Crossroads Read online

  Neither Charlie Durochie nor his truck was at the little house in town. When Russ found a woman down the street who spoke English, she said that Charlie was gone for the summer and Keith was with his wife’s people, up on the mesa. She nodded in a direction where there was only glare and dusty vacancy, no mesa.

  Russ was now additionally afraid that his mission would be a bust, because, in all the vast reservation, he knew only two men to speak to. Inside the baking Willys, he shut his eyes and prayed for strength and guidance. Then he drove in the direction the woman had indicated.

  The road up to the mesa was in places barely passable, the country relentlessly deserted but nevertheless dotted with bleached, shriveled cow patties. The Navajo men Russ encountered, one whittling a stick in the shade of an outcropping, two others watering horses at a tank beneath a rusted windmill, seemed to assume that a twenty-one-year-old white man looking for the Fallen Rocks people, as Keith Durochie’s in-laws were evidently known, must have had some reason. The men stressed, in their crude English, that the distance wasn’t short.

  He had to stop every half hour to shake his cramped hands. When the air cooled and the shadows grew long, he pulled over by a decrepit stock pen and a tank into which water trickled from a crusty pipe. Small birds, ghostly in the twilight, were drinking from the seepage. The water was bitter, but his canteen was empty. On the mesa road, in six hours, he’d seen two women on a motorbike, one boy with a dog herding sheep, one old man driving a truck with coils of wire strapped to its bed, various free-roaming horses, and nothing resembling a town. He ate pork and beans from a can still warm from the day’s heat. Then, fearing scorpions, he bedded down inside the Willys. He missed George Ginchy. Through the windshield, he could see a sky clotted with stars and nebulae, but he was too homesick for the camp to get out and admire it.

  In the cool of early morning, he traveled through an upward-sloping basin forested with juniper and pinyon. Along the road, on flats too dry to be called meadow, sheep grazed among thorny shrubs. There was a magnificent desertion to the country, rutted tracks branching off with mysteries at the end of them, a sense of lives present but hidden. He drove fifteen miles before he saw another person, and then it wasn’t one but a hundred.

  Close to the road, beside a corral, were cook fires, horses, some trucks. Older men and women of all ages stood or sat around a structure of tree boughs festooned with scraps of red cloth. When Russ stopped and asked the nearest man, who was saddling a horse, where he might find the Fallen Rocks people, a scent of fried mutton entered the Willys. The man nodded up the road.

  “At the chapter house. Follow the wash.”

  “What does the chapter house look like?”

  The man cinched the saddle and didn’t answer.

  A long way farther up the road, Russ came to a neat, unmarked structure of mud and split logs beside a wash. The track next to it looked passable, and he followed it up into a shallow canyon, past fallen rocks the size of haystacks, an encouraging sign. In a side canyon still shaded from the sun, he found a proper small house, a stock pen, a yard with chickens in it. Beyond the pen was a hogan outside which women were cooking on an open fire. In front of the house, a little girl, Stella, was watching her father chop wood. At the sight of Keith Durochie, the tension of Russ’s long drive drained out of him. He felt like he’d come home.

  Keith approached the truck, trailed shyly by Stella. “What the hell?”

  “I’m back,” Russ said.

  “What for?”

  “Forgot my wrench.”

  There was a silence before Keith smiled. He led Russ into the house, which had two rooms, one with a bed in it, and gave him sweet coffee and a cold, unsweetened sort of doughnut. When Russ explained that he was on a fact-finding mission, Keith said it would have to wait—he was doing a sing. He left Russ alone, by no means for the last time. Life among the Navajos meant a lot of waiting and not much explanation.

  What a sing was he learned later in the morning, when a dust cloud boiled up from the canyon. The people he’d passed on the road were now on horses adorned with brightly colored yarn, followed by trucks similarly adorned and tooting their horns. The entourage proceeded past the house to the hogan where the women had been cooking. Nervous but curious, Russ crossed the yard for a closer look.

