Blasphemy (25 page)

“Are you puzzled that he packed a suitcase?”

“Some suicides do that sort of thing. Suicide is often spontaneous.”

“So where do you see a problem?”

“Mr. Ford, how’d you know there was a car out there?”

“I saw the fresh tire tracks and the crushed sagebrush—and then there were the buzzards.”

“But you didn’t see the ravine.”

“No.”

“Because it isn’t visible from anywhere along the road—I checked. How’d Volkonsky know it was there?”

“He was distraught, drove off into the desert to shoot himself, came across the ravine, and decided to make it even more certain.” Ford didn’t quite believe it himself; he wondered if Bia would.

“That’s exactly what the FBI thinks.”

“But not what you think.”

Bia straightened up and touched his hat. “Be seeing you.”

“Wait,” said Kate.

Bia paused.

“You don’t think one of
us
might have killed him?” Kate asked.

Bia brushed a broken tamarisk twig off his thigh. “Let me put it this way: if it’s not suicide, it was a very, very intelligent murder.”

With this, he touched his hat brim again, nudged the flanks of his horse with his heels, and passed them by.

Ford thought:
Wardlaw
.

BLACKHORSE LOOKED EVEN BLEAKER THAN IT had when Ford had first seen it on Monday — a lonely collection of dust-covered trailers huddled between the flanks of Red Mesa and some low yellow hills. There was the smell of snakeweed in the air. In the patch of dirt where the children had been playing last time, a swing rocked emptily in the wind. Ford wondered where the school was—probably Blue Gap, thirty miles away.

What a place to grow up. And yet, there was a kind of monastic-like emptiness to a Navajo settlement that Ford found appealing. Navajos did not accumulate property the way other people did. Even their houses were spare.

As they rode toward the corrals, Ford spotted Nelson Begay shoeing a sorrel horse snubbed to a cedar post. He was cold-shaping a horseshoe on an anvil with a series of well-aimed blows of a hammer. The blows echoed off the mesa.

Begay laid the hammer and shoe down with a clatter and straightened up, watching them approach.

Ford and Kate halted, dismounted, and tied their horses to a corral fence. Ford raised his hand in greeting, and Begay motioned them over.

“This is Dr. Kate Mercer, assistant director of the Isabella project.”

Begay lifted his hat brim to Kate. She stepped over and shook his hand.

“You a physicist?” Begay asked, eyeing her skeptically.

“Yes.”

Begay’s eyebrows rose slightly. With great deliberation he turned his back, put his shoulder into the horse’s flank, pulled up the hind leg, and began matching the shoe to the hoof. Then he placed it on the anvil and gave it a few more whacks.

As Ford stood there pondering Navajo cultural sensitivities, Kate said to Begay’s blue plaid back, “We were hoping to talk to you.”

“Then talk.”

“I’d prefer not to talk to a man’s back.”

Begay dropped the hoof and straightened up. “Well, now, ma’am, I didn’t ask you to come, and right now I happen to be busy.”

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me. I’ve got a Ph.D.”

Begay coughed, laid down his tools, and faced her without expression.

“Well?” she said. “Are we going to stand here in the hot sun or are you going to invite us in for coffee?”

Exasperation mingled with amusement spread across Begay’s face. “All right, all right, come on in.”

Once more Ford found himself in the spare living room with the military photographs on the walls. As Begay poured coffee, Ford and Kate sat down on the brown sofa. When their mugs were full, Begay settled into the broken Barcalounger. “Are all lady scientists like you?”

“Like what?”

“Like my grandmother. You don’t take no for an answer, do you? You could be Diné yourself. In fact”—he leaned forward, scrutinizing her face—“you aren’t—?”

“I’m half Japanese.”

“Right.” He leaned back. “All right. Here we are.”

Ford waited for Kate. She always had a knack with people, as she was already proving with Begay. He was curious to see how she’d handle him.

“I’ve been wondering,” Kate said, “what, exactly, is a medicine man?”

“I’m a kind of doctor.”

“How so?”

“I perform ceremonies. I cure people.”

“What kind of ceremonies?”

Begay didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry if I seem nosy,” Kate said, giving him a dazzling smile. “It’s sort of my profession.”

