Arrived, however, these hundreds and hundreds of Indians have come alive in their eyes and are climbing, not coming down. He sees them now in the Rock, through it, a Redman’s trick of color, the light, the volcanic ash, but what’s ash and tuff, and what’s lava, lava was molten but didn’t burn, he’s even less geologist than maybe Indian; but then there’s perhaps their time and his time, they’re more eternal than he, you can bet, yet this is a multiple operation, as the man back at Fruitland said of the mine cum power plant; for the Indians, female and male, both climb and descend and they come off and come out, both up from within the earth (having turned the monster that was bugging them to stone) and down onto dry land which, like the volcano and its ancient lands, shrinks from their feet until (though he’s no mentalist) they tell it to stop and then they stand, no more alone than a man in front of a rented car, upon which they turn to see what brought them and see not some lava mouth below them within a cone’s throat, nor any old big rock, but the stone ship: so though he’s no authority on Indians he has to see that, sure, the Great Spirit sent the stone ship, but sent it from here. (So two stories meet.)
Sent it while the volcano was still here and the resulting absence inside it would be unknown. So that, to take the story further and bring Indians and geologists together, the volcano’s erosion, its wearing down, corresponds to the return of Ship Rock to this place. Here it comes, it’s ploughing the seas, Indians manning the crags, the mind of the Rock harrowed with women and men lookouts speculative as any rock man with his cutaway restorations. But full of some stone’s-throw dream of monsters done for.
Head of a rhino, arms of a spider, torso of a cactus, legs of a linebacker.
But wait: the Navajo story tells of individual heroes, not a communal attack on the ogres.
Well, that’s their story, and don’t expect to be admitted to any of their shindigs.
All of which is his alone to know, hypothetical man, a notch more beat-up this morning, last night’s pound of steer ground down in the gears of his gut, no one’s going to push him around; but hypothetical: but only he knows this secret union, the geology and the Indian stuff. United in what you can call one operation, like the same collateral for two loans, make it three, four; and he is encouraged not to get a more single-minded telling of the ship story or the monster story or the bird story from the environmentalist lady from Albuquerque who wants him militant, that’s why she’s trying to see him— develop an attack—make certain the surface-mining legislation coming we hope this year at least compels operators to repair damage to the land, and while the polluting particulates, the sulfur dioxide, the nitrogen oxides are worse from Four Corners than from what’s ahead, what’s ahead is thousands more acre-feet of water that could just as well be Indian irrigation-project water, taken from the Colorado River system; millions more tons of coal stripped, because now (if the companies get what they want—and let’s face it, energy projects as the Sierra Club man said are like apple pie, God, mother, and country) it’s gas—gas by the German method of chemical transformation—the Lurgi method, how does the name grab you? why aren’t you busy at your particular job in your niche, your stall, your compartment?—where you add oxygen and steam to an oven-hot pressure-pot of coal to make a gas composed of hydrogen, carbon oxides, methane, some sulfur compounds, then take away the wastes (which you sell while they’re fresh): which leaves low-heat-content "town gas" which before you shoot it to California gets refined again to make good old pipeline methane —a long, quiet, interstate fart—which was your object—a synthetic natural gas! Which is what this beautifully named process is all about: "gasification," the one simple object of all this.
This trip, his copy’s going to be pretty brisk.
Meanwhile he has made it here to Ship Rock alone only then to feel (for no place is only itself) eyes on him two thousand miles east as he put an open geology book on a table by a clear-glass bowl of water with pink and white petals in it (but now he saw only the water—which those very eyes had said would be—if you could only wrap water—a very nice present to take to Kyoto—she said it was a Jap poem). And he thought he heard a car from far off toward the town of Ship Rock (spelled as one word with a small r, he later noted) but then it might be the vehicle that he’d seen but now maybe can’t see coming slowly back over the curved, rutted track from the Rock, and so did not hear the car.
