Crossroads Read online

  Frances, too, looked dirty and poorly slept. “You’re not going alone,” she said.

  “It’s fine. I can take care of myself.”

  “She has a point,” Ted said. “Why don’t you and I go together?”

  “Because I need you to stay here with the kids.”

  “I’m going with you,” Frances said.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I don’t care what you think.”

  Her eyes were on the table, her expression sullen. Russ wondered what he’d done to make her angry.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Yes I want to do that,” she said crossly.

  He guessed she was embarrassed. Embarrassed by her fear for his safety, embarrassed by her need to stay close to him.

  Ruth Benally’s truck was barely big enough for him to fit behind the wheel. If the fuel gauge could be trusted, there was half a tank of gas. As he followed the old road along the wash, he told Frances about the first time he’d driven it, the Enemy Way ceremony he’d blundered into. The road had since been widened, but the surface was no better. Negotiating the ruts and stones, he was slow to notice that Frances wasn’t listening. Her eyes were fixed on the windshield, her mouth tight. He asked what she was thinking.

  “I’m thinking,” she said, “I’d rather just buy two guitars with my own money.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  Not getting an answer, he stopped the truck. “I mean it,” he said. “I can easily take you back.”

  She shut her eyes. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Russ, but I’m a fearful person.”

  “Someone else could have come with me. It didn’t have to be you.”

  “Just drive.”

  He reached for her, but she jerked away from him. “Just drive.”

  He didn’t understand her. He couldn’t sort out the mixture of confidence and fear, self-love and self-reproach. In her own way, she was as odd as Marion. He wondered if all women were odd or only the ones he was attracted to.

  The farther he drove up the valley, the less he recognized it. The land had always been dry, but he didn’t remember it being so utterly denuded. Gone were the sheep and cattle, gone every conceivably edible leaf and shoot, gone even the fence wire. All that remained were rough-hewn fence posts and erosion-scored slopes. Except that the rocks were white, not red, the landscape could have been Martian. Even the sky had a strange yellowish-gray pall. The haze was too pale and diffuse to be from a fire, and it wasn’t a dust storm—there wasn’t any wind. It was more like the pall over Gary, Indiana, on a clear Chicago day.

  The alienation deepened when he passed the last of the fallen rocks and saw, in the distance, Keith’s old farmstead. He’d assumed he would find people here, maybe Clyde himself, but there was nothing. No grass, no garden, no animals, only gnarled junipers and dead cottonwoods, their broken limbs barkless and silvery. In his mind, the farmstead had remained unchanged, alive with Keith and his extended family, their chickens and goats. To see what time had done to it was to become aware of how old he was.

  “Amazingly enough,” he said, “this is where I spent a summer.”

  Frances wasn’t listening. Or was listening but was too tense to speak.

  The little house, where he’d had his sexual revelation, had been stripped of its doors and its windows and its roof, leaving only the walls. The sunlight on it was bright but not as bright as it should have been. As Russ proceeded along the road, across the canyon and up the ridge opposite the farmstead, the yellowish pall became more pronounced.

  Reaching the top of the ridge, he saw where it was coming from. In the middle of the wide plain below, the earth had been torn open—was being torn open. Dust was billowing from a gash that might have been a mile wide. Industrial trestles and a raw new road extended from the gash to the northern horizon. Russ had a sense of betrayal, born of his loyalty to the primitive mesa of his memories. Keith had mentioned that the tribal council permitted coal mining on the reservation, but Russ hadn’t had any reason to travel in this direction until now. He hadn’t imagined that the mining was so close to the Fallen Rocks land—so close, indeed, to Kitsillie itself—or that the scale of the operation was so immense.

  Half a mile down the road, he saw Clyde’s pickup. In a clearing among sparse, stunted pine trees were two unhitched camper trailers, a structure of sticks and tarpaulin, a woodpile, and a larger, rusted truck with a water tank on its bed, everything filmed with road dust. Russ pulled over behind the pickup and cut the engine. A second sticker on its bumper said CRAZY HORSE WASN’T.

