The Big Wander

by Will Hobbs

  Sincerely,

  Marilyn Blanchford

  Now he was suffocating. Yes, what a fool he was, what a complete fool! All those things he’d said to her. He’d told her everything! “I think of you under these same stars….” He’d said that! He’d said a lot of things. He’d never felt this awful. He’d never felt this stupid. He’d never felt this …

  Clay called Goulding’s with the message for Weston, and then he called home. Of course Mike wasn’t there. Mike would be at the gas station. He called information, he dialed the station number, Mike answered. His brother was on the line. It seemed so strange, and didn’t feel anything like he’d expected.

  “Mike,” he said, “this is Clay. I’m calling from the Navajo Mountain Trading Post.”

  “You’re at some other trading post again? I thought you were at Oljeto.”

  “Well I’m here now.”

  “Did you get my letter?”

  “Yeah…. They sent it over here. I forgot to open it.”

  “Whaddaya mean, ‘forgot’?”

  “I mean, I’ll read it in a minute. I just got it. Any big news?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Look, Mike, I’m living with some Navajos that Uncle Clay lived with last summer, in fact he got married to a Navajo last summer and she died and we’re going to be riding across the San Juan and the Colorado soon to meet him—he’s bringing some wild horses across—and if you hurry you can get here in time to join us.”

  “Hey, slow down there, Clay, let’s take it from the top.”

  Clay almost ran short of quarters trying to explain it all. Mike was having a hard time taking it all in, he seemed so far away. He was sorry about their uncle, but after it was all hashed out Mike couldn’t come out to meet up with him. His job, and wanting to be with Sheila: nothing had changed. In fact he tried to talk Clay into coming home. Mike didn’t really understand at all. “You can always meet him later, now that you know he’s okay.”

  “No chance, Mike,” Clay said. “Not when I’m this close.”

  “You sure are a persistent cuss,” Mike said slowly. “I’ll give you that. I don’t like the part about how you took off on your own between these two trading posts. I still think you should come home. At least promise me you won’t do anything else stupid, you hear?”

  “Sure, Mike.”

  “So when are you coming home? It’s already the twenty-first of July.”

  “After I’ve spent some time with Uncle Clay, Mike.” Remembering it wasn’t his brother he wanted to kick, he added, “Think of us on the twenty-seventh—that’s when we’re going to meet up. He doesn’t know I’ll be there.”

  “Still got the burro?”

  “Sure, I’ve got her right here. I have a little dog too. His name’s Curly—I’m going to bring him home with me.”

  “Just so you don’t show up with Pal. I wrote Mom about what’s going on but of course I don’t know if she got the letter. Still haven’t got any more letters from her. Hey, I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—have you seen it? It’s good, real good.”

  “I haven’t thought much about the movies lately.”

  “Hey, have you heard anything from that Marilyn you met in Red River?”

  He hated lying. It made him feel awful. “Nah…,” he said.

  Well, how could he feel any more awful?

  He got out of there as fast as he could. Away from that trading post and back on toward the sheep camp. He rode alongside Russell without speaking. With a flick of the wrist he tossed the shark’s tooth aside. His mind was on fire, it was burning up. How could she do that? How could he have written those things? What was he thinking? What did he know? About girls, nothing. It was hopeless.

  They made a camp while it was still a little light. Pal proceeded to roll around on her back and take a dust bath.

  Curly came and licked his face. He pushed the dog away.

  Pal stepped in a tin can and got her hoof caught. Now she was hopping around on three legs again. Russell smiled, but Clay didn’t see what was funny.

  “The moon’s starting to grow,” Russell said meaningfully. “We meet him when it’s half full. Not too many days now.”

  Clay knew what Russell was getting at, a much happier day was coming. But he said, “I don’t see why they want to go to the moon anyway. There’s no air up there, there’s not even much gravity. You couldn’t even stay attached to the ground without big old weights in your boots, and you’d have to wear a big old suit with tubes and stuff like a scuba diver.”

  “I guess so,” Russell said.