But then did—all around him like that hollow whole of his son’s stereo at college.
Or the equality of all places. Haunting him.
Well how did we get here? blinks an Indian woman.
Think up a story to tell her quick. Wing it.
Father Sky run roughshod over Mother Earth? Only in some families.
Blinking against the sun that he forgot to curtain out when he came in from the motel bar last night, blinking early this morning against the phone, blinking against two car doors clucked shut by marital voices outside the next unit, two voices, the memory of coffee ahead. Woke to the phone ringing Ship Rock out of his crumbling head, sleeping head, so that he need not pick up if he no want to, while last night’s drinks swung, hung together into one swaying deposit as deep as stories two engineers in invulnerable Stetsons told at the bar, which was not very deep, until he rolled one bed-creaking shoulder to grab the phone (feeling the void of another purpose than his own approaching his ear) and found his heart pounding through as if he had a hole in his ribs and heard instead something pretty nice, and the hope that in his report he would tell the "whole ecological story" and if we can’t stop these people, at least get a strong reclamation provision into the new law—make the bastards replace their divots, he thought, and if they don’t, then fine their asses, and if they don’t pay up, then check who’s buying their coal, but he heard himself say "Get back to you," and out of a dream of sailing round Ship Rock he thought he told her he wanted to go there, voices in the increasing shadow of his bladder—but for the first time (like a pun that only he had missed, carrying it, but missed only because he’d daydreamed it, no doubt to forget it)— "shipwreck."
This message. But one the messenger carrying it can’t know.
The Albuquerque lady anyway woke him with her call. But he thought he would not call her back. (O.K.? he asked, asking himself.)
She was not waiting for him when he came out of the shower onto—
More telling still, if by old practice he must speak aloud the message: words he knows in his sleep and told his daughter and son with more or less success before theirs, their sleep, of the Eastern Princess who went among crystal labyrinths (that sort of thing) and unheard-of flowers and rode a giant bird past the pyramids of Egypt and the bright hot springs of Iceland, saw the ritual slaughterhouses of five continents and a healer who with an invisible knife parted the skin to let out bad thoughts—and this East Far Eastern Princess whose royal father had shown her all the monuments of his country and all the love and all the young nobles that he and his loyal wife could muster, had given her this growing bird of a giant species noted for its traveling powers, but having caught and gobbled a cow here and there on the great plains and up into the desert among the greatest monuments of the earth that the Princess had yet seen, her bird found down across its track an animal faster and whiter than it had ever seen and flew at it and caught it in its beak and secreted it under its left muscle and flew on. But at that moment was spied a creature never seen before, or so it seemed in its solitary white-and-dark-dappled speed, nor did the Princess’s bird see that the speed of this western horse was a sudden reaction to the bird’s own course. And the bird caught the white-and-dark-dappled horse in its iron beak until a call like none the Princess had yet heard came from a crag on the horizon, whereupon she saw a herd of similar wild horses and above them a burnished prince upon his own dark, tall horse calling, in a language she knew without taking thought, calling to her that the wild and fancy young horse her giant bird had beaked could be hers.
There was more of that story if he did not thin
k, and if he did not fully wake up. But the Albuquerque lady woke him with her call. He thought he would not call her back. (O.K.? he asked himself.)
She was not waiting for him when he came out of the shower onto thick dry carpet, the shower’s pleasant dream, nor waiting in the dining room smelling the steak-and-eggs platters sailing by, nor in credit car, into which he did not quite disappear, to flow secretly back through the wide streets of this boom town of Farmington (boom? boom? average, wide-streeted, middle-of-the-road boom) honked not boomed back to his senses and the right side of the road after catching sight of Ship Rock thirty-odd miles ahead, thinking maybe it was the Albuquerque woman following, who on the phone had offered her own car. Turn his in, she said, cancel his plane to Albuquerque, she was going to Albuquerque anyway, going home, her voice hesitated in order to be insistent, like his daughter’s voice somewhere very far east of here, probably in Washington, drowned out by her motorcycle; and he wanted for a moment to have breakfast with the woman but was able to say, "Get back to you." Shoulder creaking, hung up, knowing in the heart of this heartfelt clarity of knowing that he would take his own car and drive to Ship Rock by himself, hung up and found the woman’s voice between his legs in the motel bed.