  “So,” he said to Frances. “Maybe you should stay here.”

  She was still staring at the windshield. “What did I ask you.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What was the one thing I asked you to do.”

  It was interesting that her fear expressed itself as anger, as if it were his fault that she needed him to include her.

  “Okay, then,” he said, opening his door.

  As they approached the trailers, the flimsy rear door of one of them banged open. Clyde came out in his bare feet, dressed only in brown jeans and a fleece-lined denim jacket, unbuttoned. His chest was bare and hairless. “Hey, white man.”

  “Hello, good morning.”

  “That your wife?”

  Frances had stopped a step behind Russ.

  “No,” he said. “She’s an adviser in our fellowship.”

  “Hey, pretty lady.” Again the smiling insolence. “What brings you up here?”

  “What do you think?” Russ said.

  “I think you didn’t get the message.”

  “I got the message, but I didn’t understand it.”

  “Get the fuck out of here? Seems pretty clear to me.”

  “But why? We’re not bothering you.”

  Clyde smiled at the sky, as if his amusement were cosmic. He was handsome in a strong-browed way, handsome and fit. “If I walked into your house in Chicago and you said, ‘Hey, red man, get the fuck out, I don’t like you people’—I’d get the message.”

  Russ could have objected that his group wasn’t in Clyde’s house. But the Navajos’ home was in the land, not in structures, and white people had certainly given them reasons to hate them. It was only by chance that Russ, until now, had dealt with Navajos who didn’t hate them. He glanced back at Frances. She seemed entirely occupied with managing her fear.

  “You’re right,” he said. “If you don’t want us here, we shouldn’t be here.”

  “That’s better.”

  “But first I want you to hear me as a person. Not as a white man—as a person. I want to hear you, too. I didn’t come here to argue with you, I came to listen.”

  Clyde laughed. “Like hell you did. I know why you’re here.”

  “If you’re talking about the guitars, then, yes, we will need those back. We’re not leaving the mesa without them.”

  “You people are all the same.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Your possessions, your money. You think you’re different, but you’re all the same.”

  “You don’t know me,” Russ said angrily. “I don’t give a damn about possessions. I do care about the two young girls you hurt by stealing from them.”

  “How many guitars do you need? I left you three of them.”

  “How many do you need?”

  “I already gave them to my buddies. That’s the difference between you and me.”

  “That’s bullshit. The difference between you and me is you steal from teenaged girls.”

  Clyde’s smile became pained. He looked around at the pine trees and then, shaking his head, walked over to the other trailer. From the dirtied sky came a faint sigh of industry, from the trees the chirring of a nutcracker. Frances’s eyes were fastened on Clyde as if she expected him to get a gun.

  “We’re safe,” Russ said gently.

  Her eyes moved to him without seeming to see h
im. Clyde emerged from the other trailer with the two guitar cases and set them on the ground. “Now get out of here,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Seriously, white man. You got what you came for.”

  Clyde went inside his own trailer, and Frances gripped Russ’s arm. “We should go.”

  “No.”

  “Please. For God’s sake.”

  Russ’s anger had turned to sorrow. There was beauty in a young man’s righteous anger and no joy in overpowering it—no satisfaction in bringing a white man’s legal rights to bear, asserting white ownership, reclaiming his possessions from a man who had nothing. The moral victory was Clyde’s. Thinking of what it cost him, Russ felt sorry for him.

  He went and rapped on the door of the trailer. Rapped again.

  “Listen to me,” he said to the door. “I want to invite you to come down to the school and talk to our group. Will you do that for me?”

  “I’m not your performing Navajo,” came the voice from inside.

  “Goddamn it, I’m showing you respect. I’m asking you to do the same.”

  After a silence, the trailer shifted with movement inside it. The door opened a crack. “You’re a friend of Keith Durochie.”

  “I am.”

  “Then I have no respect for you.”

