Moonlight Water (18 page)

Tony stood.

“Hands!”

Tony hesitated.

Zahnie said, “Tony.” She gave him the most significant look she could and sent him a mental message:
Use your get out of jail free card. Let him know you'll tell all if he busts you.

Tony stuck out his hands.

She said sharply, “Tony!”

He looked at her with hound-sad eyes and gave his head a minuscule shake—
no
.

At that moment Zahnie noticed how Tony looked at Charlie, and got a glimpse of his heart.
My God, Tony still has a thing for him. After all these years.

Hicks snapped the jaws of the cuffs shut, and Charlie gave a rooster-crow smile.

“Young man, what are you charging us with?” This was Clarita at her most imperial.

Charlie grinned savagely. “Possession and cultivation of illegal substances for purposes of use and distribution.”

“I remember you perfectly. Aren't you Roddy Lyman's youngest? Charles, it would be. Why are you doing this, Charles? Everyone in town knows what we grow here, and why.”

“Miss Clarita, I haven't had to answer your questions since fifth grade.” He turned to Tony and started to read him his rights.

“Charles,” Clarita interrupted, “I have cancer of the colon.”

Charlie started in on the rights again.

“The pain is sometimes intolerable. Tony grows it for me. I smoke a marijuana cigarette every day, sometimes two. I'm sure you don't want my days to be pure pain.”

“Oh, don't I?” Charlie snapped. “Why not? Tit for tat.”

She opened her mouth once more, but Tony said, “Grandmother, enough.”

She made herself half-visible.

Charlie finished reading Tony his full list of rights. “Anthony,” he went on sarcastically, “is this property yours?”

“It belongs to Harmony House. I am the executive director of Harmony House and fully responsible for everything that goes on here.”

“You have full cognizance of what's being cultivated in those buckets?”

Tony let out a big breath. “I want a lawyer.”

Charlie looked around at everybody and called out, “Perps and jerks, we're taking those buckets as evidence.” Hicks picked them up. “And we're clapping Anthony Begay in jail.”

With a shit-eating grin, Charlie marched Tony to the car and pushed him into the backseat. Charlie and Hicks spun out for the county jail with lights and siren going full blast.

Clarita wept quietly.

*   *   *

They ate supper in silence. When the last pudding was eaten and the last coffee cup drained, Clarita said, “Tony did it for me.” Her voice trembled. Her cheeks glistened with tears. Red thought her face looked like water-stained silk.

“This train has been coming down the track for twenty years, and it just ran over us,” said Zahnie.

“What do you mean?” Red didn't get it.

“Tony and Charlie's week in San Francisco.” Zahnie added, “God save us from other people's guilty consciences.”

“You figure Charlie doesn't care if Tony exposes him?” Jolo asked Zahnie.

“Tony won't. Ever.”

“Why in heaven's name not?”

“He still loves Charlie,” said Zahnie. “But I might blow the son of a bitch out of the water. That would fix him with the sheriff and most of the county.”

“My fear is,” said Clarita, “even if the people around here turn their backs on Charlie, the state board will still shut us down because of the marijuana.” She stared at space, thinking. “Zahnie, you tell Tony he can use my money to fight this,” she said. “Whatever it takes.”

A sweet, reedy voice came. Winsonfred. “I have an idea.”

They waited. They hoped.

“Let's all go to Navajo Fair over at Mythic Valley.”

Red looked at Zahnie, but her face was freeze-framed. “Have you totally lost your marbles?”

“I'm no crazy person, and I say it's as good a time as any to back out of this … mess,” said Winsonfred in his soft voice. “Hey, the fair is a lot of fun. Mostly it's races, horse races and footraces, little kids, old ladies, everyone, the way old-time Navajo fairs were.”

“Zahnie and I talked about going tomorrow,” said Clarita, looking mystified.

“Well then,” Winsonfred said, “let's Red and me just go ahead now and meet you there.”

“Okay,” Red said, carefully not looking at Zahnie.

