by T. Greenwood
The other people from the funeral were already there, milling about in front. The coffin had been loaded into Shadi’s uncle’s F-150, which pulled up next to his truck, dwarfing it, making it look like a child’s toy. Ben felt uncomfortable and stiff in his suit. He was sweating, and the tie was tight around his neck. He got out of the truck and went to Shadi, who was helping her grandmother out of the car.
“Can I get a ride back to Flagstaff with you?” Shadi asked, looking over her shoulder at him.
“What?”
“Can you give me a ride back to Flag?”
“What about the burial? I thought that’s where we were going.”
“No. My grandmother wants things done the traditional way. My uncles dug the grave last night. They’ll take him, with the shaman. My grandmother insists it’s the only way he can make it safely to the underworld.”
“And you don’t want to be there?” he asked.
“I’m not allowed to be there. It’s no good to be around the dead. And I need a ride home. This is my uncle’s car.”
“Okay,” Ben said, shrugging.
“Thanks,” she said and grabbed a bag from the cavernous trunk of the Lincoln, tossing it into the bed of his pickup.
By then, Shadi’s uncles had all piled into the cab of the F-150 and were heading north, the wooden coffin bouncing around in the back. They watched the truck disappear in a cloud of dust.
“You been to Canyon de Chelly before?” she asked as he opened the passenger door for her and she hopped up into his truck.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He looked at his watch. It was almost one o’clock.
“Then I’ll take you. It’s a sacred place. A good place to be today.”
The house Ben grew up in backed up to a creek with thick woods on either side. At night, with his window cracked open, he could hear the water bubbling and stumbling over rocks. When spring came, the trees of the forest made a fortress around their house, the new green leaves pressing against all of the windows. At night they made moving shadows on his walls. The woods were his private playground. He knew how to climb every tree, he was familiar with every rock, he could always find his way home. But after Dusty died, his mother forbade him to go to the woods. She was afraid of everything then. Everything good became a possible disaster. He could drown in the creek, fall from the tender limb of a tree, get bitten by a rabid raccoon. And so he was exiled from the one place where he felt at home.
In high school, he and his friends found their way back to the woods, but it wasn’t the same anymore. Now they smoked weed and made out with girls, emerging from the woods with twigs and pitch and burdocks in their hair. They drank beers and crushed cans and left their candy wrappers at the water’s edge. They pissed in the creek and carved obscenities into the aging elms. Sometimes he felt as though he owed the woods an apology. But how do you say you’re sorry when you can’t undo the damage you’ve done?
This is the way he felt about Sara sometimes. He knew what he was doing was hurting her, harming her. Destroying what was left of what had been beautiful. But he couldn’t seem to resist. There was something strangely thrilling in wondering how far he could go before she snapped. There can be a terrible joy in knowing that someone won’t fight back no matter what you do. It’s the kind of joy that makes you sick to your stomach. The kind of joy that makes you ashamed of what you have become.
This is what Ben was thinking as he pulled the truck up to the overlook. If Sara knew where he was, how far this lie had gone already, she would be hurt.
He and Shadi got out of the truck, and he looked over the edge.
“That’s Spider Rock,” she said, gesturing below at two looming red rock towers jutting up into the sky from the bottom of the canyon. The cliff must have dropped down five hundred feet. He felt dizzy and exhilarated.
“The Diné believe this is where Spider Woman lives. She is the one who taught us how to weave. She also punishes disobedient children. See how the rock is white at the top? Those are supposed to be the bones of bad children.”
“Jeez,” Ben said.
When they got to the next overlook, she pulled her backpack out of the bed of the truck and put it on her back. “Let’s go,” she said. And she gestured to the path markedWHITE HOUSE NATURE TRAIL.
“You want to go on a hike?“ he asked. He had taken his tie off but was still wearing his suit. She was also still wearing her funeral dress but had changed into the high-tops she’d had on at the hospital. “It’ll just take a couple of hours. I have plenty of water,” she said.
