusted the neck strap and the tail strap. When the pack boxes were packed—“panniers,” Hubcap Willie had called them—the Navajo tarped Pal’s load and secured it with a diamond hitch, which Clay more or less remembered from scouts.

  When he was all ready he mailed a postcard to Mike, telling him he’d be over at the other trading post where there was no phone and not to worry. He could still send mail. Clay bought himself a new pair of jeans, a long-sleeved plaid shirt, and a black Stetson that he immediately creased down the middle. He looked over the cowboy boots but Mr. Whitmore said he’d probably be more comfortable in his own broken-in hiking boots. “One more thing,” Clay said, and picked himself out a fancy silk neckerchief, a blue one.

  “Well, you sure enough favor him,” Mr. Whitmore said, with a nod to indicate the photo on the cash register.

  Clay peeled loose his uncle’s photograph and stuck it in his pocket. “I surely hope to,” he said. He paid his money and walked out onto the porch. He felt like a new man.

  All that was left to do was fill his canteens and tie his backpack to Pal’s load. When he’d done that he clucked, “C’mon, Pal,” and steered down the dirt road that skirts the cliffs of the big island in the sky that lay between Goulding’s and Oljeto. Clay looked back, hoping there was someone to wave to. Charlie Dilatsi gave him a tiny wave, and now he could see Mrs. Whitmore up there by the dining hall waving vigorously under her blue bandanna.

  It seemed as if Pal and he had been together for years. The burro seemed content to take up once more the job she was born for, and Clay spent the day feeling exactly like his uncle and picturing Uncle Clay approaching from the distance, leading his burro. He wouldn’t say anything; he wouldn’t shout, “It’s me, Uncle Clay!” He’d let the realization come slowly into his uncle’s eyes and watch that trademark grin light up his uncle’s face.

  A man and his wife who’d wandered away from Goulding’s slowed their sedan, then stopped and asked if they could take his picture. “Don’t mind a bit,” he said cordially, and when they took his picture he realized it was a Polaroid camera they were using. “Could I have one of those pictures?” he asked on the spur of the moment. For Marilyn! was his next thought. This is going to be perfect!

  The couple was so pleased to oblige they stopped the car and got out, and as the man tore back the cover sheet Clay was able to see himself and the burro materializing right before his eyes. Just as they took the second picture, he wished he’d been tipping his hat. That would have made it even more perfect. He knew what he’d write for Marilyn on the border at the bottom of the picture: “The Lonesome Trail.”

  Crumbling stone buildings gave Oljeto Trading Post the appearance of a ruin. Clay liked how it was tucked against the cliffs and commanded a view out to the west as big as the country. You looked out across the broad flats of Oljeto Wash to buttes and high mesas with open sky between them, and towering over everything, the dark sloping mass of a mountain rising high and alone into the sky like a breaching whale.

  Two sheep were browsing among hulks of old cars and trucks, rusted-out cookstoves and heaps of tires. Chickens were pecking along the margin of a little garden fenced with wire, poles, and rusted bedsprings. A few of them were starting into the open gravel in front of the trading post. The leaders paused as if for cover at the base of an old-fas
hioned gas pump, the kind with the skinny glass top Clay liked because you could actually see the gasoline and the bright-colored balls that swirled around and around with the gas moving through.

  Clay paused before walking up closer and looked back across Oljeto Wash once again. At the foot of the mesa, surely, that was one of the Navajos’ homes called hogans. From this distance it looked simply like a mound of red earth.

  “If this place isn’t the real thing,” Clay said to himself, “then the real thing doesn’t exist. No billboards and baby rattlers out here, Mike.”

  He heard a sudden sound something like a burst of air through a tire valve, and just as quickly those chickens ran flapping and squawking back toward the garden. Clay looked up from one especially indignant hen with a stain of brown juice on her feathers, and saw for the first time an old man rocking back and forth behind the shade line on the porch.

