The Darkness Rolling (2 page)

To change his name? No problem.

He also learned, later, that the
zopilote
sometimes
is
like human beings and other predators—it kills first and then eats. But that was rare, a last choice. It might, sometime, be
his
first choice. He could hear the future’s drumbeat and the rhythm made his days. Most avidly, he dreamed of his wife’s death.

Over and again he heard the words she spoke against him in court. He also spent hours remembering her father’s testimony against him, word by daggered word, and he pictured knife-blade revenge.

Sometimes Buzzard thought of his child. At the trial his wife had been big with his offspring, but he had never known whether the child was a boy or a girl, alive or dead. He didn’t dwell on this child, because it confused his feelings.

So back to images of his traitor wife and her turncoat father. He would descend upon them and bring terrible deaths to each.

In the Navajo way, to touch a dead body was taboo. The part of the dead person that was evil, the
chindi,
might enter your body and spirit, might take you away from the good path. An Enemy Way ceremony was required to heal the ill, to restore
h
ó
zh
ó
to the victim—harmony, beauty, balance, and health. Men returning from war especially needed this ritual.

The thought of deliberately
consuming
death—how much more horrifying that would be to his clansmen. That’s why Zopilote relished the idea. Revenge was the shrine in his heart. He gave himself wholly to it, he made it the sole devotion of every moment of his life, he prayed to be transformed by it. He rejected
h
ó
zh
ó
.
He cursed harmony, beauty, balance, and health. Zopilote, Scorched Buzzard, sought evil. In turn, evil had befriended him.

Two

Jake Charlie and I had been bumping along the dirt road headed north out of Flagstaff all day, baked by a murderous sun, racked by every rut and rock in the dirt road. A few times we got stuck in the sand and had to shovel out.

All that day I’d been worse than restless. My thoughts churned inside my chest. I wanted to sound off, to banter, to tell jokes and ask questions, but Jake Charlie, at the wheel, had a way of neither listening nor speaking.

Was going home supposed to be this kind of hard? Good question. Being here, in red rock country, after living so close to the ocean? My body had started feeling like it was salt water and driftwood instead of blood and bones. And from where I sat, next to a quiet Jake, this world seemed like it couldn’t be home to anything except lizards, bluffs, and buzzards.

Except for one thing. A squirmy part of me was excited to be here. Home echoed. I felt it to the very center of my heart. All in all I was a Ping-Pong ball going over a red-dirt net, and it was no wonder.

Yes, yes, I had not walked in harmony, as my people say. I’d enlisted in the navy and been gone from Dinetah, our land between the Four Sacred Mountains, for six years. After the first two years I’d gotten caught up in a conflict that killed many human beings, so many human beings. A planet-wide combat. Mother Earth was waist-deep in the gore of her children. A terrible thing.

So, an Enemy Way ceremony would be planned for me, and then I would listen to the deep, quiet part of me that
knew,
that part I didn’t have words for yet. So far, that quiet part had told me only, “Live your life the way you want.” I damn well meant to.

I would answer my own questions—how did I really feel about my people’s traditional ways? There were other questions that were hard to speak out loud, hard to put into words.

I’d grown up at a trading post in a place near Monument Valley called Oljato, which means Reflection of the Full Moon on Water. The water was the spring that persuaded my grandfather to build his home and business there. I was expected to take it over. But now I’d changed, I’d seen some of the big world. And I had been on shore patrol, a different kind of job that gave me ideas, ones that maybe leaned into the future. Maybe not.

Shore patrol wasn’t a big deal, but I liked keeping order, and I liked seeing inside people’s minds. Thinking about what they might do before they did it. Did I want to go back to hanging out in the post, jawing endlessly with other Navajos about how many sacks of Bluebird flour they could get on credit? Those memories didn’t frost my cake.

But Monument Valley? The land was a glory. Straddling the Arizona–Utah state line, it is in every photo that people see when they think of the word “west.” Horses, courage, isolation, cutting lose, outlaws, being wild, and layers of geologic time peeled back like a naked lady strutting her stuff. Yes, it is home. Yes, it tugs at me in a way no other place does. But, those sandstone monuments, no matter how magnificent, they are always, day after day, unendingly the same. My taste of city life, the possibility of a different kind of life than the trading post, plus a whiff of the glamour of being around movie people … I doubted that the glow of a full moon on water could satisfy me, but doubts come and they fly off. You cannot trust your doubts.

