by Layla Wolfe
The beautiful scientist shouldered Galileo aside and reached out a hand of friendship. “Fremont Zuckerman.” He introduced himself resolutely, giving me the first of many gifts, the gift of his name. I’d been right—Jewish. And he came to the first, to any, church he could find to unburden himself. That must’ve taken a lot from him.
“Father Moloney,” I said again, as though we’d never met, just in case he didn’t want Galileo to know. “Thank you, Galileo. Don’t forget, you’re going to be sharing lamb grilling duties tomorrow with Anson and Harte.”
“Oh, good,” said Galileo, the relief pouring off him almost palpably. “Not that Rover guy. He gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“No. We’re keeping him away from sticking forks into meat.” The names mentioned were of the Bent Zealots MC, a biker club that had done me great good since my arrival. They donated cash and items to the church, to the rez. Even the strange, crusty Rover became quiet and thoughtful when he entered the church wearing his “cut,” a leather vest emblazoned with the “colors” of his club. Anson and Ogden Taliwood, Galileo’s brother, were half-breeds, so that accounted for their interest in the rez. But they had almost all, to a man, attended my services, my dirt parking lot chock full of Fat Boys, SuperGlides, and Dynas—all Harleys, to be sure.
The Bent Zealots were the saviors of St. John’s in the Desert. They rode down from their clubhouse in Rough and Ready near Lake Havasu. They didn’t sit on their “own side” of the church, but mingled with the Diné, the Apache, the Hopi they had come to know, tribal council members, rez police, guys who ran tourist traps, ordinary sheepherders and farmers. They weren’t snobs, those guys. Sure, other bilagáana attended my services. People who worked at the BlueWater Casino, farmers from Quartzsite, merchants from Parker. People said they liked my freewheeling approach to the sacraments. But St. John’s of the Desert wouldn’t be standing without the Bent Zealots.
I made an arc of my arm to welcome Mr. Zuckerman into my sitting room.
“Sitting room” sounds glamorous, Victorian. But the plain whitewashed wood structure had only been insulated last year. Before then, framed paintings of Jesus, saints, and my favorite Japanese samurais hung from bare nails and wires. Now I had Native American rugs, electricity, and interior walls. People donated a mishmash of furniture, decorative pottery, handmade plates and cups. I really wanted for nothing.
Before he even sat, the manly mining engineer was saying, “I’m really sorry for how I acted last time I saw you. I hope you didn’t freak out over anything I said. Hell, I was freaked out.”
“No problem,” I replied coolly. I got his intention. He wanted to know if I’d squealed to anyone. “I didn’t tell a soul. Your confession is in my strictest confidence.”
He became ruffled. “But I didn’t do anything to confess to, Father. My only sin is observation. I want you to know I was just stunned by some . . . situations I discovered, that’s all.”
“As well you should be. From what you described, you had every right to be alarmed. As a youth, I had an interest in science.” Actually, as a youth, I’d had an interest in dealing meth. “I know you have a moral imperative to report or fix man-made contamination if it’s within your power.”
“Actually, it’s not within my power,” said Fremont. The man with the explorative, inquisitive name seemed to be backtracking on his prior state of panic. Why was he trying to downgrade what he’d seen with his own eyes, what he’d documented? “That’s why I wanted you to know, I’m not alarmed. It was just a temporary state of mind.”
“An understandable one.”
He tried to chuckle casually. “Not really, if you take into consideration there’s not a blind bloody thing I can do about it.”
“Why not?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why can’t you do anything about it? You’re an engineer. You work for a mining company. Isn’t that part of your job to report discrepancies where you see them, especially if they pose a physical danger to humans, or animals, for that matter?”
Now I’d really ruffled him. He frowned, and for the first time I could sense his capacity for ire. You did not want to get on the wrong side of this man. As someone who was forced to keep quiet, or at least act like a genteel muppet, about various disgraces I witnessed, I had respect for that. So why was he taking this sitting down? “Look, Father. It’s really not my job. My job is only to report the presence of ore, or lack thereof. Residuals, background, decayed forms of ore are not my business.”