  8

  Weston could spit prodigiously. Clay came to think that the old man had developed spitting into an art form. A thin old man under a straw hat with more veins on one face than Clay had ever seen, Weston spent most of the day rocking and chewing out on the porch. Every so often on the forward stroke he would spit tobacco juice in the direction of the mesa, “Hoskininni Mesa” he called it. Sometimes it seemed Weston might be trying for the mesa itself, and Clay chuckled thinking maybe he’d hit it a few times in his younger days.

  Whether or not Weston had two names Clay never found out. Weston’s daughter and son-in-law normally ran the place, but they had gone somewhere and Weston was minding the store more or less.

  Clay settled into the chores around the place. He brought in the eggs in the mornings, tended the garden, fed the two sorrel horses, swept the store and the porch, cleaned the bathroom, cooked eggs and hamburgers for him and Weston, made change for the Navajos. Right away he posted his uncle’s photograph with the caption HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? on the glass countertop where people couldn’t miss it.

  Weston did all the dealing when it came to the Navajos’ pawn. The people would come to the trading post to have their jewelry set aside for a line of credit so they could buy groceries, cloth, and hard goods, everything from nails to shovels. It seemed an awful shame to see the Navajo women take the rings right off their fingers and give them up across the counter. Even their silver squash blossom necklaces.

  The good thing about Weston, you could pester him with questions and he’d never tire of elaborating on an answer. Also he’d say yes in one form or another to any question you asked him, which seemed unusual and interesting.

  Maybe Weston just liked having someone around to talk to, Clay decided. The Navajos spoke barely enough English to trade, and the trader seemed to speak no Navajo at all. Quite a bit of the bartering was carried on with fingers raised for numbers. “Do they ever get their pawn back?” Clay asked.

  “Of course. You can’t sell it off within the time limit you agreed on, or they’d never do business with you again. If they pay what they owe by the time it’s due they get their jewelry back. If not, it’s gone, usually over to Goulding’s.”

  Clay loved to ask questions about the area, especially about where the Navajos lived. “Is Hoskininni Mesa named after a person?”

  “Sure is. He was the chief whose band hid out during the 1860s in that country out there—” Weston spat toward the mountain Clay had thought of as a rising whale, hitting an old galvanized bucket which gave off a convincing ring. “Kit Carson, you ever hear of him?”

  “Sure.”

  “Kit Carson scoured the reservation at the head of the U.S. Cavalry, rounded up the Navajos, and made ’em walk to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, hundreds of miles away for most. ‘The Long Walk,’ they still call it today. Destroyed their cornfields and killed their stock and cut down their peach trees. Starved ’em out. Anyway, Hoskininni’s band hid out in this remote country between here and Navajo Mountain and managed to live free during the years the Diné were in exile. ‘Dine’ is what they call themselves—it means ‘the People.’”

  “I never knew any of that.”

  “Yessir. As for Kit Carson, he wouldn’t talk of that campaign in his later days, so the story goes.”

  “They should make a movie of the true story of Kit Carson and the Navajos and Hoskininni. It sounds better than anything you could make up.”

  The trader spat. “Well, they should. You know, these Navajos have dressed up to play Apaches, Cheyenne, Comanches, you name it—everything but themselves.”

  “What does ‘Oljeto’ mean, Weston?”

  “‘Moonlight on Water,’ I heard once.”

  “Where’s the water?”

  “Where you find it, I guess.”

  “Do you speak any Navajo, Weston?”

  “Too lazy. Heard it’s as different from our language as Chinese. That about scared me off.”

  “You know, I always wanted to know how to ride a horse.”

  “Like your uncle you were telling me all about.”

  “I’d never be that good, I just want to be able to ride. He and my mom grew up on horseback, she always says. I never got a chance, living in Seattle. So what I was wondering, could I ride those horses over there? Would you teach me how to saddle ’em and ride ’em and everything?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I’ve got a pair of cowboy boots picked out in the store. Would you take them out of my wages?”

  “Prices are high way out here. Forty-nine bucks. You’ll have to stay around a while to work those off.”

  Forty-nine dollars! Clay thought to himself. That’s over half what Mike paid for the truck!