Passing the turnoff to the Navajo mine, he turned off and drove the few miles up to see it again, leaving the power plant around the lake where it was. An Indian family were picking up pieces of waste coal in shovels and buckets, children, grandfather, woman bending over in a long skirt, a little boy swinging a huge shovel, all specializing. They were alone against the low, dark tumuli of slag, and down in the valleys smoke slowly rose from some of the strip-mined craters, a gleaming pipe down one path in the bank, a crane at rest, power lines nearby, crows cawing. The family watched him turn.
Between the family and this Rock he drove the rented car; and the Rock was in the side window, then in the windshield, in the other side window, in the windshield again, while he floated into the Agency town of Shiprock ten miles by air from the Rock, sparse and spread-out reservation town with wide highway for main drag, Route 550 from Farmington, but before he hit the supermarkets, before probably pregnant women easing out of the drivers’ seats of pickup trucks they’ll be paying for, before the Bureau down a side road, before employment offices, before more than this, he negotiated a violent U-turn and pulled into a gas station. So for a couple of clicking, ringing minutes he listened to the Navajo attendant explaining that one day he will come back here with a law degree and work for DNA (young, glasses, skin pimply, long hands eating a square of process cheese peeling the plastic back just before the teeth reach it). DNA? Oh, D.N.A. The only organized opposition that gasification has experienced. (Words to be dropped down a well but recovered in future at what level?) Could you write that out? Sure, got a pencil? The hand that peeled the cheese, pens at the car window Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditahe, Inc., attorneys who contribute to the economic revitalization of the people. Well, not only opposition to the strip mining; remember the ad hoc groups and the Indian Youth Council.
So long and—hello U-turn and—on the right bearing out of town the Navajo Community College branch, pale stucco (what is stucco?), before he hit the bridge over what’s left of the San Juan River that’s come down from the Colorado mountains and into which the Chaco (which is more river bed) turns, extending south to be joined at least on the map by Coyote Wash down past Sheep Springs, the direction of Gallup, road to Albuquerque too.
Ship Rock at this stage increasingly on the right. Until here’s the right turn off onto the Red Rock road.
But no place is single; he was always doubling back. Like to Farmington, mile upon mile behind him, the motel bed-telephone (new invention) and the Albuquerque environmentalist woman somewhere in Farmington last night, sounding together, "needing" him (she said), she had to see him before he collected his thoughts, his reactions, before he wrote his "report," before he went back East (please?), she’d drive him to Albuquerque, she had an Indian engineer friend right there in Farmington. Even return your car for you.
But Ship Rock got closer, Farmington further, and with it the Four Corners Power Plant and the Navajo Mine, the family digging in the dark piled-up surface among the billows of coal and waste.
Until he turned. And left the Gallup road and went a few miles west along the Red Rock road, past a single hogan with curtains in a window— hogan, hexagonal earth-roofed or wood-roofed Navajo dwelling, more like the real thing than the SHOE HOGAN billboarded back in Anglo Farmington, boots for Indian and Anglo alike, like Prairie Schooner Steak Pit, but more like Igloo Kayak Center a fast paddle inland from Boston (but whatever happened to the Chicanos? let’s achieve a little racial balance, they wear shoes, they eat, they live, they remember the Mexican War, some of them around Farmington believe that all of that land belongs to all of them from olden times, and they have no Chicano reservation)—and at last onto the desert-dirt track roughly with the great dike-rampart on his left now, and he stopped two, maybe two and a quarter miles from the Rock to catch up with himself, and as if he hadn’t quite meant to be, he was here, having passed through not much more than himself standing here for half an hour, forty-five minutes, usefully alone, finding now a smoking cigarette coming out of his mouth between his fingers, also now thinking he has to get all the way back to Farmington to return the car and take his plane, and rubbed the wrong way by the separation of that hollow wholeness into now two accelerating sounds, the camper he saw coming from the Rock closer and closer, the outline of the crown and brims of the driver’s hat and someone on the left with him, and the car he turned and knew he’d see coming up behind his own with a woman driving and a man in the other front seat, the vehicles closing on him until he wishes for a blanket door he could throw up and disappear by.