  The lead rider was a short-haired young man whose face was painted black and red; in his hand was a tasseled black stick. He waited in the saddle until others from his group could help him down. Moving with a bad limp, he took the black stick into the hogan. Children were piling from the trucks and running to a shed where the food was. Keith and his kinswomen quietly greeted the adults. No one paid any attention to Russ.

  From inside the hogan, a male voice rose tremulously in off-key song. Russ didn’t understand the words, but they went to his heart. The voice was like his grandfather’s, singing hymns in Lesser Hebron; Clement, too, sang off-key. After the song had ended, the hogan erupted like a small volcano, boxes of Cracker Jack flying out through its smoke hole. While the children pounced on them, Keith’s people distributed blankets to the older guests, who’d taken up a different song.

  he-ye ye ye ya ŋa

  ’ėėla do kwii-yi – na

  kį gó di yá – ’e – hya ŋa

  he ye ye ye ya

  Though the language was foreign, the voices of a congregation, raised in bright morning sun, deepened Russ’s sense of having come home. As the singing continued, Keith invited him to join the group for mutton and corn bread.

  Only the children, Stella in particular, looked at him, and for a long time Keith was busy hosting. Russ might have grown bored if he hadn’t been so fascinated by the faces. When the party finally broke up, the entourage returning to their horses and trucks, Keith sat down and asked him where he was going next. Russ again mentioned his charge from George Ginchy.

  “I told you not to bother,” Keith said.

  “You said you’d talk to me after the sing.”

  “It just started. We still have three days.”

  “Three days?”

  “That’s the new way. We don’t do the long sings anymore.”

  “The thing is, the only people I know here are you and your uncle.”

  “You won’t get to my uncle in your truck.”

  “Well, so.”

  Keith turned and, for the first time, looked at Russ directly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Honestly, I want to know more about your people. The work is just an excuse.”

  Keith nodded and said, “That’s better.”

  He went to help his kinspeople, and Russ fell asleep on the ground. He was awakened by the smell of gasoline. Keith was filling the tank of a small truck through a funnel with a muslin filter. Already seated on the cargo bed were Stella and a slender young woman with a bundled baby. “You ride in front with me,” Keith said.

  Making the woman sit in back didn’t seem right to Russ, but to Keith the matter was already settled. The little truck had a suspension well suited to the rutted canyon road. After a long while, as Keith drove, his silence became so trying that Russ asked him what a sing was.

  “We’re helping our friend,” Keith said. “He came back from the Pacific out of harmony. He walks bad, from shrapnel, and he doesn’t sleep—the enemy’s burned flesh is in his nose. The enemy looked like us, not like the bilagáana, and their spirits got inside him. He brought home an enemy shirt that he can smell the war in. It will be part of the sing.”

  Though Russ didn’t understand every detail, the communal healing of a man brutalized by war made thrilling sense to him. He had many more questions, but he made himself parcel them out slowly as the truck retraced his morning drive. He learned that the woman in back was Keith’s wife, the baby his two-month-old son. Keith’s father-in-law, riding ahead of them on horseback, carrying the ceremonial black stick, was a medicine man and a friend of Charlie Durochie from a boarding school in Farmington, New Mexico. Keith had attended the same schoo
l and worked for some years on oil rigs before he married into the Fallen Rocks clan. He now managed his in-laws’ ranch on the mesa.

  Each fact Keith offered seemed to Russ a precious stone. He felt hopelessly inferior to Keith, as lovers do, and was reluctant to take his eyes off him. What Keith thought about Russ was less clear. Russ had the sense of being more than just tolerated, of being at least amusing in his ignorance, but Keith showed little curiosity about him. The only question he asked on the drive was “You a Christian?”

  “Yes,” Russ said eagerly. “I’m from the Mennonite faith.”

  Keith nodded. “I knew their missionaries.”

  “Here? On the reservation?”

  “In Tuba City. They were all right.”

  “So—are you—do you worship?”

  Keith smiled at the road ahead of them. “Everyone drinks Arbuckle’s coffee. All over the world, Arbuckle’s coffee. Your religion is like that— I guess it must be pretty good coffee.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We don’t send our coffee around the world. You have to be born here to drink it.”

  “But that’s what I love about the Bible. Anyone, anywhere, can receive the Word—it’s not exclusive.”

