The Darkness Rolling (11 page)

“Nothing smells as good as this fire,” she said.

I took the chair flanking the sofa and breathed the pungent sweetness of the burning wood into my soul.

We passed five minutes in small talk. I wondered if Mom was going to broach a certain touchy subject, and Cockeyed’s tail was twitching.

Soon she brought the fry bread, the honey jar, and a speckled pot of sweetened, fresh-brewed coffee on the table. Linda put a dollop of honey on the fry bread and wolfed it down.

Mom sat on the sofa next to Grandpa, wiped her hands on her apron, and said, “This is good, Linda. It’s so good to have you here. Yazzie says you’re very generous to him.”

“Actually,” Linda said, “he intends to pass that generosity on to you.”

I fished in my Wranglers and brought out some bills. One by one I stacked twenties next to Mom’s plate and topped them with a big grin.

She raised an eyebrow toward me.

“From Miss Linda Darnell and the studio for watching over her. Three hundred bucks out of the four hundred for a week. It’s yours. Please,” I said, “don’t toss it in a wad. It means something to me.”

Mom looked stumped. Grandpa started scribbling something on his blackboard.

Linda pitched in. “The next four weeks he’ll be guarding me until I go to bed. But, because he is so diligent and so attentive, I’ve arranged for my next studio to pay him three hundred a week, to make sure I make it to the next set on time and safely. That’s a total of twelve hundred more dollars.”

My head jerked toward Linda’s face. She smiled like a first dawn. She was trying not to look like she was gloating. I wondered who the head of her next studio was, thinking,
business or personal?

I found my voice and tried to fill it out with gladness. “Mom, right now this is my way of taking care of the family. I’ll give you two hundred of each week’s money. You can pay medical bills or pay the Babbitt driver for plenty of stock to make a profit on.”

Mom clasped her hands and her lips went into a line.

I was afraid Grandpa might be thinking,
The medical bills, my fault. I built this trading post, and now I’m busting it.
I wanted to say to him,
Grandpa, you gave us everything.
Instead, I leaned over and patted his leg. Gave him a reassuring smile.

“Look,” I said, “I can hire Katso to watch the sheep, starting tomorrow. He’s willing, and I’ll pay him myself. When the shoot’s done, and we have money and goods to trade, Grandpa can stock up on the finest rugs and baskets we’ve ever had. And we can sell them to the movie people, people with real money. There will be more movies made here.”

Mom said, “It’s not the same as having you home.”

“From now on I’ll be here every night.”

“What I want is for you to be here, at home, all the time.” I looked at Grandpa and he nodded.

Awkward silence. Cockeyed’s crazy eye peered intensely into the shadows above the chandelier.

Never shy, Linda said, “Nizhoni, you’re not pleased?”

Mom stood up. One of her hands scratched the other arm like fingernailing ant bites. “Linda, I miss my son, and this is where he belongs.”

“The money doesn’t make up for a short absence?”

“The money helps,” Mom admitted, “but…” Longing drained her face.

Iris jumped in. “Yazzie, what’s your dream? I mean, Uncle Mose’s was to go on an adventure into the wilds and create his own living, independent of his well-fixed family.” Cockeyed turned his face straight into Iris’s.

She looked at Grandpa. He nodded. Everyone looked relieved.

“What is your dream, Yazzie? Say it.”

Everyone waited. This felt dicey.

“Maybe I don’t know. Part of me wants to go to L.A. and New York and Paris and Rome and … I joined the navy to see the world.”

One tear held fast in the corner of Mom’s eye.

Iris gave me an odd look and plunged straight ahead. “Linda, we barely know each other, but can we talk about this in front of you?”

Linda hesitated, and then she surprised us by saying, “Yes, why not?”

Silence all around.

“Okay,” said Iris. “We’re going to talk about dreams.”

*   *   *

Dreams … How about nightmares? Zopilote felt like smashing the window.

Just then he heard something, a
snick,
and it was the second time—the first time he’d thought it had been his imagination. Had the rhythm of nature turned in on itself? He had not chosen the Navajo Witchery Way. It had called to him, made itself his home, had yanked him inside it. And inside that circle? Anything could happen.

He would have to be more careful. Perform some rituals, maybe.