A bleached beer can stands upright near a low bush and a candy wrapper.
A truth is that Ship Rock isn’t so alone as it seems. But it is so much bigger than any of the other igneous intrusions that are within a twenty-mile radius that this Rock is what it seems.
(Throw in a couple of oil-drilling rigs.)
Has the god come and gone?
Several, of both sexes.
And went away together bickering about who was the most beautiful and terrible.
He’s between cars, cars on top of him. He looks above the camper truck coming from the Rock and the Indian in the driver’s seat with big hat and trooper’s sunglasses, and his girl with him—and looks beyond to Ship Rock which recedes; and then the camper comes to a stop looking at him, and the car coming up behind him comes to a stop, and he hears a woman—the woman—call his name here in the desert and his hackles are up and he can’t not turn to her, thinking of the past and of his dispersed family, to say, "What brought you?" and she answers, like a former wife who still bears his memory, "You did."
He looks still harder at Ship Rock. Time lost and running. Time looks through his eyes. At the possibilities for him.
Shipbuilding, for instance. Prime instance of the wisdom of the division-of-labor principle in the pursuit of the wealth of nations. Adam Smith or someone similar in those days thought so. Two hundred years ago. Eighteenth-century shipbuilding.
Rock men, red men, rich men, energy men, workmen, women, and men came here with him yet were waiting for him here; but having consolidated into a whole company they disperse now like family.
Look at Ship Rock for the last time.
Because—for God’s sake—he’s just seen this—or heard it said inside him—for God’s sake, the Rock doesn’t look like a ship! Doesn’t look like a volcano either, nor the stuff coming up out of a volcano—word’s "tuff," he thinks (but only after it’s hard, he thinks, so he’ll have to ask). The main thing is that the Rock doesn’t look like a ship, for the moment.
A discovery earned. But he won’t labor the point. Divide the labor; he did the discovering.
He is the center of a traffic jam in the middle of nowhere, three vehicles, gangsters, agents, famou
s kidnapped South American economist being handed over. But the camper has cut around him—what’s a road, out here?—and is detouring cross-country for the moment and he hears music from the car and he recalls what followed "hy-po-thet-i-cal" on the jukebox last night and it was "des-ti-nation."
Drop words into welcome well, draw up silence: fair trade: silence to the People.
He looks away toward the other car and sees with the Albuquerque woman an Indian—portly, young. He’ll know what organization the letters D.N.A. stand for. Something about lawyers who contribute to the economic revitalization of the people.
She herself is dark blonde. In her thirties, watching him from beside her car.
She’ll know if it’s just a myth that the plume from the power plant drifting south, drifting north, holds together for hundreds of miles, or has at least been seen hovering near Albuquerque.
She understands he’s looking at the Rock.
But it doesn’t look like a ship.
But it brought him here.
And it will get him home.
still life: sisters sharing information
How it happened?" exclaimed the fair-haired woman. "How it happened?" she said, looking past her companion who sat with her back to the street window. "I don’t care how it happened. It happened."
"But if you don’t care," replied the other woman, who was younger, "how do you keep it from happening all over again the next time?"
She had hesitantly introduced herself to the fair-haired woman only to be invited to sit down; rather, she had found out who she really was after she had sat down.
Women and Men Page 34
