by Layla Wolfe
There was, or wasn’t, some artifact other than Sinquah’s hungry mouth as he fell to his knees groaning, once again mouthing my lover’s crotch. But this time Fremont prevailed, putting his animal instincts behind him.
“I kneed him in the Adam’s apple,” Fremont claimed.
“And told him no,” I prompted.
“And told him no and ran out.”
I would have to get used to owning such a ripped buck for a boyfriend. It had become so predatory at Sailor Jack’s club I’d vowed to stop going there. Hands off was the policy there unless invited, but cuntiballs, I guess our performances had become so legendary men couldn’t resist a bunch of grab-ass in the shower, phone numbers shoved into our shoes, or just plain old dick-squeezing when we walked down the hall. I loved the nightlife, the exhibitionism, the showing off of my mouthwatering lover, the boost to my broken ego. But having my man groped and desired was too much for my self-esteem. I knew Fremont would run away with someone sooner or later, so I made a new rule. The jackoff club was off-limits.
Now, Sinquah boldly eyeballed Fremont up and down, but followed it with a nod of acknowledgement at me. He knew we were a couple. And he respected it.
I spoke with a few EPA equipment operators who had donated their time and machinery to demoing the first house we’d chosen. They were clad in crinkly white Tyvek suits and wore respirators, as did most other people. Klah was already jackhammering a foundation, and Toby waved me over.
“Something’s weird, Father.”
I grinned crookedly, pulling the elastic respirator strap down around my neck. “What else is new?”
“Well, you know my dad’s been out of touch lately.”
“Yes. I imagined he’d gone to a week-long sing.”
“Right. But I could find no other medicine man conducting any such sing. And I got no phone call or text from him until this.”
Toby handed me his phone. I took it gingerly by the edges so as not to ruin the photo. I frowned and looked around me, then back to the phone. I moved, holding the phone out at arm’s length. I circled around until Toby was back in my line of vision. “It’s a picture of here. There’s Sleeping Lady Mountain. There’s the Cleopatra Mine.”
“Exactly,” spat Toby. “This photo was sent five days ago, after I saw you last. No text, nothing. Just the photo. He was standing right where you are.”
I was standing in what had probably been a kitchen of one of the contaminated homes. Why would Joe Bloodgood be out here five days ago before work had started, before we’d even chosen this cluster of houses as the demo site?
“Put on your mask,” instructed one of the EPA guys, and Toby and I obeyed.
Another guy took up the jackhammer, so it would’ve been impossible to talk to anyone even behind the muzzle of the respirator mask. In that inexplicable scientist way, Fremont managed to do it, talking to his environmental friends and pointing at various stuff. Again, I hung back and admired my lover. Watching him in his work atmosphere was one of my most gratifying hobbies. The council had recently awarded him a parcel of land not far from my church, clean and near a clean well, on which to build a little house. This rez job could go on for years, I knew, but after that he’d be jetting off around the world again. It would be good to have a base for him nearby.
I knew that what we decide to welcome into our lives, to respond to, is the most shining sign of who we are and what we adore. Belief is a deed that is completely imbued with moral importance. The call to believe isn’t some timid god’s trial, testing us and sitting back to see if we do it correctly. No, it’s the only calling that can let us fully show who we are, who we love, what we most ardently desire. The most monumental deed of self-revelation happens when we decide who we will love.
Loving Fremont had been my choice.
As men tossed chunks of dirty concrete into the back of a dump truck, I again surveyed the kitchen where Joe Bloodgood had last been. It looked like someone had already started jackhammering a corner of the room’s foundation. Maybe Klah had gotten overly zealous, wishing to prove his sincerity to the group.
I shook Klah’s arm, getting him to turn off his jackhammer. We lowered our masks.
“Klah,” I asked, “did you jackhammer that other home’s foundation?”
Klah squinted a bit to see forty yards to the other house. He shook his head. “We haven’t started on that one yet. We’re completing one first before starting another.”
I nodded and patted his shoulder to indicate he could continue. Meandering back to the dug-up kitchen, I studied the broken concrete slab. Someone had dug a rectangle about seven feet long by four feet wide, the size of a coffin.