  The door fell shut. Russ opened it again. Inside the trailer were the smells and disarray of solitary male living. “We came here to listen,” he said.

  “Your lady looks at me like I’m a rattlesnake.”

  “Can you blame her? You make threats, you break into the school.”

  “But you’re not afraid of me.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  Clyde pursed his lips and nodded to himself. “All right. I’ll show you who your friend is.”

  He stepped into a pair of boots, and Russ gave Frances a reassuring smile. She looked furious about what he was putting her through, but when Clyde came outside and led him down a sandy trail, through the pine trees, she followed them.

  The trail was short and ended at an outcrop overlooking the devastated plain. Dust continued to billow from the strip mine, and the intervening slopes were treeless, lifeless—water-starved and grazed to death. Clyde stood so close to the cliff’s edge that Russ’s rectum tightened.

  “Looking at this,” Clyde said, “is like watching you rape my mother.”

  “It’s bad,” Russ agreed.

  “It’s sacred land, but it’s full of coal. You see that smoke?” He gestured to the north. “That’s electricity for your cities. It’s not for us—there’s no electricity on the mesa.”

  “Do you want electricity?”

  Clyde looked over his shoulder at Russ. “I’m not a moron.”

  “I’m just trying to understand. Is the problem the coal mine, or the fact that you don’t have electricity?”

  “The problem is the tribal council. Your friend thinks this shithole is a good thing. Modern economy, man. Gotta deal with the bilagáana, fact of life, can’t live without ’em. That’s what your friend says.”

  “Keith cares about his people. I don’t like what I’m seeing here any more than you do, and I don’t guess Keith likes it, either. But the money has to come from somewhere.”

  “Keith doesn’t have to see it. He’s down in Many Farms.”

  “He’s not well, you know. He had a stroke last week.”

  Clyde shrugged. “Somebody else can cry over that. He fucked my family, and we’re not the only ones. The leases are shit and they last forever. We should be getting two or three times the money. And the jobs? My buddies are down there right now, eating coal dust. That’s the new Navajo—Peabody Fucking Coal Company.”

  Frances was faintly shaking her head, her expression neither frightened nor angry, merely desolate, as if here were another door she was sorry to see opened.

  “What did Keith do to your family?” Russ asked.

  “This whole slope, he had the grazing permit for it. His wife had the permit on the back side, too. We knew the back side was no good—you probably saw it, coming in. But this side was still good. Keith cleared out and sold us the permit, and bang, a year later the council signed the deal with Peabody. He knew what was coming—we didn’t. We had healthy herds, the maximum allowed, and now look. You see any stock down there?”

  There wasn’t an animal to be seen, not even a raven. From the direction of the mine came a muffled boom.

  “The mine sucks water,” Clyde said. “Peabody could shut it down tomorrow, the water wouldn’t come back for twenty years. And you think Keith didn’t know that? He read the leases, and the leases came with water rights. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

  Russ didn’t want to believe it—there had to be another side of the story. And yet what did he really know about Keith Durochie? He remembered being smitten with him, remembered the delight of feeling accepted by him, the pride he’d taken in being friends with a full-blooded Navajo. What he couldn’t remember, now that he thought about it, under the dust plume from the strip mine, was any particular warmth from Keith’s side—any real curiosity or sentiment.

  “That’s your friend,” Clyde said bitterly. “That’s your tribal council.”

  “I feel for you,” Russ said.

  “Oh yeah? You know the Sierra Club? They’re the crazy bilagáana that stopped the government from flooding the Grand Canyon. We went to them to try to stop the mine. We said we didn’t want a power plant on sacred land, and they were exactly like you. They said, ‘We feel for you.’ And they didn’t do shit for us. They only care about saving white places.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Frances said suddenly.

  Clyde seemed startled that she had a voice.

  “If we’re the bad guys,” she said, “if everything we do is automatically bad, if that’s the way you feel about us, why should we try to do anything?”