*   *   *

“Let’s start easy,” said Iris. “I’ll tell you my mother’s dream. She wouldn’t mind.”

“Easy” was hard to imagine with my Aunt Iris. I listened, but I sat on the edge of my seat, never sure where her words would take us.

Grandpa gave us his version of cheering. He loved his sister with all his heart.

“Frieda Goldman grew up in the same Santa Fe household with Uncle Mose. Everyone played music. But for my mom, it was her heart, part of who she was.

“When she was twelve, she was the violist in the family string quartet. Uncle Mose was busy then, learning about silver and turquoise and rugs. So she gets to be twenty, and she yearns for more. A touring violinist comes to town, and she gets infatuated with him. First he charms her out of her clothes, and then into touring around with him, and finally into moving with him to New York.

“It’s a real dream come true. She gets into Juilliard, a new school for musicians. She gets a job in the viola section of the Metropolitan Opera, and she’s still in love. A Cinderella story without the wicked stepsisters. And it happened because she had the guts to fling caution to the winds and run off with a man she hardly knew.”

Mose held up one hand to say
stop
and scribbled with the other. At length he held up a sign:
DAD
+
MOM
=
MAD
.

“Right. That’s what I hear. Your parents…” Iris shrugged. “What can I say?”

I hoped this story was going someplace where it came out supporting a person’s right to have dreams.

“Anyway, after twelve years, my mother gets walloped with a big dose of the truth. It turns out the violinist is a bastard. They have an apartment in Greenwich Village, but he won’t marry her, and he’s mostly gone, supposedly on tour. Now, after all this time together, he comes to their apartment, to
her,
and he’s begging. He has a babe in arms. He can’t help it, he has to come clean. He has a wife in Chicago, always has. And the wife, she just bore a daughter and died doing it. Will Frieda take the child?

Here my grandfather made a growling sound that burbled at the base of his throat. Iris looked at him.

“I know, I know. She’s heartbroken, stunned, but, yeah, she loves him, so she’ll take the baby, even forgive the guy. Plus, she hadn’t been able to have kids, and she felt that pain like a hole in her stomach. It was a piece of her that felt completely skewed. He goes on tour, he leaves the baby with her, and—guess what?—she never hears from him again.”

Iris paused. “End of story? No. That kid was me.

“Fade out. Twenty years pass in New York while I grow up and Frieda plays her heart out in the opera orchestra. Fade in: Mom’s father dies in Santa Fe, and we go home to New Mexico for the funeral. We never go back to New York. Six more years we’re still in Santa Fe, living in the house where you all grew up, Uncle Mose.

“So I ask her—this is just a couple of years ago—‘Mom, are you ever sorry that you ran off with that bum to New York?’ I was hot to know.

“She looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘What? I should be sorry?! Haven’t I had everything? Stupid, but … Haven’t I loved a man? Didn’t I get a job I adored? And I found the love of my life, which is—guess who, Iris?—
you.
”

Iris let that sink in. Everyone in the living room was perfectly still. “Now,” Mom goes on. “‘You remember the prelude to
Tristan and Isold
?’—she never gets tired of playing that piece on the Victrola—‘We did a lot of performances of
Tristan
at the Met, and I ended up feeling like it tells my story. That opening melodic phrase, so poignant, and ending on that chord of yearning—the one that cries for resolution, for fulfillment?’

“Sounds like a sad story, what with that piece of music? No. Mom says to me, ‘If I’d stayed here? I’d never have heard the greatest singers in the world pour their hearts out in the world’s most splendid melodies. I’d never have had any really large feelings, even if one of those feelings was longing. Most of all, I wouldn’t have had you. You are my fulfillment.’”

Iris paused, maybe overemotional.

“‘
Any
feeling is a great thing, Iris,’ my mother tells me, ‘as long as it’s a grand one, a tidal wave that sweeps you away.’”

Linda said, her voice soft, “I’m on board with that. Any adventure is better than sitting around waiting for something to happen in your life.”

Iris looked straight at me. “I know Mom would want you to hear that story.”

I had nothing to say.

“I have a question, Iris.” Surprise—this was my mother. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you in New York painting and doing your shows in big-time galleries?”