“Well, I don’t mind the question, as long as it isn’t idle curiosity. I perform several ceremonies—the Blessing Way, the Enemy Way, and the Falling Star Way.”

“What do the ceremonies do?”

Begay grunted, sipped his coffee, eased back. “The Blessing Way restores balance and beauty in a person’s life—after troubles with drugs or alcohol, time in jail. The Enemy Way is for soldiers returning from war. It’s a ceremony that removes the taint of killing. Because when you kill, a little bit of that evil clings to you, even though it’s war and you did it lawfully. If you don’t do an Enemy Way, that evil will eat you up.”

“Our doctors call it posttraumatic stress disorder,” said Kate.

“Yes,” said Begay. “Like my nephew, Lorenzo, who went to Iraq . . . He’ll never be the same.”

“Does the Enemy Way cure PTSD?”

“In most cases.”

“That’s extremely interesting . . . . And the Falling Star Way?”

“That’s a ceremony we don’t speak about,” said Begay curtly.

“Would you ever consider doing a ceremony for a non-Navajo?”

“Why, you need one?”

Kate laughed. “I could use a good Blessing Way.”

Begay looked offended. “This is not something you do lightly. There’s a lot of preparation involved and you have to
believe
in it for it to work. A lot of
Bilagaana
have trouble believing things they can’t see with their own eyes. Or they’re New Agers who don’t like the hard preparation—the sweat lodge, fasting, sexual abstinence. But I wouldn’t deny the ceremony to a
Bilagaana
just because they’re white.”

“I didn’t mean to sound flippant,” she said. “It’s just . . . For a long time, I’ve been wondering what the point of it all is. What we’re doing here.”

He nodded. “Join the club.”

After a long silence Kate said, “Thank you for sharing that with us.”

At this Begay leaned back and rested his hands on his jeans. “In Diné culture, we believe in exchanging information. I’ve told you something about my work. Now I’d like to hear something of yours. Mr. Ford here tells me that over there at the Isabella project, you’re investigating something called the Big Bang.”

“That’s right.”

“I been thinking about that. If the universe was created in a Big Bang, what came before?”

“Nobody knows. Many physicists believe there was nothing. In fact, there wasn’t even a ‘before.’ Existence itself began with the Big Bang.”

Begay whistled. “So what caused the Bang?”

“That’s a difficult question to explain to a nonphysicist.”

“Try me.”

“The theory of quantum mechanics says things can
just happen
, without a cause.”

“You mean you don’t know the cause.”

“No, I mean there
is
no cause. The sudden creation of the universe from nothing may not violate any laws or be unnatural or unscientific in any way. Before, there was absolutely nothing. No space, no time, no existence. And then, it just
happened
—and existence came into being.”

Begay stared at her, then shook his head. “You’re talking like my nephew, Lorenzo. Smart boy, full scholarship to Columbia University, studied mathematics. It screwed him up—the whole
Bilagaana
world messed up his head. Dropped out, went to Iraq, came back believing in nothing. And I mean
nothing
. Now he sweeps out a damn church for a living. Or at least he used to, till he ran off.”

“You blame science for that?” Kate said.

Begay shook his head. “No, no, I’m not blaming science. It’s just that hearing you talk about how the world came into being out of nothing, it sounded like the kind of nonsense he spouts . . . . How could the Creation
just happen
?”

“I’ll try to explain. Stephen Hawking proposed the idea that before the Big Bang, time didn’t exist. Without time, there can’t be any kind of definable existence. Hawking was able to show mathematically that nonexistence still has some kind of spatial potential, and that under certain weird conditions space can turn into time and vice versa. He showed that if a tiny, tiny bit of space morphed into time, the appearance of time would trigger the Big Bang—because suddenly there could be movement, there could be cause and effect, there could be real space and real energy. Time makes it all possible. To us, the Big Bang looks like an explosion of space, time, and matter from a single point. But here’s the really weird part. If you peer into that first tiny fraction of a second, you’ll see there wasn’t a beginning at all—time seems to have always existed. So here we have a theory of the Big Bang that seems to say two contradictory things: first, that time did not always exist; and second, that time has no beginning. Which means that time is eternal. Both are true. And if you
really
think about it, when time didn’t exist, there could be no difference between eternity and a second. So once time came into existence, it had always existed. There was never a time when it didn’t exist.”