  “It’s just to beat the Russians anyway. On the moon by the end of the decade and all that stuff. Maybe we won’t even be alive by 1970—that’s eight years off. Maybe we’ll all get blown up with atomic bombs. Do you ever think of that?”

  “Not much …”

  “My brother says the Russians and us came this close last summer when the East Germans were building the Berlin Wall.”

  Clay realized that the thumb and first finger he’d held up were touching. He was getting carried away. His friend had his head down and was digging a little hole with his boot heel. Why was he making Russell feel bad?

  “I used to worry about it a lot,” Clay continued, trying to explain himself, and much more softly now. “They’re always talking about whether you should have a bomb shelter. Some people have them. This one family on our block has one. Do Navajos have bomb shelters?”

  “Not that I ever heard of.”

  “I don’t think we’re really going to have an atomic war. But it’s scary.”

  “I know. We learned about it at school. We practiced getting under our desks in case there was an air raid.”

  “We did that too. Didn’t you wonder what good that was going to do? I got my hair stuck once in some gum under there.”

  Russell chuckled, and then he said, “I remember once, everybody was real quiet and I couldn’t help it, I said Ka-Boom! real loud. But the teacher didn’t appreciate it.”

  Then they both were laughing. It felt good to be laughing again.

  Clay was glad to be back in the sheep camp, glad he wasn’t alone right now. Working alongside Russell, he hoed in those corn and bean fields with a vengeance. He helped to harvest squash and melons, and he rode with Russell every day on horseback to accompany the sheep. They were being called twins, to everyone’s amusement. When had he ever had a better friend?

  Each day it seemed they were giving him something. He’d admired Sam Yazzie’s hatband of nickels, and now his Stetson was decked out the same way, with buffalo nickels he’d seen Russell’s father shape over a conical mould. The silver parade of buffaloes looked sharp against the black felt. At his wrist he wore a bracelet Sam Yazzie had made, with three large turquoise stones set in silver. Around his neck he wore a strand of red coral just like Russell’s. “I can’t take all this,” he said each time, yet each time he could see how pleased his friends were in the giving.

  One evening the kids made a campfire and he played the scratchiest “Oh Susannah” imaginable on the Midnight Flyer. Then Russell tried the harmonica and taught all the dogs to sing along to certain chords that would set them off. The kids laughed especially hard when Clay’s tiny white dog laid his brown ears back and sang. “Elvis,” suggested one of the kids, and that’s what they called Curly after that.

  The next night everyone in the camp came together around the campfire. Russell’s grandfather was drumming monotonously, and he and the men were singing their wild and eerie songs. Many of the boys were chanting too and dancing in the firelight. Russell was among them, shaking a gourd rattle to the beat of the drum. Thinking he’d add another instrument, Clay joined in and produced some unusual notes on the Midnight Flyer. Then he tried to chant along with the singers, which the Navajos found the funniest thing in the world with the possible exception of his dancing. Whenever he’d fall out of rhythm, or stumble as he did a number of times, the Navajos had to hold their sides they were l
aughing so hard. Tears were falling from the women’s and the old people’s eyes.

  He was beginning to heal. The hurt would stay, but the scar was forming over the wound. Maybe he would always be this way. Maybe he would never be able to make his heart known to a girl. For him it was different than it was for Mike, and much harder. He’d always known it was going to be hard. It would have to be a miracle, like saving a girl from a raging river and her falling in love with you.

  Then came the morning for him to leave with Russell and the men and to cross those two rivers. Pal was all packed. Curly was already settled in his perch and ready to go. Sam Yazzie had said that Pal wouldn’t be too happy about crossing any rivers. Burros hate any water that’s more than ankle deep, he said. But when he saw how much it meant to Clay, he said, “She’ll swim when we don’t give her any choice.”

  “Besides,” Clay added. “I might need to go on to Escalante with Uncle Clay. He might be going back there.”

  Here was Russell, all ready for the journey, dark eyes shining as ever. He was mounted on a chestnut mare and trailing a packhorse. “Where’s that painted pony of yours?” Clay asked him.