“Oh, yes? Well, after you left I did a little research. Strictly on the Q.T., don’t worry. A simple Google search showed some EPA reports. They suffered the same situation over in Blythe, across the border in California—a white town. They mined uranium ore during the forties there, too. Except in Blythe, the government removed contaminated material in homes. Yards that had been fertilized with tailings were excavated and replaced with fresh soil. Whenever a tree came out, a fresh sapling went in. Lawns were torn up, sod put in—”
“I know, I know!” Fremont shifted from side to side in his upholstered chair. “Don’t you think I know all about that? It’s patently obvious they deconned the whole town of Blythe because the people were white. Bilagáana.”
I paused, impressed he knew the Diné word. But I had a whole sermon stored up, and it would have to come out. “Four thousand private and commercial properties had uranium carted off at the behest of Congress, the implication being that white citizens deserved more quality management than the native miners.”
Fremont exploded from his chair, unable to contain his energy. He paced the “native” rugs I’d lined the floor with, his hands fisted, the globes of his ass working beautifully under his jeans. “Don’t you think I know? Cost the government two hundred fifty million to clean up that town.”
Pivoting back toward me, he spiked his fingers through his soft hair. When he lifted his arms like that, his threadbare T-shirt rode up, displaying a strip of carved abs. My penis was hardening, a situation I was usually able to keep under wraps. The vestments helped, and it was one reason I’d chosen the priesthood. It did help with temptation, but when it hit, it hit hard. Like now. Now I shifted uncomfortably, looking at a samurai woodblock print on the wall.
He was shouting. “Did Google tell you that this church is built on uranium? When you and your miner friends built St. John’s, you used uranium tailings and rock from the mine for this very foundation.” He pointed a stiff finger at his feet. “You’re right. There are so many red flags on this rez it resembles a used car dealership. But there’s not a fucking thing I personally can do about it.”
I stood too, holding my hands out patiently. I had never thought about my own church, about the floor beneath my feet. Was I contaminated because I walked on radiation? How many years of walking on radiation until you got cancer? Or was it cancer? Was it some other insidious disease that slowly ate away at your innards, at your mind? Was that why I couldn’t sleep at night, why I tossed and turned with visions from my childhood, of my father, floating and leaping at me like tigers from the bushes?
“Fremont,” I said. “You must be the hero you were born to be. You don’t strike me as a cowardly man. I can see you’re heroic to the core by your bearing, by your stance.”
He stood so close to me I could detect his natural scent, his sweat, my nose pricking up, heavy with pheromones. “Well, your intuition must be wrong, because I’m a coward of the worst kind. This job is my identity, my fame. My mortgage.”
I shook my head, holding up a cupped hand as if to bless him. This man walked in beauty, as the Diné say, and he didn’t even know it. “God chooses human, imperfect leaders because he has no choice. That’s the only sort there is. The holiest of men have feet part of iron and part of clay.”
Fremont pointed at himself. “But I’m fallible. I have feet of clay.”
“Good!” I cried happily, and this time I almost clapped him on his shoulder. “Then you’re ready. You must be the hero of your own story, F
remont. We all bear the pain we give to each other. At one point you’ll have to make the choice. Can you bear giving witness to your discoveries?”
Fremont slapped away my hand that hadn’t touched him. “My mother named me Fremont because she wanted me to get out of New Rochelle, you pompous ass! She thought if I was named Levi or Aaron I’d be stuck forever in the claustrophobic Jewish society of the synagogue, the latkes, the buffets, the doctor visits. She wanted me to get out and do something different, something unexpected, something I loved, and I loved rocks, so there you have it!”
“But I didn’t say—”
“I never signed up to be a whistleblower. And if you think you’re going to sneak behind my back using your holy official channels to nark about your foundations, your walls, your cattle, your blankets—”
“My blankets?”
“—then you can think twice, Father Apple! Because you have no authority to act on information I gave you in confidence.”
And he breezed past me, wafting such a trail of his essence that my knees went weak with need for him.
What a ride he would be.
CHAPTER FOUR
FREMONT
“I’m very disappointed in you, Fremont.”