  “Now you sound like a missionary.”

  Russ was surprised to feel ashamed.

  Many miles down the main mesa road, they reached an encampment where fires were being built, blankets shaken open, slabs of raw mutton handled, a flaccid basketball kicked around a grassless pasture by shouting boys. Several hundred people were at the camp. The sight of them created a pressure in Russ’s head, a sense of too much immersion too quickly. To relieve it, he set off down the road by himself, into the setting sun.

  A raven was croaking, jackrabbits browsing in sagebrush shadows. A snake, both startling and startled, went airborne in its haste to leave the road. As soon as the sun dropped behind a ridge, a breeze came through the valley, carrying smells of warmed juniper and wildflower. Turning back, he saw smoke rising from a distant bonfire, the cliffs behind it pink with alpenglow. He saw that he’d been wrong about the Navajos’ land. The beauty of the national forest was friendly and obvious. The beauty of the mesa was harsher but cut deeper.

  Feasting was in progress when he returned to the camp. He hadn’t known to bring anything but the clothes he was wearing, his pocket knife and wallet, so Keith gave him blankets from the truck. Even if Keith’s wife hadn’t been nursing, Russ would have been too shy to speak to her, because she was Keith’s wife. While he ate mutton and beans and bread, competing songs wafted over from other cook fires. Someone was beating on a drum.

  The dancing started when the sky was fully black. Standing with Keith, Russ watched a young woman circle the bonfire, stepping in rhythm with the drum, while a crowd clapped and chanted. Other young women joined her, and soon some of the older men were dancing, too. The pressure in Russ’s head had given way to exhilaration and gratitude. He was a white man alone among the Indians, hearing the women sing and chant. Resinous knots of juniper exploded in orange sparks, the stars dimming and brightening in swirling smoke, and he remembered to thank God.

  One of the younger girls peeled off from the fire and came over to him. She touched his shirt sleeve. “Dance,” she said.

  Alarmed, he turned to Keith.

  “She wants you to dance.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “Dance with me,” the girl insisted.

  She wore a bulky shawl and a skirt with a Mexican ruffle, but her calves were bare and slim. Her forwardness was so alien to Russ’s experience, she was like a threatening animal, and he didn’t know how to dance; it had been verboten in Lesser Hebron. He waited for her to go away, but she stood patiently, her eyes on the ground. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and he was a tall, white, older stranger. He found himself touched by her courage.

  “I’m not a dancer,” he said, taking a step toward the fire, “but I can try.”

  The girl smiled at the ground.

  “You need to give her a little money,” Keith said.

  This bewildered Russ. But the girl, too, seemed confused. Her smile, in the firelight, was edged with disappointment. Not wanting to offend her, he took a greenback from his wallet. She snatched it and hid it in her skirt.

  He had no idea what to do, but he joined the circle and stepped as well as he could, following the girl, who did know what to do. The slimness of her legs and the shimmy of her hips brought out the queasiness in him. But now, in the flickering orange light, amid the beating of the drum and the chanting of female voices, he understood that the queasiness had nothing to do with pity or revulsion. It was heart-quickening excitement. Beneath the girl’s shawl and skirt was a body that a man could want; that Russ himself could want. A suspense that had hitherto existed only in disturbing dreams, dreams that ballooned into apocalyptic heat and ruptured in the soiling of his pajamas, had invaded the world he was awake in. What made the dreams so disturbing was how painless it was, how ecstatically pleasurable, to be consumed in flame.

  The girl’s interest in him seemed to have expired when he gave her money. After a politely long interval, he stepped out of the circle and retreated into the dark. As soon as the girl noticed, she ran over to him. Her expression was now closer to angry.

  “Keep dancing or give her money,” someone, not Keith, called to him.

  He couldn’t imagine what money had to do with healing a soldier’s psychic wounds, but he fumbled with his wallet and gave her another greenback. Satisfied, she left him alone.

  He awoke in the morning, on the ground beside Keith’s truck, still excited, still prickling with his new awareness, and daunted by the prospect of further immersion. Feeling the need for a walking cure, he told Keith he was going back to the ranch and would wait for him there.