“Good,” said Winsonfred. He leaned forward. In a stage whisper, he said, “I'm going to be in a race myself.”

 

22

THE HOSTEEN HOP

Don't weave if you don't know a weaving song. It won't be any good.

—Navajo saying

 

“Across is better,” said Winsonfred. “People there know how to live.” This was the “across” that meant over the Old Age River and on the reservation, the most remote old-time part of the rez. “Funny, you white people, you're so smart, you can make all sorts of clever things like television, but you don't know how to live.”

Red drove through the dark, next to an old-timer whose confidant was a buzzard, headed for a town of throwback polygamists and, after that, across into a world that would be … What? Even more than when he started east across the Bay Bridge, Red didn't know where the hell he was going. And now Winsonfred seemed to have gone to asleep.

“Let's stop at Splendora for coffee,” he said with his eyes closed. “I like Splendora.”

“You like the polygamists?”

“I had three wives.” Then he read Red's mind again. “No, not like you white people, I had three all at once. My first marriage, that was pretty funny. We were teenagers, me and this girl, and our parents arranged for us to get married. Them days, that's how it was done, the families talked, the man's family gave the woman's family some horses, or something else her family wanted, and it was set. I didn't know her, of course. We didn't marry girls we knew. If you'd hung out with her, got to know her, that was like marrying your sister or your cousin. Also, if you called a girl ‘friend,' then you could never marry her—the two don't mix.

“Anyhow, at the ceremony her and me, we looked at each other and no way liked what we saw. All our thorns got sharp. Even after the ceremony she said no. I wasn't gonna take a backseat, so I said hell no, or as close as one of the Dineh can say something like that to his parents. Them days that wasn't done, saying no to your parents.

“So our families, they took us into the hogan where we was supposed to live and boarded up the door. Three-four days we was shut up in there together. When we came out, we liked each other good. Real good.” His smile gleamed of sexy memories.

“What about your other wives?”

Winsonfred opened his eyes. “They came along later, when we were doing better. It's a responsibility, a big family. And they were her sisters. We all got along real good.” Red glanced sideways at him. “Hey, somebody's got to balance you out. You divorce them. I marry them.”

“How did you get along with all three wives?”

Winsonfred's voice was merry. “What you mean is, how did it work with three?”

The silence twisted Red.

“You know better than to ask that,” said Winsonfred easily. “So. You know what makes up a typical Navajo family?”

“No.” Red had never felt more ignorant about more things in his life.

“Two parents, four children, one grandparent, and an anthropologist.”

Red grinned big.

Winsonfred closed his eyes again. “Wake me up at Splendora. I like to look at that young woman works there, has big breasts.”

Red drew a careful mental picture of the waitress. Then he said, “
Hosteen,
she can barely fill out her dress.”

Winsonfred flicked his eyes open in surprise, then suddenly smiled. “No, that's the baby. I mean the young woman, her grandmother.”

*   *   *

After Winsonfred spent half an hour paying due attention to Coralee's well-encased bosom, and they were back in the van, Winsonfred screwed himself around and studied the Big Dipper. “We'll go the short way.”

That worried Red.

They wound uphill, apparently onto the top of a mesa. As they cruised at sixty-five, Red could see the dark shapes of mesas and monuments on both sides but no vegetation at all. He pondered his bleak future as a homeless person, ignoramus, and rejected suitor of the thorny Zahnie Kee.
This is adventure?

Every once in a while he also made time for a thought of the bleak future of his new friend Tony, now in jail.

Suddenly Winsonfred said, “Turn here. To the right.”

Red throttled down to dead slow. There it was, a double dirt track in the sand. Red turned. He stopped. He said a quiet thank-you for all-wheel drive.

He drove for five minutes, ten, fifteen.

“I'll tell you when,” said Winsonfred.

Red pushed the van through desert scrub. From time to time in the darkness he thought he saw shadows off to the left or right, maybe long shapes like trailers or round shapes like hogans. On and on they pushed, endlessly. Other two-tracks dived off to the left and right. Winsonfred didn't speak, or he just said, “Straight.” Red wheeled down the widest swath of sand he could see.
Well, I asked for somewhere new to do my dancing.