It wasn’t I’m disappointed in the results, Fremont. No, it was me personally Ozzie Avery was disappointed in. He prided himself on making the best deals, and if you failed to make the best deal, you were outta there. So far, I guess I’d made the best deals, aside from that time he’d had me stalked by a Russian hitman.
“To be fair, Ozzie, I did find feasible deposits worth mining. Just not at the levels we were expecting.”
“Well, what did they do in the forties?” he bawled. Avery was an upper crust Connecticut family man, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He bawled every word, his mouth shaped like an anus. I personally loathed the man. But I had to admit, he set the bar high. He challenged me to exceed my own goals every time. “Don’t tell me they took all the ore out and it’s all gone now?”
“No, no, not by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve got a lot more investigation to do.”
“Well, you go ahead and do it, then. Grushenka and I are going to Cape Cod this weekend, but I’ll be in touch on my phone. Oh, and, what in the name of Zeus’ zygotes is this shit about sampling wells? Why are we supposed to care about livestock watering holes?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I just thought I’d put that in there because it might become important later. I sampled forty-eight wells. The EPA determined the maximum safe level for uranium in drinking water is thirty pico per liter—”
“I don’t care if it’s thirty hundred picos and Alvarados, Zuckerman!”
Already using my last name wasn’t a good sign. It was Russian goon time when he started calling me Israel, my real first name, I noticed.
“You say here the Indian Health Services are the primary public health providers for the Cheyenne.”
“Navajo. And Hopi. And—”
“They’re the ones to make the effort to warn residents not to drink from shallow wells. Correct?”
“Correct,” I admitted.
“OK then,” Ozzie said grandly, as if the problem had been solved. “Delete it from the report. You look for more ore and get back to me. And give me something inspirational to tweet about the beauty of the Indian reservation, that sort of thing. Optics go over well with the public. I’ll steal some photo of Little Bighorn from the net.”
“Colorado River Indian Reservation.”
“Something to do with Custer. Ciao, Fremont.”
I sighed and checked my hair in the rearview mirror of my rental car. I combed it with a little comb I had in the center console. Why did I care what I looked like? Most of the bikers who’d been roaring up hadn’t seen a can of mousse in centuries, or a dentist for that matter. One towering, gangling Cro Magnon of a man actually flipped me off as he ambled past. He was so thin he was assless, and I don’t mean chaps. Another fellow was so roly-poly his vest wouldn’t button in front, but he didn’t seem to mind. He gripped a pink bakery box in one hand, in the other a plastic Safeway bag overstuffed with potato chips. This guy was cheery and seemed to nod at me.
Either way, I stood out like a reasonable man in the Fox News building. With my anchorman hair, looks I’d been told were clean-cut and good, and my desert boots, I bravely got out of the car. Neither did I fit in with any of the Indian groups heading for the scent of grilling tilapia from Costco. I tried to casually amble behind a ground of middle-aged, cowboy-hatted Diné, but no matter what I did, I did not fit in. I hadn’t even brought an offering. Not even a bag of chips or a six-pack, like men usually did.
One leather-clad guy hoisted a portable camping toilet on his shoulder, as though planning to give it away at a raffle. Another biker had to be the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. His pointed features were enhanced in their devilish appeal by a well-groomed goatee, an elegant man bun, and the most well-stuffed package I’d ever witnessed. How could he walk with a schlong that massive rubbing against his thigh, sliding around in that hot leather?
“Turk!” a blonde guy shouted at him. “You bring the blue?”
Turk patted the pocket of his cut with assurance. “Got an eighth for Dr. Moog. Another eighth for Haven.”
Dr. Moog? He must be the rez doctor. As a fellow man of science, it would be good to suck it up to him. I needed all the friends I could get in this place, and I’d gotten off on the wrong foot with the stunning Father of this church.