Begay shook his head. “That’s just plain crazy.”

An awkward silence settled in the shabby living room.

“Do the Navajo have a creation story?” Kate asked.

“Yes. We call it the Diné Bahané. It’s not written down. You have to memorize it. It takes nine nights to chant it. That’s the Blessing Way I told you about—it’s a chant that tells the story of the creation of the world. You chant it in the presence of a sick person and the story heals them.”

“You memorized it?”

“Sure did, my uncle taught it to me. Took five years.”

“About the same as my Ph.D.,” said Kate.

Begay looked pleased by the comparison.

“Will you chant a few lines?”

Begay said, “The Blessing Way shouldn’t be chanted casually.”

“I’m not sure we’re having a casual conversation.”

He looked at her intently. “Yes, maybe so.”

Begay closed his eyes. When he opened his mouth, his voice quavered and was pitched high, as he chanted in a strange five-tone scale. The non-Western harmonics and the sounds of the Navajo words—a few still familiar, but most not—filled Ford with a longing for something he had no name for.

After about five minutes, Begay stopped. His eyes were damp. “That’s how it begins,” he said quietly. “It’s the most beautiful poetry ever written, at least in my opinion.”

“Can you translate it for us?” asked Kate.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that. Well, here goes.” He took a deep breath.

Of it he is thinking, he is thinking.
Long ago of it, he is thinking.
Of how darkness will come into being, he is thinking.
Of how Earth will come into being, he is thinking.
Of how blue sky will come into being, he is thinking.
Of how yellow dawn will come into being, he is thinking.
Of how evening twilight will come into being, he is thinking.
Of dark moss dew he is thinking, of horses he is thinking.
Of order he is thinking, of beauty he is thinking.
Of how everything will increase without decreasing, he is thinking
.

He stopped. “It doesn’t sound good in English, but that’s sort of how it goes.”

“Who is this ‘he’?” Kate asked.

“The Creator.”

Kate smiled. “Tell me, Mr. Begay: Who created the Creator?”

Begay shrugged. “The stories don’t tell us that.”

“What came before Him?”

“Who knows?”

Kate said, “It seems that both of our creation stories have origin problems.”

From the kitchen sink, a drip of water splatted into the silence, then another, and another. Finally Begay rose and limped over to turn it off. “This was an interesting conversation,” he said, returning. “But there’s a real world out there, and in it is a horse who needs new shoes.”

They stepped out into the brilliant sun. As they walked back to the corrals, Ford said, “One of the things we wanted to tell you, Mr. Begay, is that tomorrow we’re doing a run of Isabella. Everyone will be underground. When you and your riders arrive, I’ll be the only one there to meet you.”

“We aren’t doing a ‘meet and greet.’”

“I didn’t want you to think we were being disrespectful.”

Begay patted his horse and stroked his flank. “Look, Mr. Ford, we got our own plans. We’re going to set up a sweat lodge, do some ceremonies, talk to the ground. We’ll be peaceful. When the police come to arrest us, we’ll go quietly.”

“The police aren’t going to come,” said Ford.

Begay looked disappointed. “No police?”

“Should we call them?” Ford asked dryly.

Begay smiled. “I suppose I had a fantasy of being arrested for the cause.” He turned his back and plucked up the horse’s leg with one hand, the paring knife with the other. “Easy, boy,” he murmured, as he began to pare and trim.

Ford glanced at Kate. On the ride back, he would come clean.

BY THE TIME FORD AND KATE reached the top of the mesa, the sun was so low, it seemed to wobble at the horizon. As they rode quietly through the blooming snakeweed, Ford tried for the hundredth time to frame what he wanted to say. If he didn’t start talking, they’d be back at Isabella—and he’d have missed his chance.

“Kate?” he began, riding up alongside her.

She turned.

“I asked you on this ride for another reason besides visiting Begay.”

She gazed at him, her hair like black gold in the sunlight, her eyes already narrowing in suspicion. “Why do I have a feeling this is something I’m not going to like?”

“I’m here partly as an anthropologist, and partly for another reason.”

“I should’ve guessed. So what’s the mission, Secret Agent Man?”