I grabbed some unused leather gloves and began to lift the concrete chunks. Underneath the four-inch pieces that I removed, the sandy dirt had been disturbed. I fetched a spade from the back of a pickup truck and started digging, gingerly at first. At a depth of about a foot my blade hit something spongy. Falling to my knees, I stuck my hand into the sand.
And felt a man’s hair, sticky and clumped beneath my fingers.
Leaping to my feet, I waved for Klah and Leroy Sinquah to get the hell over there. I purposefully did not call on Toby Bloodgood.
“I swear on a Bible there’s a man down there,” I told them.
We removed more concrete chunks, dug a little with spades, then kneeled to remove the remaining dirt. A nauseating stench wafted from the grave. The mask covering my nose didn’t seem to help, although I’m sure it did.
Klah said, “I’ll swear on my mother’s grave this is Toby’s dad. I heard him say he hadn’t seen him in a week.”
Leroy said, “And he smells like he’s been down here for a week.”
I’d seen a dozen corpses during my thug life, and of course I was called upon to give benediction and last rites to the dying. It did not bother me.
But the Navajo view death differently. Ghosts of the deceased were alleged to loathe the living. They buried their dead quickly and burned the homes and belongings of the departed. Anyone exposed to a corpse had to undergo an extensive ritual purification. I’d seen people jumping out second story windows of the rez hospital when someone nearby passed on.
Now Klah leaped up, holding up his hands as though surrendering. “That’s it, man. I’m out of here. I hope you understand.”
To his credit, Leroy Sinquah stayed. “It is not going to be easy to find people to help you get this man out of here.”
I said, “We should leave him, so forensics people can study the body.” I knew that much. There was no forensic guy on the rez, though.
We had the second-best thing. I now waved for Fremont to approach.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FREMONT
“See the skin on the fingertips?” said Leroy Sinquah, holding up Joe Bloodgood’s stiff arm.
It looked as though Joe wore those rubber fingers clerks in the government wore, the better to file things with. “That’s called ‘skin slip,’ right?”
“Right,” intoned Leroy. Louder, to Noel and Klah, he said, “Cell liquid infiltrates layers of skin and disconnects them. You can see the skin slip off. He’s been here a week.”
“Eyew,” said Klah, holding his stomach.
I pointed at the teen. “Klah, get back to work so we don’t draw attention to ourselves. Maybe even take Toby to the next house farther down the street to start jackhammering.”
“You got it,” said the newly reformed kid, just as the entire skin of Joe’s hand slipped off between Leroy’s fingers. It looked like a used condom, slack and sticky.
“Maybe don’t touch anything,” suggested Noel, squatting down next to us.
“What am I waiting for, the cops?” said Leroy.
“If we don’t figure this out,” I said, “no one will. Now, who has motivation to kill and bury Joe Bloodgood?”
Almost before the words were out of my mouth, all three of us knew. Ozzie Avery. Joe was the second most powerful Diné on the rez. He knew things, an
d he led the Superfund allocation that was driving Ozzie off the rez. But would getting rid of Joe stop the Superfund? The ball was already rolling in that regard. Would killing one Diné put a dent in it? If anything, it would draw attention to our struggle.
And the big question. Would Ozzie personally kill anyone? He was all sorts of vile things, but a killer he was not.
“Dragan,” said Noel, just as I was thinking it.
I said, “Would he take matters into his own hands? I thought he just followed orders.”
The stench emanating from the ground was unbelievable, so I stood and moved off a few feet. I’d dealt mostly with mummified people discovered in caves, that sort of thing. And of course, in Africa, the random victims of war crimes, usually women and children, but we always just drove on by, didn’t stop to examine anything.
Now I was faced with a guy I personally knew crawling with carnivorous beetles. I shakily told my friends, “His pancreas is so laden with bacteria it’s basically eating itself. That’s why he’s purple. Next, he’ll turn black. The terrible smell is the gas that’s causing the body to bloat.”
“And his eyes bulging from the sockets,” added Leroy, almost fondly. He’d been a good friend of Joe, yet he could analyze the scenario heartlessly. A sign of a good cop. “And his tongue protruding from his mouth.”