Suddenly Winsonfred said, “To the right.”

Red steered down an even narrower track. After a couple of minutes shapes took form in his headlights. A stock pen, maybe another stock pen, a trailer, a hogan. Then a ragged line of vehicles appeared, mostly pickup trucks. “Find a parking place. That's the track in front there. Most people will come in the morning. It's late, let's sleep.” He put his head back. “The young men will prowl up and down in their chiddies all night. Hope it don't keep you awake.”

“Chiddies?”

“Pickup trucks. Chevvies.”

The old man seemed to drift away. Within seconds he was switching back and forth between a light snore and a light whistle. A chiddy rumbled slowly down what must be the track in front of them, growling. The flesh it was hunting was surely young and female.

Red gazed out the windshield at the stars.
It's true. Out here where there are no lights, you can see ten times as many stars.

He started checking them out, looking for the Big Dipper, though he didn't know how to tell time by it. He checked out a dozen stars, then a hundred, then gazillions, and he was still awake. He had fantasies about some of the people who lived on them, how they had ears like conch shells or their noses were broom brushes. He imagined the orgies they conducted with their impossible equipment. He got some chuckles but couldn't get to sleep.

And the chiddies growled all night. At some point the growl turned into Red complaining loudly. He was in a big, old four-poster bed with three women and a passel of kids. The kids were running around the bedroom, hopping onto the bed, bouncing off, and running around the room. The women were each trying to screw Red, all at once. The problem was that no one's equipment fit. Red's equipment was five gold hoops, like the Olympic rings. They dangled and clinked, but were useless. One by one, fast as a monkey chasing around a tree, the naked women tried to find some sexual use for the rings, but their equipment was bizarre, too—one had a mussel shell, another had a long fork like you barbecue with, and the third had a flopping fish. No matter what they did, nothing worked, and they got more and more frustrated and started yelling at each other and at Red. One of them tried something that went
squeak, rattle, clank, sque-e-e-eal!,
and that woke him up.

*   *   *

Red blinked out of the stupid dream, hoisted himself by the steering wheel, and peered out blearily. A chiddy rocked on its springs noisily in front of the van. Another slid in beside him and stopped. Wake-up colors paraded in front of the van, a flamboyance of velveteen—rose or purple skirts, turquoise necklaces, silver belts, jet hair, shell-white teeth, brown-red faces. It felt like the moment where Dorothy gets to Oz and the movie bursts from black and white into Technicolor.

He snapped the seat upright.

From the pickup by his window climbed one old Navajo man, one young man, four women of various ages, and a pack of kids.

“What's going on?” Red asked. He turned his head toward his companion.

Winsonfred was gone. He was perched on the chiddy's hood.

Then Red's eyes went beyond his friend.

Mythic Valley.

Words couldn't touch it.

His eyes feasted while his spirit held still.

Red knew this place, sort of. His mind struggled to bring into focus old John Wayne movies. Monuments stood mute and eloquent as gods. Stony slopes angled up to the base of each one, and from there the towers rose straight against the sky in simple, pure majesty. Spaced across the landscape, stone giants made their statements against an impeccably blue galaxy. Somehow, Red understood that life was simpler than he had ever known and more original. Better.

He got out of the van and looked up at Winsonfred.

“It's heady up here,” said the old man, grinning. He reached for a hand down.

As Winsonfred slid to the ground, the light changed his face. Red turned. In the east, the sun butterscotched low ridges. For a moment the sky turned a color he'd never seen before, and above the darkened earth was a blush of mint green. Then the sun rose, and abruptly the red rock of monuments glowed gold.

The morning air was cool. The desert sun, gathering itself on the horizon, seemed to freshen and sweeten the air.

This felt anything but lost.

“You know,” said Winsonfred, “the white people, the scientists, they tell us a lot about these monuments. About the big rock walls in the canyons, too. They're full of fancy words, and I like them okay, but I don't understand.”