  Russell’s mother appeared in all her quiet beauty. Her full skirt was a deep blue, with a braid stitched near the bottom to match her shining green blouse. Around her shoulders she wore a colorful fringed blanket, and from her neck hung many strands of fine turquoise beads. She was leading Russell’s spotted pony, adorned as always with the silver bridle but displaying this morning a bright new saddle blanket with distinctive geometric patterns and bright colors.

  Russell dismounted, and his mother handed the reins of the spotted horse to Russell. Clay would never cease to marvel at this horse’s beauty. Mostly white, it had a golden mane and reddish brown spots along its spine, red stockings, red marks too on the front of its face and chest.

  “This kind of horse is called a Medicine Hat,” Russell said almost bashfully. Clay could see Russell’s grandparents looking on from a little break between the stunted junipers. “Good war horse,” Russell added with a laugh. “Some tribes say these markings are good luck because they look like a war bonnet and shield.”

  Clay didn’t understand why Russell was telling him these things right now. The little kids were quiet, and looking back and forth between their brother and his friend.

  Russell transferred the reins to Clay’s hand. He glanced ever so slightly at Clay, and then he looked away as he said, “This horse is one of the two your uncle first brought from across the Colorado, to arrange his marriage. You’ll look good on this horse going to meet your uncle. I want you to keep this horse.”

  Clay wanted to say right out, This is too great a gift. Almost twenty pairs of dark eyes were waiting now, looking away in their fashion but watching him still. He knew it was their custom also not to say “thank you” at every turn. Their dignity and pride did not allow it. But for great occasions and with great humility the word could be used. “Kehey,” Clay said, his voice breaking with the depth of his feelings.

  His time at the summer hogan had come to an end. It was time to leave the sheep camp and to cross two rivers.

  15

  They waited on the banks of the Colorado. On the designated day, the twenty-seventh of July, they waited, gazing all the while across the river at the narrow canyon mouth of the Escalante, watching for Clay Jenkins and wild horses.

  Clay waited with Russell and his father and four others as the half-moon rode across the daytime sky. He waited with them into the night until the moon set behind the canyon walls and darkness fell, obscuring the mouth of the Escalante River.

  Clay hoped they wouldn’t give up and leave. Maybe something had held Uncle Clay up, maybe he was just late.

  He needn’t have worried about the Navajos giving up. They were much better at waiting than he was. Together they watched through the next day, through the heat and the endless minutes and hours. It seemed his companions didn’t even need to talk to pass the time. The river rolled by and lapped gently at the sandstone. The swallows over the river twisted, dipped, and climbed endlessly, those violet-green acrobats. Sometimes they skimmed the surface—for bugs or a drink of water? He kept wondering what had happened to his uncle, and worrying.

  It occurred to him, he’d never once heard the name of Sam Yazzie’s sister, the woman his uncle had married. When he asked Russell, it was obvious how uncomfortable he’d made his friend. “It’s not good to speak the name of someone who’s dead,” Russell whispered.

  They waited a second night and he watched the slow passage of the waxing moon with his friend. No figure appeared at the mouth of the Escalante other than a coyote who came to the riverbank, then turned around and splashed back into the shadows up the shallow bed of the river. “It’s good we’ve come to see this place again,” Sam Yazzie said. “Next year there’ll be no coyote here and no crossing.”

  “But why not?” Clay asked. “Why wouldn’t there be a crossing?”

  “Didn’t you know? They’ve been building a big dam down the Colorado for years now. It’s almost done. Next spring, they say, the water will back up into all these canyons. All these hundreds of tall canyons of the Colorado and the San Juan too. Even Paiute Creek—it’s all going to be underwater.”

  “How far up these cliffs right here?”

  Russell’s father pointed almost straight up. “Way up there, they say. Only the tops of these canyons will be left. They say they’re going to call it Lake Powell.”