Noel was still squatting, however. He lifted Leroy’s arm like a board. “I heard that nails don’t necessarily continue growing after death. It’s just the mummification of the hand that makes the nails look bigger.”
“That’s true,” I was able to say with sincerity, since I’d seen the effect in caves. “But be careful. You don’t want that skin dripping onto you like butter.”
I had to kneel again to gently lift the arm from my lover’s hand. That’s when I saw it. Chips of sky-blue paint under Joe’s nails. He’d been scrabbling, fighting against the murderer. I looked around at the roofless kitchen where we huddled. No blue paint. I looked at the house where Twinkletoes and Klah demoed cement and rotten wood. That house had been painted a fluorescent shade of banana yellow.
“He’s been moved here. He wasn’t killed here.”
Noel took my word for it, but Leroy had to question me. When I showed him the paint chips beneath Joe’s nails, he seemed to have a newfound respect for me. I jogged to my rental car to grab a small stoppered plastic bottle from one of my bags and a tiny scraping knife. I jogged back to grab a small Ziploc bag, an evidence bag, like I’d seen on TV.
When I got back to the body, Twinkletoes was there with questions, and Noel was saying to him,
“A man of the cloth cannot take up the sword.”
“We’re not asking you to!” cried my assistant. “I just think you should be there when we confront this motherfucker because he seemed to respond to you last time. He must have respect for men of the cloth.”
“Yes, that’s true,” I agreed. “You should’ve seen how he turned into a puppy when you took his arm to lead him away.”
Noel looked his usual modest self. “I just thought of something. Don’t people always want to know cause of death? Take those chunks of cement off from around his head.”
The three of us—we wouldn’t let Noel touch the concrete—removed the jackhammered chunks, some with sawed-off rebar sticking from them. It was a horrifying sight. Poor Joe’s open eyes bulged from their sockets, and I was actually afraid they’d pop and spew us with eye liquid. Well, what the fuck else was I supposed to call it? We were in an incredibly gruesome situation that we couldn’t back off from.
I wasn’t sure what Noel was looking for, gunshot through the forehead? I tried to be logical.
“You know, if you shuffle a deck of cards and take ten, the odds of that sequence popping up are in the trillions. If you drew out an actual suit it would be surprising, but the odds are equal to any other combination of ten cards. The meaning we attribute to it is a construct of the human brain.”
Leroy said, “You’re saying we’re looking to assign meaning to something.”
“Exactly! You and I are men of science. The odds of that cholla cactus growing right there on that particular spot in this galaxy are so microscopically small that it seems to be important, right?”
“I think you’re losing it, Zuckerman,” joshed Twinkletoes.
“You’re just sketching a bull’s-eye around a cluster of bullet holes on the side of a barn. Making meaning out of a random event. It would be the same thing if you saw a Gila monster right out there, a funny-shaped cloud, or a fish in the lake. There’s a hundred percent chance you’ll find something if you look.”
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. Well, we’re looking, Mr. Science Man,” said Noel. He didn’t seem repelled at all to be bending over Joe’s face as Twinkletoes and Leroy uncovered it. He smiled, in fact. “There. Look at his forehead.”
Everyone except me bent over poor Joe. They all breathed, “ooo,” and “aah,” as though something suddenly made sense. I felt obligated to move Twinkletoes aside and look myself.
“Indentations,” Leroy was explaining, his rheumy fingers hovering over a few cave-ins to the poor man’s forehead.
I said, “Could be those brass knuckles Dragan carries with him everywhere. But how are we going to test his head?”
Leroy had an answer. Smooth as silk, he just pressed his fingers to one of Joe’s temples and slid them as though skating on ice. Sure enough, a whole sheet of skin came off whole, and he said to me, “Get another Ziploc bag.”
I sent Twinkletoes back to my car for another bag, and I took Noel off to one side. I was supposed to be overseeing the EPA in the home demolition, so I couldn’t follow through with the murder of Joe Bloodgood. And how long could we keep it from Toby?