  “Just stay the fuck away,” Clyde said. “That’s what you can do.”

  “So you can go on hating us,” she said. “So you can go on thinking you’re superior to white people. If somebody like Russ comes along, somebody who actually cares, somebody who takes the time to hear you, somebody who’s good, it messes up your whole story.”

  “Who’s Russ?”

  “I’m Russ,” Russ said.

  “I don’t hate your guy,” Clyde said to Frances. “At least he came up here—I respect that.”

  “But we’re still supposed to get the fuck out,” she said. “Is that the idea?”

  Talking to a woman appeared to discomfit Clyde. He kicked some gravel over the edge of the cliff. “I don’t care what you do. You can stay the week.”

  “No,” Russ said. “That’s not enough. I want you to come down and talk to our group. You can do it tonight—bring your friends.”

  “You’re telling me what to do?”

  “It won’t change anything. You’ll still have this nightmare on your mesa—nothing’s going to change that. It makes me sick to see what’s happened. But if you’re angry enough to steal from us, we have a right to hear why you’re angry. I promise you the kids will listen to you.”

  “Have their little Navajo experience.”

  “Yes. I won’t deny it. But you’ll experience who we are, too.”

  Clyde laughed. “The thing about your promises? There’s always something you didn’t tell us.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Russ said. “That’s self-pitying bullshit. If you keep getting cheated, you need to be smarter. If you end up feeling like we’ve cheated you, you can go ahead and say so—we can take it. The question to me is whether you have the guts for an honest dialogue. From what I’ve seen, the only thing you’re any good at is saying ‘Fuck you’ and walking away. I’d hate to find out you’re nothing but a bully and a thief.”

  Did words give expression to emotion, or did they actively create it? The act of speaking had uncovered a love in Russ’s heart, a love related to Clem, and he could tell, from the uncertainty in Clyde’s
sneer, that his words had had an effect. But the fact of the effect was problematic. The very act of caring was a kind of privilege, another weapon in the white arsenal. There was no escaping the imbalance of power.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to us.”

  “You think I’m afraid of you?”

  “No. I think you’re angry and you have good reason to be. You’re under no obligation to spare us the discomfort of your anger.”

  Now every word he said seemed to aggravate the imbalance. It was time to swallow his love and shut up.

  “Thank you for giving us the guitars,” he said.

  He beckoned to Frances to go ahead of him on the trail through the pines. Following her and looking back, he saw a complicated smile.

  “Fuck you,” Clyde said.

  Russ laughed and proceeded up the trail. Halfway up it, Frances stopped and threw her arms around him. “You’re amazing,” she said.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “God, I admire you. Do you know that? Do you know how much I admire you?”

  She held him tight, and there it was: the joy. After all the dark years, his joy was shining forth again.

  Returning to the camp, they collected the two guitars and laid them on the bed of Ruth’s truck. The sun was now white, the glare intense on the road down the back side of the ridge. (To Russ, when he’d stayed with Keith, it had been the “front” side.) Dangling from the rearview mirror was a small plastic Snoopy, not necessarily an indication that Ruth liked Peanuts. All sorts of random trinkets turned up on the reservation.

  “I’m sorry about this morning,” Frances said.

  “Don’t be. It was brave of you to be here at all.”

  “It’s like the feeling comes over me and I can’t control it. I wonder if it has to do with Bobby—the way he died. I don’t remember always being so afraid.”

  “The important thing is that you did it. You were afraid, but you did it.”

  “Can I say something else?”

  Russ nodded, hoping for a stroke in return.

  “I desperately need to pee.”

  The canyon was devoid of shrubs to pee behind, but the old farmstead was close ahead. Russ increased his speed, Frances squirming at every bump. When he pulled into Keith’s old yard, she had the door open before he stopped. She hobbled behind the shell of the little house, and he took his own leak behind a cottonwood. Watching the wood go dark with his urine, he thought of the bare ground going dark with hers, her pants around her ankles. In the sun and the thin air, he felt dizzy.