  In the morning, after they had waited as long as they could, Clay knew what he would do. When Sam Yazzie said it was time to return to the sheep camp, Clay said, “I’m going on to Escalante, if I can get across. I came this far.”

  They transferred Pal’s boxes to a packhorse, as they had for the crossing of the San Juan. It would be hard enough for the burro. They didn’t want her loaded down with gear.

  Russell’s mother’s brother led the way across, trailing the packhorse.

  Sam Yazzie followed with Pal’s lead rope snubbed around his saddle horn. Clay and Russell and two others pushed forward in a tight ring and forced the burro into the coffee-and-cream-colored Colorado.

  It was shallow at first, and the burro tolerated being driven. She had no choice. Then Sam Yazzie’s horse was swimming. Clay saw the whites of Pal’s eyes roll as the burro brayed in terror—her legs had suddenly lost the bottom too.

  Clay’s own spotted horse was swimming now. Curly’s little head and ears were poking out of Clay’s shirt, and his black eyes were looking all around. One of Clay’s feet lost a stirrup but he clung tight with his legs, and clutched the mustang’s flaxen mane with one hand.

  Once on the far shore, Clay set to repacking the burro. Taking his leave wasn’t going to be easy. He stowed everything away but the harmonica.

  “The third canyon on the left side leads up to the top,” Sam Yazzie said. “I remember it’s got a cliff ruin in it. Maybe you won’t want to go all the way up the river to get to Escalante. You could go out a side canyon.”

  “Just think, I’ll be with Uncle Clay in a couple days!” Clay said.

  Everyone stood around nodding their agreement, but it seemed none of them would speak now that the parting was so close. He brought the harmonica out of his back pocket and gave it to Russell. “I hope you can learn how to play this thing,” he said. “I’m sure I was never going to.”

  “Kehey,” Russell said.

  “You teach those dogs of yours to sing a tune.”

  Clay mounted the spotted pony and snubbed Pal’s lead rope around his saddle horn. “On a beautiful horse I wander,” he said. “With my dog Curly I wander. Toward my uncle I wander. Saying good-bye to my friends I wander.”

  “Your horse’s ears are made of round com,” Sam Yazzi answered, speaking in a chanting rhythm.

  “Your horse’s ears are made of stars.

  Your horse’s head is made of mixed waters.

  Your horse’s teeth are made of white shell.


  The long rainbow is in his mouth for a bridle.

  With it you guide him.”

  “Come back one day,” Russell called as Clay rode away.

  “I promise,” Clay said over his shoulder.

  He wound his way up the canyon of the Escalante at the feet of its overtowering red cliffs, up its gentle streambed of sand between the swath of bright green willows on its banks. Pal didn’t mind the water now, it was so shallow. And it ran delightfully clear.

  It was cool in the morning shadows. It was peaceful. Never in his life had Clay seen the like of these sheer red walls cut as if with a knife. He realized with a pang, he would never have the chance to share them with Mike. Next spring, water would be rising up these walls.

  On some of the banks there were bright patches of clover. At every bend in the canyon, he let the mustang and the burro browse to relieve their hunger.

  The canyon walls allowed him only a slice of the sky. All through the morning the slice remained a hard, bright blue. When the sun cleared the canyon rim high above, it didn’t shine for long. Tall thunderheads were boiling up in what little of the sky he could see, and they were turning dark.

  Faster than he would have thought possible, the wind was blowing hard and those clouds were growing positively black.

  Clay urged the horse forward and felt the resistance from Pal as the rope went taut. “Let’s get a move on, Pal,” he said anxiously. “You remember what Weston said about being caught in the bottom of a canyon at a time like this.”

  He started eyeing the sides of the canyons for refuge. Nothing as far as he could see. He couldn’t remember a safe place behind him. Fifty miles of this canyon lay in front of him with side canyons coming in left and right. It came to mind how Sam Yazzie had described the world on top that these canyons drained: solid rock. This isn’t the Northwest, he told himself. No forest, no soil to hold the water back like a sponge. What would a flash flood look like roaring down this canyon?