“Noel, I know you have to see meaning in this murder. His body is at the right place at the right time, maybe where Dragan knew we’d be. You need a pattern to give your life meaning, to point the finger, to make you feel better. You require a primal order. Your forbears knew patterns and altered their actions to get food, or avoid turning into it.”
Noel shook his head. “No, I’m fine living with doubts and uncertainty. It’s more fascinating to survive not knowing than to have the wrong answers. I’m not afraid of being adrift in a purposeless universe. The thought doesn’t scare me.”
“Maybe we weren’t meant to be. But I’m fine with the idea we bumped into each other randomly. Carl Sagan said in the endlessness of space and the vastness of time it was his happiness to share a planet with his wife. He knew fate didn’t stick them together, but it didn’t detract from the amazement he felt when he was with her.”
Noel took my chin in his hand. Potentially a hundred working men could have seen us, but he didn’t seem to care. He touched his nose to mine.
“We’re not random. We matter. We were meant to be, Fremont. And I’m never looking at another man again.”
He stopped just short of kissing me, but the emotion in his face told the story. It was as though he looked at me with love. That’s all I can describe it as.
He gave me heart, and the balls should I say, to see this Dragan investigation through to the bitter end.
CHAPTER TWENTY
NOEL
For propriety’s sake, we put the cement chunks back on top of poor Joe Bloodgood. A few rez dogs came sniffing around, so Fremont quickly declared that that particular house wouldn’t need demoing. He lied to the EPA and claimed the levels weren’t high enough.
First, we showed the body to Galileo. He was my trusted deacon now, and being only half-Yazzie he might not be inclined to become a patsy for the worst of Diné superstitions, mainly, the deathly paranoia of dead bodies. I was right.
All he really said was, “I found a body buried beneath the floorboards once. It was only the social worker sent to check on us.”
No one made a sound. Finally, Fremont said, “You’re one dark motherfucker, Galileo.”
“Listen,” said Leroy, logicall
y. “You must find this Dragan fellow first, so I can arrest him.”
“‘Arrest’?” squeaked Twinkletoes. “You must know by now, the Bent Zealots do not ‘arrest.’”
Leroy pointed a stubby finger at Fremont’s assistant. “You must know by now, the Bent Zealots do not rule over this land. We do. If we went around killing every murderer, it would be anarchy.”
Twinkletoes nodded with satisfaction. “Anarchy, exactly. That’s how we rule.”
In the end, the men kowtowed to Leroy, but I had a feeling they were not telling him the whole truth. In the end, we evaded Leroy by all going back to Fremont’s EPA trailer to test the fingernail paint. Leroy stood guard over the body, a job that gave him the heebie-jeebies. He said all we had to do was let everyone know a body was there, and no one would go near it. But the bilagáanas would.
I’d never seen Fremont in the lab. He even put on a white coat to stand before the counter of vials and beakers as he tapped paint chips into a tube, showing Twinkletoes how to do it.
Galileo and I sat in the only two chairs, dentist office waiting room chairs by the front door. Galileo said, “Our number one priority is to find this asshole. He obviously killed Joe to send a message—“
“Or to get rid of a powerful Diné,” added Fremont.
“—and we need to take him out.”
I was surprised to hear such talk coming from the sheepherder. Had he been watching too much TV? But the rectory barely even got the basic broadcast channels. I said, “No, no one’s taking anyone out. We’ll hand him over to Leroy.” Back in my day, I would’ve taken the bastard out. Violence was an everyday thing when you needed to protect your drugs and guns against vile thugs. And just as I thought that, I realized that’s what the Bent Zealots were all about. Protecting their drugs and guns. And their people. If I allowed this Russian to go free, his next step would be to bash Fremont’s forehead in with his fucking brass knuckles.
I thought about Paul’s epistle to the Romans. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate, I do.” He was struggling with the dichotomy between his worst impulses and his purest. He “had the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” He waged war against the law of his mind, much as I was. At the very bitter end, I justified my ambivalent feelings by thinking that whatever happened, maybe I should not be there when it did. That would absolve me of guilt. It was a roundabout way of getting at it, but it was necessary.