  “Take a horse,” Keith said. “You could die in the sun.”

  “I’d rather walk.”

  The walk was brutal, seven hours under a sun ever hotter and whiter. Keith had given him a skin of water and some bread wrapped in a rag, and he’d exhausted both before he reached the turnoff at the chapter house. By then, in the white heat, the road had ceased to be a line leading rationally from an origin to a destination. It had become, in his mind, the defining engenderer of everything that wasn’t road—stony slopes boiling with grasshoppers, stands of conifers made blacker by the blazing light, seemingly proximate rock formations whose respective positions his progress refused to alter. Either his ears or the air rang so loudly that he couldn’t hear his footsteps. He mistook a hovering falcon for an angel, and then he saw that the falcon was an angel, unaffiliated with the God he’d always known; that Christ had no dominion on the mesa.

  By the time he reached the ranch, he’d walked his way out of all certainty, and the cure hadn’t worked. The very thing he’d been fleeing awaited him in Keith’s little house. The spirit of the girl he’d danced with had preceded him, outrun him, to the bedroom. Parched and sunburned though he was, he lay down and opened his pants to see if the dreamed apocalypse could be achieved while he was awake. He discovered that, with a bit of chafing, it very quickly could. The pleasure that tore through him was the more glorious for being waking, and there wasn’t any punishment; he wasn’t struck blind. He wasn’t even ashamed of the splatter. No one could see him, not even God. For the rest of his life, he associated the mesa with the discovery of secret pleasure and permission.

  When Keith came back with his family, two days later, he put Russ to work on the ranch. To the farming skills Russ already had he added new ones. He learned how to lasso a calf, how to catch a horse on a range without fences, how to compel a cow to walk backward in a narrow gully. He experienced the misery of sheep dip for all concerned, both the sheep and anyone who touched the vile liquid. Keith’s brother-in-law castrated a stallion and threw a bloody testicle at Russ, and Russ threw it back at him. He and Keith rode far up the canyon and camped beneath a milky host of stars, saw the si
lent silhouettes of gliding owls, heard spirits whistling in rock crevices, ate roasted pinyon nuts. When his worst fear was realized, in the form of a scorpion sting on his ankle, he learned that it merely hurt like the dickens.

  The longer he stayed with the Diné, the more resemblance he saw with his own community in Indiana. The Diné, too, preferred to live apart and seek harmony, and their women were like his mother—sturdy and patient, permitted to own land. In the stories kept alive by medicine men, the original divine mother, Changing Woman, who was named for her seasons, had partnered with the Sun and given birth to twin sons. Like Russ’s mother, Changing Woman was associated with the fruit of the land. She’d raised the sons and instilled them with practical wisdom, while the solar father, though necessary for creating life, remained aloof. And just as Mennonites recalled their martyrs, so the Diné sang of their Long Walk to the prison camp in the 1860s, the years of disease and hunger inflicted on them there. The Diné, too, defined themselves by persecution, and their country, close to nothing, welcoming to no one, a desert, was even godlier than Indiana. It was in the desert, after all, that the Israelites had received the Word of God, the one God of all mankind, and that Jesus, while summoning clarity for his ministry, had prayed for forty days and forty nights.

  During Russ’s forty days in Diné Bikéyah, Keith advised him not to point at shooting stars, not to whistle at night, not to look a stranger in the eye, and not to ask a man his name before it was offered. When a Diné man died in his hogan, his family had to burn it and destroy whatever had touched him. Out on the open mesa, Keith nodded at a sun-bleached horse skeleton, still saddled a decade after the horse’s rider had been struck by lightning, and told Russ to stay away from it. Keith said the man’s bad luck adhered to the spot, and Russ, in the shimmering heat, the rarefied air, found that this made sense to him. While man experienced time as a progression, from unknown past to unknowable future, to God the entire course of history was eternally present. To God, the site of the lightning strike wasn’t just the spot where a man had died but the spot where he would later die and the spot where, in God’s perfect knowledge, he was forever dying. Being in the desert made a mystery like this accessible.