Altogether, my soul was in trouble. I didn’t know where I belonged.

As we came around the curve that river-winds between orange and rust cliffs, and I knew I was about to see the long vista of the huge stone gods of my homeland for the first time in six years, I took a deep breath. This was the test. Was it a joyful homecoming? Or was it drinking from a pond turned to scum?

Suddenly, there it was, unexpected and magnificent. Another mile or so and I saw something new, yet familiar. Pushed upside the folds of Monument Valley, and laid out perfectly, stretched the false-front street of an Old West town. A big gang of white people crowded up together near the road, there was a camera with some guys working beside it, and lights mounted all around. Beyond them stood two circus tents, the white canvas tinted orange at the bottom from dust. My pulse soared, and it thumped two words,
movie crew, movie crew
.

Jake Charlie cracked open his jaw and squeezed out in Navajo, “Mr. Ford and them, they come here right before I pick you up. You remember ’em.”

“Remember” was a weak-tea word. Mom must have given herself a secret smile by writing me nothing about the shoot and telling Jake Charlie to let me be surprised. He hand-rolled a smoke and clamped it between his lips.

The first movie that was ever shot in my homeland was
Stagecoach,
a couple of years before the big war. I had watched every day of the filming and had worked on it, and the movie turned into a big hit. Now, with the war ended, John Ford and his crew were back.

I felt like hollering for joy, right out loud. Yes, I was glad to think of the money the movie people would bring our trading post. Mostly I was beside myself because Mr. John had told me he’d have work for me when he returned. Also, I admit, I was starstruck.

“Stop!” I said.

Jake Charlie slitted his eyes and lip-pinched his smoke in disapproval, but he braked. I got out and edged my way down the shaley slope, knowing Mr. John would be right by the camera. He picked me out first off with his good right eye and waved me over. He wore a patch on the left eye, I never knew why, and sunglasses. He called over the heads of several people, “Howdy, Groucho.”

I went into Groucho Marx’s funny chicken-lope of a walk.

As I got close, Ford said, “Mrs. Goldman, why do you have so many children?”

It was an old routine of ours.

In a falsetto voice I said, “Because I love my husband.”

“I love my cigar, too, but sometimes I take it out of my mouth.”

Everybody around Mr. John burst into laughter, me the loudest.

“Welcome, Uncle Miltie,” said the man next to Mr. John, who was his brother-in-law and assistant director, Wingate something. Wingate was calling me out to do one of the bits from the Milton Berle show
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One.

I responded on cue, “You monkies is the cwaziest peoples.” It got a laugh. All silliness leftover from the last shoot years ago, and I almost felt light-headed.

I’d started out as an extra playing a red savage chasing heroes on horseback. We were supposed to be Cheyenne Indians, never quite sure about that, but they painted us up in ways that no one in the Southwest has ever seen. I hung around—listening, learning—until the actors noticed the curiosity that is me, Yazzie Goldman, a tall muscular Navajo with a Jewish last name, able to speak three languages fluently—Navajo, English, and Spanish—and pretty hep to white people’s ways.

We’d gotten along great right from the start. They’d egg me on, and I’d launch into my mimic routines, stolen straight from radio broadcasts. First I tried my Groucho imitation on the camera crew. “The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.”

They loved it—the absurdity of the little guy’s New York voice coming out of a tree-tall Navajo. Then I’d roll out some other lines. It was good times.

All this shtick came from the radio, not Grandpa. He didn’t talk one bit like a Borscht Belt guy. But those Hollywood people were mostly New York Jews. I looked at them and their glamorous lifestyle, and I thought,
Maybe these are my real people. My real tribe.

Regardless, I got a bunch of good buddies right quick. When Mr. John discovered that I could translate Navajo and Spanish into English without blinking an eye, he kept me close by for the whole shoot.