Father Moloney had really rattled me, all that blather about stepping up to the plate, being the hero of my own play. I was crushed with indecision, and he told me that’s all right. I was beaten down and terrorized with fear of the company, U-238 and the man behind the mask, Ozzie Avery. As a good Jewish boy, I utilized this fear to whip myself to greater heights, to be sure. But now Father Moloney was telling me my fear had created a hero in me. I could stroll through the valley of indecision and still be most true to myself. I could basically even be, if I read the good father correctly, a weenie whining crybaby and still come out on top, as long as I blew the whistle to the feds. As long as I saved the people around me from cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, “Navajo neuropathy,” I could be the biggest pissant loser shaking in my boots.
Right now, I walked beside a teenaged girl in a wheelchair, her hands and feet curled into lobster claws. Was that “Navajo neuropathy”? The youth who pushed her, maybe her brother, seemed to be developing the same curled fingers. The serious, Stetson-hatted father walked with a resolute step, and the mother was absolutely grim.
It reminded me like a hot smack at the end of a wet fist just what we were dealing with. This was no fucking idyllic, pastoral scene. These were no innocent, holy sheepherders on their way to a community fish fry. The only thing real about this scenario, oddly enough, was the unruly, gritty bikers swirling around me, shouting respectful epithets at each other, tossing loaves of homemade bread like footballs, setting up the raffle table.
And I hadn’t even brought a six of Bud.
As I rounded the corner of the scenic whitewashed church, the extent of Father Moloney’s power stretched out before me. Maybe four hundred people, fifty of them clad in leather, had come to support this event. A Quartzsite farming wife unveiled a pie from under a cloth napkin. A pale and weedy biker with watery eyes displayed his offering of brownies. And of course, there was plenty of the ubiquitous Indian fry bread, that lard-filled tasty treat that was the staple of every trading post.
There was no sign of the good father, and he was the one I really needed to talk to.
My mother hadn’t really named me Fremont. She’d named me Israel, and even after over a decade in a Jew-centric New Rochelle school, that name had been a heavy beast to bear. I’d officially changed my first name to Fremont when applying for colleges. It was I who couldn’t wait to bust loose from the confines of my upbringing. I was accepted into MIT and, as they say, I never looked back.
As the Father had promised, no one who looked like a Rover was manning the fish grills, whitefish sizzling over coals and chunks of mesquite. I did like fish myself, so I looked around for a donation box. I was relieved when the poncho-clad, skeletal form of Galileo Taliwood sailed into view.
“Fremont,” he said with apparent joy, as though we were besties separated by miles. In fact, he said, “Bro. May I call you bro?”
I was flabbergasted, but why not? “Sure, bro. What’s on your mind?”
His next words were even stranger. “Well, you’re accustomed to hooking up with ladies, aren’t you?”
I frowned and smiled at the same time. “I suppose. I mean, I was married for awhile, so I’m probably pretty rusty. What do you need?”
He looked from side to side shyly. “I thought I’d fan out my feathers, if you know what I mean. See what sort of birds I can attract to my nest.”
Birds? Did he think I was from England? “But don’t you live up north in Pure and Easy? Don’t you run some kind of dog grooming business? Surely there must be more accessible and geographically desirable women up there.” In fact, now that I looked around, it seemed the only age-appropriate women were in wheelchairs.
Galileo practically toed the sand with embarrassment. “That’s true. But . . . “
“But what?”
He glanced from side to side. “You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“What with the Bent Zealots and all . . . “
The Bent Zealots were the motorcycle group. “What about them? What do they have to do with women?”
Galileo exhaled with relief. “Exactly! What do the Bent Zealots have to do with women, bro? My brother joined up with them, and I admit it took me awhile to get over the idea. But now that I’m up here hanging with those homies, on the fringes of course, not as a Prospect or anything, but I can see the advantages.”
I was perplexed. It had bothered Galileo that Ogden had “patched in” with the Zealots. I guess I could see why. They were thugs, no matter how many trays of pot brownies they brought to the fish fry. As many Toys for Tots runs they may pretend to go on, they probably traded guns for heroin over the border. I knew this was no riding club, groups of employed men who took their motorcycles on weekend jaunts, wives in tow, doing poker runs. This was a true outlaw MC all the way, a 1% club as they called them. “Oh yeah? What’re the advantages? Because they attract a lot of chicks to the nest?”