  Still, he wanted those boots.

  He rode a couple hours a day, around the buttes and across the arroyos and onto the mesas, wishing his uncle could see him like this, tugging on his Stetson and riding with the rhythm of that big animal underneath him. At first he’d beaten his behind raw going against the motion of the horse, but the soreness was passing now. Where a horse couldn’t take him Clay scrambled on his feet. He climbed up and into three of the ruins of the Ancient Ones, the cliff dwellers Weston said had lived here long, long before the Navajos.

  He wouldn’t have a complaint in the world if only he’d get a letter from Marilyn. Every day he was more sure than the last he’d get a letter or two or three forwarded from Goulding’s as Mrs. Whitmore had promised.

  Finally a letter came, but it was from Mike. Anyway it was a fat one. All full of expectation, Clay settled into the other rocker on the porch and broke the seal. Even if it wasn’t from Marilyn, somebody out there knew he was alive.

  Inside he found two letters, one from Mike and one from his mother. He read hers as fast as he could. It described all about her long automobile trip through Mexico with the other volunteers on the way to Guatemala, and it was mailed before she even got to Guatemala. “Maybe you won’t even hear from me once I’m in the interior. I’ll try to get mail out but the mail is notoriously slow from Latin America to the States. Take care, you guys. Make me proud.”

  You’d be proud of me, Mom, Clay thought. If you could only see me now!

  Mike had nothing new to say. “Guess you like it out there. Nothing much going on here, same old stuff.” Then it got more interesting when Mike talked about the old truck. He said how much he’d enjoyed the trip in the Studebaker, all their crazy adventures, and especially all the time they’d had to be together.

  Dummy! Clay wanted to shout. We could have had all summer together!

  Nothing at all about Sheila, Clay noticed, folding the letter and putting it away. But then, Mike never really told him much about her.

  It sure was exciting to get mail.

  “Mind if I try some chewing tobacco?” he asked Weston.

  “Up to you.”

  With his eyes on Hoskininni Mesa, he chewed and rocked. The mesa helped get his mind off the sweet foul taste of the tobacco, especially if he kept his eyes right on that hogan at the base of the cliffs over there.

  He was doing
all right until he made the mistake of burping. Some of the wad slid straight down to his stomach. It wasn’t long coming back up, along with breakfast. He felt sick to his stomach for the next twenty-four hours.

  “I’m cured for life before I even started,” he told Weston the next day.

  “Yessir,” the old man said. “Nasty habit.”

  He wrote to his brother and mother and Marilyn all about Oljeto, trading widi the Navajos, learning to ride horses and all, but he left out about the chewing tobacco.

  He’d been at Oljeto long enough for his earnings to pay off a boot and a half when an old Navajo couple came in early one evening and bought some groceries, mostly canned goods. The old man wore his gray hair tied up behind his head in white cotton string like his wife’s. Their dark faces and hands were deeply lined, from years out in the weadier, Clay guessed. Other than that he wouldn’t have long remembered them; they spoke little to each other and not at all to him until they were just about leaving. The old woman had come back up to the counter to get some hard candy when her head kind of dropped down toward the countertop and all he could see was the neat way she had her hair tied up. Next thing, she’d called her husband back in and the pair of them erupted in a lively exchange. That’s when Clay saw the old woman pointing to Uncle Clay’s face in the picture.

  Clay looked again. Her finger went from Uncle Clay’s face to her own front tooth, which she now tapped a couple of times before returning her finger to the countertop and Uncle Clay’s face.

  “You’ve seen this man?” Clay asked incredulously. “That’s my uncle—that’s right, he’s got a chipped tooth! Did you see him? Where’d you see him?”

  “Yes,” the old man said, happy to agree.

  Weston had come inside to see what the commotion was all about. “Weston, they saw him!”

  The old couple was nodding agreeably. Clay shouted, “They’ve seen my uncle! Find out where, when!”

  The Navajos were looking from him to Weston and back, ready to be helpful if only they knew how. “They don’t speak English,” Weston explained.