Iris shrugged. “There’s no explaining love, for a person or a place.”

Grandpa held up his blackboard. I hadn’t even noticed him writing, but he pointed it toward me. It said,
FOLLOW YR DREAM.

*   *   *

Mesmerized by the flames of the pinyon fire, Buzzard wished he could smell it. Remembering that smell brought back the feeling of being in the hogan of his childhood.

Those five gathered around the fire beyond the window were talking about their dreams. He didn’t pay attention to every word. He was sure, though, that he’d had dreams as a kid. He couldn’t remember them anymore, but he knew bone-deep that he had them. All gone now.

Dreams as a young man, too. Winning the bareback competition at an Indian rodeo. Being named best all-around cowboy. Having the women crowd around him, admiring, eager to have a drink with him, ready to slip out into the cottonwoods for some adult fun. The rides, the drinks, the lays—those were his dreams, sort of, and sometimes he made them come true.

The taste of whiskey rose in his mouth. Funny, he didn’t like it, not one bit, and he spat.

He watched his son and that Iris standing in front of the huge fireplace, warming their backsides. The old man, the movie star, and Buzzard’s wife sat facing the blaze, their eyes lit and their conversation warmed by the flames.

Some part of him felt lost. He had to get some sleep. Pull himself together.

*   *   *

My grandfather tucked his blackboard back into the pouch. Iris spoke up. “Uncle Mose, I’m sorry you can’t tell us just how you made your dream happen.” She opened her palms in Nizhoni’s direction.

“You want me to do that, Dad?”

Mose gave an emphatic nod.
Yes.

“Our family? Traders, always traders,” Mom said. “In Santa Fe a lively business trading up and down the Chihuahua Trail.

“Lots of times the sons went out to set up smaller trading posts, and the family’s power increased.

“Now picture my father, the grand engine who is Mose Goldman. This tall young man rides to the farthest corner of the rez, sets up at the spring—the heart of Oljato—and trades with local people from a tent. They’re leery of him at first—these are the children of the Hoskinini, people who escaped the four years in a concentration camp for Navajos by hiding out. But he speaks their language and treats them with respect, so they gradually come to trust him a little. Maybe even like him.

“His thought is to build a bustling business over the years, sell it, and move back to Santa Fe in triumph.

“But he falls in love with a Navajo woman, and he comes to love the Navajo people and the country we live in. His dream changes—he wants to live among us, raise a family, and be happy. His family, unfortunately, turns out to be me, just me.

“Mose Goldman walks wherever the path of his dream leads. When the destination changes, he’s still ready to ride on his spirit of adventure.”

Grandpa gave Nizhoni a lopsided grin and shot his good fist upward in triumph. Cockeyed tensed, like he might jump off Iris’s shoulder, but he didn’t.

Iris pitched in. “Now, Uncle Mose claims he won’t go back to Santa Fe, regardless. When he was doing rehab there after this stroke, he insisted on coming home. Mom and Aunt Nizhoni gave in to him. Silly.”

Grandpa gave her a stern look.

Iris said, “I’m going to hog-tie him and take him back to finish that rehab.”

Mose Goldman stuck out his tongue at her.

I looked at Linda. She was quiet. Maybe thinking of her options, her future. Weighing her own dreams.

*   *   *

Far too late into the evening—a really fine evening—I escorted Linda back to the town car. As I turned the key in the ignition, I came right out with it. The question had been waiting for days. She said being a movie star made her feel like a phony. So why keep it up?

“Linda, I really want to know. You have what every young woman in America dreams of. Does being a rich, famous movie star satisfy you?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.” But, from her tone, I didn’t believe her, not all the way.

We rode in silence for a couple of minutes.

“It was my mother who wanted it first,” she said. “Even way out in Cherokee country, she got her hands on fashion magazines and such and dreamed of living the glamorous life.

“About the time I was born, the movies became gigantic, and she invested all her dreams in me and Hollywood.

“Dallas was our first step up. I was performing at twelve. I went to a Hollywood scout’s audition the next year, and he liked me. I made my first Hollywood movie at the age of fifteen. I liked the clothes, the jewelry, the attention.

“And in the end…?”

“In the end I guess I ate my mother’s dreams and they turned into part of me.”