I would have worked for Ford forever, but the filming ended, and the cast and crew went back to the magical place where they lived, Hollywood. Someplace mystic near the shining sea where Changing Woman wrapped her dusky arms around her husband, the Sun-Bearer, every evening. That’s what I imagined.

Now, looking at the movie people … we had all changed. The war snuffed out a lot of people’s happy fantasies, and it near killed Mr. John at Normandy. I’d read that while I was doing nothing big or important in San Diego, he got to chase right into battle with his camera and got wounded and decorated.

“Good to see you hale and hearty, Mr. John,” I said, offering my right hand the white-man way.

“Yazzie. Good to see you.” He’d long since learned to shake Navajo-style, a touch like moth wings.

We had some time to talk while they set up for the next shot. I had to decipher his mumble through the linen handkerchiefs he chewed every minute of a shoot, don’t ask me why.

He said, “Damn glad you’re back.” He took off his sunglasses. “Still want a job?”

He fixed me with that one blue eye, the way white people look right into you, probing. You had to watch out for Mr. John. According to his mood, that look made him a friend of heartfelt understanding or a Jehovah about to send you straight to hell for your sins, ones that only he knew about.

“Damn straight,” I said. “Raring to go.” I’d started cussing from being around swabbies who peppered and salted their talk with profanity.

“People say you got cop experience.”

“Shore patrol.” My unheroic war.

“I can use you for security. Ready to start now?”

“Yeah.” I was screaming inside not to get excited so big that Mr. John would see the thump of my heart. He was Hollywood, and might offer me less money.

“I got an actress ready to come out here. Big star, bigger ego. Linda Darnell.” I kept my face straight. Who didn’t know her name? Most beautiful woman in show business, the movie mags called her. “She needs”—he shrugged—“escorting.”

I looked at him, waiting for more. I wasn’t about to push Mr. John, just kept standing there, studying the sky.

He did a double sigh. “She has a way of getting involved with men,” he said, “who think her attentions mean more than they do.”

“Got it.”

“Problem is that she also has a way of getting involved with men who have money and power, and they don’t like getting dumped.”

“They’re used to being on the leaving end, and money gives a person plenty of ways to cause trouble,” I said.

Mr. John patted me on the shoulder and looked at that same patch of blue sky. “Exactly. What I need from you is to make sure trouble and Miss Darnell are strangers, at least while she is working on this movie.”

A job that was a natural fit. I could try out some of my cop instincts in a bigger way, and I was strong enough to take care of trouble. Not only did I speak the languages needed in my wild piece of country, I had read the classics and knew which fork to use. In other words, socially presentable. A lady of the silver screen crossing a desert full of Navajos, Hopis, and Mexican guys, some of them outcasts and others fresh out of the service, would be a lot safer with me than any Anglo.

“She coming in from Flagstaff?”

“No, Winslow.”

“So,” I said, “she’s riding the Super Chief, and she wants to spend a night at La Posada.”

“What else? The Train of the Stars, the hotel of the stars.” Ford hated actors who paraded around like big somebodies.

But whoa! The Super Chief, the Santa Fe Railroad’s ultra-luxurious passenger train from Los Angeles to Chicago. I’d read all about it, forward to backward and then all over again. Forty-one hours and forty-five minutes for the one-way trip at speeds up to a hundred miles an hour, only occasional stops, and every amenity—Pullman sleeping compartments, plus posh dining cars run by the Fred Harvey Company serving fancy foods, all the way up to oysters, champagne, and caviar.

The whole thing was one of my pictures of heaven—blasting across deserts and mountains at top speed while being served fine food on white tablecloths. When the Super Chief started running in 1936, and until I went off into the navy, I spent every possible minute during the trips Grandpa and I made to Flagstaff standing at the train station. Watching the trains roll in, and then trembling to my soles as the Chief flew by. Those diesel locomotives powered my dreams.

The Super Chief didn’t make many stops, and the Santa Fe chose Winslow instead of Flagstaff. Fred Harvey built a luxurious hotel there called La Posada, designed around Southwestern Indian motifs and art. The rich people thought it was just too exotic to pass up.