This was ridiculous.
He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past one o’clock. If they were on the road to Flagstaff by three, he’d be home by six or six thirty. Jesus, what was he thinking? But before he had time to argue, Shadi had pulled her long hair off her neck into a ponytail and was headed down the sandstone path.
He thought about the time he and Jason had gone into the woods behind his house with a bunch of firecrackers they bought at a Fourth of July firecracker stand set up at the Sunoco on New Hampshire Avenue. Jason had thought it would be fun to put a brick of firecrackers in the crook of a tree. Ben thought about the hiss of the flame, the crack, and the explosion. And he thought about the robin’s nest, the shards of blue shells, and the small featherless embryo motionless on the ground when it was over.
“Did you grow up in Chinle?” he asked as they descended deeper into the canyon.
“Yeh. We lived in town until my mother took off, and then Ricky and I lived with our grandmother until I graduated.”
Ben nodded. He tried to imagine all of them living inside that small hogan. He didn’t ask where her mother went.
“My mother’s father was a missionary,” she said. “She went to high school on the rez, got pregnant with me, and married my dad. When her family went back to Kingman, she stayed with us. But by the time she had Ricky, she’d realized she made a big mistake.” Shadi shrugged. “She was only twenty. She went back home. And my dad sent me and Ricky to live with my grandmother.”
Ben could feel the sun on his back; the back of his neck was hot. “When did you move to Flagstaff?” he asked.
“I got a scholarship through the Navajo Nation. For college. And then I went straight to grad school for my MFA. This is my last year.”
“Are you a painter?” Ben asked, thinking about her paint-splattered clothes at the hospital. “You’d been painting, right? At the hospital?”
“Oh no,” she said, laughing. “I was just painting my kitchen.”
They were at the bottom of the canyon now. Looking back up at Spider Rock, which loomed above them, framed in clouds. Ben felt small, at the feet of a giant.
“I’m in textiles,” she said. “I’m a weaver.”
It was only five o’clock when they pulled back into town. Shadi had suggested they go back through Leupp, on a shortcut through the endless barren expanse that is northern Arizona, which thankfully cut more than an hour off the trip. They’d stopped in Winona to get gas, and Ben had called Sara at work, told her he and Hippo were on their way up from Phoenix. That they were grabbing some dinner at Camp Verde. He said he’d be home by six thirty.
Shadi rolled down the truck window. They were climbing back up into the clouds, into the cold. Ben stared out the window at the ribbon of asphalt unfurling in front of them.
“Did Ricky live with you in Flagstaff?” he asked.
“Up until a month ago. It was too crowded, though. So he got a studio at the Downtowner. He was washing dishes at Beaver Street Brewery. Trying to put together a new band.”
Ben knew those apartments; they weren’t far from Jack’s. Lots of short-term residents, very transient. Lots of people coming and going.
“Do you think it could have been someone at the Downtowner?” he asked. “Was there anyone there he had problems with? Anybody giving him a hard time?”
Shadi turned to look at him, shaking her head. Her eyes were filling with tears.
>
“Ben?” she said. “Do you have anything you regret? Anything you wish you could take back?”
Ben nodded. He considered all of his regrets, like barbs on a wire fence circling around him.
“I shouldn’t have kicked him out,” she said. “He was my brother.”
As they pulled into town, the sun was setting, the air becoming cold.
“Where should I take you?” he asked as they drove past the motels and strip malls along Route 66.
“You can take me home,” she said. “It’s been a long day.”
They drove past his neighborhood off of Fort Valley Road, past the road up to the Snowbowl, and into an RV park. She directed him through the woods to her space, where a vintage silver Airstream was parked. “This is it,” she said, and he parked the truck. “You want to come in for coffee or something?” she asked, opening the door.
It was five thirty now, and getting dark. It was cold outside, the sky cloudy and starless. He grabbed his jacket from the seat and pulled it on.
“No,” he said, thinking of Sara getting home from the doctor’s office soon. “I should get home. I’ve got papers to grade.”
She turned to look at him. “You’ll come back, though,” she said. This was not a question.
He cocked his head at her quizzically, wondering what she meant. What it was that she wanted from him.
Her cheeks were pink in the cold, and she shivered inside the thin fabric of her black dress. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it, and it sent a trill through his entire body.
“I need you,” she said. “To help me find out who did this to my brother.”
At home, Sara was in the kitchen making a salad, patting dry the lettuce with a paper towel. “Hey,” she said without looking up at him. She was still wearing her scrubs but had pulled a thick wool cardigan over them. “How was Phoenix?”
He felt a knot in his stomach twist tight. “Okay.”
“Any luck?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“Hippo find a camper shell?”
“Nah.”
She started to tear the lettuce into pieces. “You ate already?” she asked.
“Just a couple of tacos. I’m still hungry.” He went to the fridge and pulled out a bag of carrots, a pint of cherry tomatoes, and a bottle of blue cheese dressing. Another lie; he hadn’t eaten since this morning. He was starving. “Can I help?” he asked.
She looked at him and smiled a little suspiciously. “Sure.”
Silently they worked together, assembling the salad.
“I can’t stop thinking about that boy,” she said. “I dreamed about him last night. I dreamed he didn’t die.”
Ben stiffened. “He did. I told you I stopped by the hospital.” He grated the carrot on top of the two bowls.
“Have you seen anything in the paper about it?” she asked. “I mean, it’s so weird, don’t you think? There was nothing in the police log. It’s like it didn’t even happen. You’d think there’d be something. An obituary at least.”
“He was probably from the rez,” Ben said. He thought about the pink light enclosing him and Shadi as they descended into the canyon. He thought about the way the light caught in her hair, how he’d wanted to reach out and feel if it also held the sun’s warmth. The lie was so big it seemed to fill the room, all of the empty spaces.
“It’s such a shame,” Sara said.
“What’s that?”
“The drinking. The alcoholism. You wouldn’t believe how many Indian kids we see with fetal alcohol syndrome. It’s not just the men who drink.”
“Who says he was drunk?” Ben asked, feeling heat rising up his neck as he tossed the brown carrot stubs into the garbage.
“Well, how else would you explain it?”
“It looked to me like somebody beat the shit out of him,” Ben said angrily. “You don’t have to be a drunk to get the crap beaten out of you.”
Sara’s lips tightened and she sliced a cucumber into perfect transparent disks. “I’m not being a racist, if that’s what you think,” she said. “There have been studies done, genetic studies about Native Americans’ predisposition to alcoholism.”
“Jesus Christ, Sara. I didn’t call you a racist. Let’s just stop.”
Sara grabbed the two bowls from the counter and brought them to the table. She sat down hard in her chair and shook the bottle of dressing.
“Is this it? Just salad?” Ben asked. “I’m starving. Do we have any of that leftover chicken?”
“I’m on a diet, Ben.”
Ben sighed.
They ate silently. Ben took a long drink of ice water; it made his whole body go cold.
“I was thinking we could have the reception up at the Snowbowl,” she said quietly, staring into her salad.
“What?”
“I called up there yesterday, and they still have two weekends open next summer. But they fill up fast, so we need to decide.”
“Right now?” Ben asked, pushing a cherry tomato around his bowl. His appetite was suddenly gone.
“No, Ben, let’s wait another year. Hell, let’s wait two more. What’s the fucking hurry anyway?” she said, grabbing her bowl and going to the kitchen, where she dumped it in the trash. He heard her slam it onto the tile countertop.
She came back into the dining room and stood in front of him, hands on her hips. There was something unidentifiable (Blood? Chocolate?) smeared across her pale pink scrubs shirt. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said. “I feel disgusting.”
Later that night as Sara slept curled tightly away from him, Ben thought about all the ways to tell her this was over. He imagined the conversation that would free him. He thought about all the ways to say, I don’t love you anymore. He tossed and turned.
When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed of the Spider Woman perched at the top of her red stone spire, spinning a web that stretched all the way across the canyon in shimmering filaments. And as he descended into the abyss, he could feel her silken trap slowly entangling him, enclosing him.
At Jack’s on Wednesday night, Ben asked all of the regulars if they’d seen Ricky Begay on Halloween. He got in at six o’clock, just as the day crew was stumbling out, replaced by the nine-to-fivers.
None of the day crew would know Ricky. These were the folks who came in after the bar opened at eleven and stayed all day, shooting pool or watching CNN on the one TV over the bar. Hippo called them the Retirees, but the truth was, most of them were just out of work, disabled, or career drunks. And there’s no retiring from that.
The nine-to-fivers, the people who worked at Gore or at any of the businesses downtown, were the folks who came in straight from work before heading home. Single guys mostly, though there was the occasional gaggle of women enjoying a ladies’ night away from their husbands and children.
Jack’s was one of those bars that appealed to everyone by appealing to no one in particular. There was no theme: no sombreros on the wall, no Irish or Italian paraphernalia. No sports motif, no mounted marlins, no fancy microbrews or cocktails with silly names. It was just a small, dark bar with three beers on tap, two good pool tables, and one rarity: really good food.
On any given night, you could expect to see a wide assortment of people crammed into the booths or bellied up to the rough-hewn bar. Sorority girls flirting with bikers, bikers hanging out with lawyers, lawyers offering free legal advice to the recently paroled. Ben considered Jack’s the great equalizer. A place where all those walls we build around ourselves, all those labels we cling to, disappear into the frothy foam of beer.
Tonight he asked all of them if they remembered seeing Ricky on Halloween.
“I wasn’t here. Out with my kids trick-or-treating,” said Nancy, who worked at an oral surgeon’s office up on Cedar but found her way to Jack’s at least a couple of nights a week.
“I was up at Havasu last weekend,” said Huck, who ran one of the many outdoor sporting goods stores in town.
At a Halloween party,
stomach flu, mother-in-law in town. Not a single person was even at the bar, never mind watching to see if anybody was giving some quiet Indian kid a hard time.
The weekenders were a less predictable crowd, primarily because of the college kids. In Flagstaff, bars fall in and out of popularity with the college population. For a while, everybody’s hanging out at the Monte Vista, and then all of a sudden that love affair is over and they’re back at Jack’s. By the time the season changes, or the semester ends or the summer begins, some other bar is calling their name: Beaver Street, the Mad I, or Collins’. There’s a restlessness about small towns, and with restlessness comes infidelity. But the good news was, they almost always came back. And there was never a weekend night when the bar wasn’t full.
“Who was tending bar Saturday night?” Ben asked Hippo.
“Ned,” he said. “I came out to help when it got crazy, but he was out front most of the night by himself.”
Ned had been working at the bar off and on for ages. He was a river rat, disappearing into the canyon for weeks at a time on rafting trips. But when he wasn’t river running, he was here at Jack’s, pulling beers and dealing with drunks and making sure people had fun and also making sure they got home safe. Ben had seen Ned walk girls to their cabs and even drive a few folks home who might be stranded otherwise.
Tonight, Ned was in as a patron rather than an employee and sat at the end of the bar near the condiments tray, drinking whiskey and stealing olives.
“Hey, Ned,” Ben said, giving Ned a fist bump across the bar.
“Dude,” Ned said, throwing back his third shot of Jameson since he’d gotten there. Ned had the skin of a fifty-year-old man who’d spent too much time in the sun, but he was probably only in his twenties.
“Listen,” Ben said. “I’m trying to find out if there was something going on Saturday night with one of the regulars.”
“Who was it?” Ned asked, swiping another olive. The pimento slipped out and fell on the bar.
“You know the kid who comes in and shoots pool? He usually sits over in the booth by the bathrooms?”
