Moonlight Water (19 page)

Red reflected that he didn't understand them, either, and didn't much like them. Analytical words.

“It's good to know about the rocks, the old, old story of our mother the Earth.” Winsonfred was measuring and polishing his words. “This one brother-in-law, he was a Lakota guy. I met him in the army, World War One, you know, France. Afterwards he visited me at home and married two of my sisters. He said, ‘The Stone People are the oldest people. They were here before any other people, two-legged, four-legged, rooted, or winged. They were here before the rivers and the sky and even the sun. Their stories are the first stories.'

“I like that. I'd like to know those stories, along with those scientific men's stories. Also, I think it's good to know the stories of what people did here. The white people tell you how a big rock was formed—wind, rain, snow, ice—but they don't know the stories of the people who lived below the rocks. Funny idea they got, of what's important.

“For instance, you look out to the east, all the way to what we call Male Sleeper, that's the Lukachukai Mountains and the Carrizos, with Gray Mesa as the pillow. Then you look west to Sleeping Mountain, the Female Sleeper with Navajo Mountain as the pillow. Across this country a hundred years ago some Mormons came, moving, going to a place their Prophet told them to go. In the end they made the dwellings in Moonlight Water, you know, that's what they did. When first they crossed this country, it was not so dry. Where Laguna Wash is now, below the Tsegi, the canyon, it was low green meadows, with water coming out of the hill like fingers.

“One day an old Navajo, they whispered that he was a witch, he said in a bitter way, ‘There's not enough water here. In Floating Reed Canyon there are lakes. That water should be here, where we can use it.'

“So he went up, all the way to Floating Reed Canyon. There the water god lived, and twice every day he made the water spout up.

“The day the old Navajo got there and did whatever he did, black clouds formed over the canyon, and the rain slashed down in torrents. The lakes broke loose. Down came the water into the pass. It gushed along the lowland by the rock ridge. The flood bore old logs glowing with phosphorescence, and one log bore the water god. The people saw him pass by on the stream during the night, breathing fire.

“The old man, the people made him pay the price of death, as witches deserve.

“The meadows, though, they became sandy flats. Every year the wash got deeper. The country was drier, more deserty, and there were fewer places of living, green earth. From here, way to the east, to where the water used to come out of the hill like fingers, it's drier now.

“When the white people come out here, it's funny how they get the scientists' stories but not the stories of the people or the gods.”

*   *   *

About that time two more chiddies stopped in front of them with dozens of Navajos, it seemed like. Winsonfred walked over to greet them. The air was sassy with the word
shicheii,
which Red later discovered means “Grandpa.” He didn't know if Navajos had words that meant “great-grandpa,” “great-great,” and so on, but if so he figured Winsonfred probably got all of them. Red figured Winsonfred might even have a hundred progeny altogether.

Clarita walked up and took Red's arm. She introduced him all around. Everyone greeted him with their eyes down and no show of interest in the white guy. One couple asked where Tony was. “I got Gianni on the radio. He'll bail Tony out this afternoon,” Clarita said. The kids were ready to run off and find their friends.

“Winsonfred,” Red said softly, “is it okay if I sleep? Didn't get much last night.”

Winsonfred patted him on the back, motioned to the van in approval.

Red slipped into the van, and that was the last he knew until the passenger door opened, then closed softly, and he peeped between his eyelids to behold Miss Clarita in the next seat. “I hope you don't mind, Red,” she said. “This walking around, I'm hurting.” She plucked a plump joint from her purse, lit it, and dragged deep.

“Have a toke?” She held it out to him.

“I quit,” he said, “many years ago. But thanks.”

“My dear young man, you have no idea what an expanse of many years is.” She looked at Red with all those smarts in her eyes again. “You always seem to have something on the tip of your tongue around me. Why don't you come out with it?”

Okay,
Red thought. “I still don't get it. How can you be a Mormon and a Navajo at once? They're so different, and you're so … you. Centered.”

“Mmmm. At least with you the question comes from thinking Navajos are noble savages and Mormons wretches. From most white people around here, it's the opposite.

“Here is your answer. I have no sense of conflict. I was born a Navajo and raised in the traditional way until I was eleven, when I was adopted by the Allred family. But it wasn't the placement that opened the new door in my life. It was reading. You heard of Mose Goldman at the trading post, Yazzie's grandfather, the old Jew. Larger-than-life character, good man, taught me English, taught me to read, and loaned me books. Then at the Allreds', I again had access to books. My first great enthusiasms were the Bobbsey Twins and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I love literature. I could no more turn my back on reading than stop breathing.”

She took another deep drag.

“For me, becoming a Mormon was embracing a culture that was literate.

“Oh, I felt torn sometimes. I insisted on a traditional Navajo wedding ceremony. When I looked into the eyes of my firstborn, I knew I wanted her to walk the earth with two strong bloodlines flowing, not just one. So I asked a medicine man to do a Baby's First Laugh ceremony to welcome her to the world. The children and I always went to squaw dances, and to fairs like this one, and visited our relatives and slept in hogans.

“I raised them in town, though, and sent them to school. At the same time, I became a teacher myself. My life has been reading, family, and ceremonies.”

She set the half-smoked joint in the ashtray and cocked her head at me for further inquiries.

“But the polygamy,” Red stammered.

She chuckled. “A few plural marriages among the more prosperous Mormons when most of my poor Navajo uncles and grandfathers had more than one wife? Really.”

She looked at Red and waited. At last her expression changed. “All right, what else? Out with it.”

“The silly stories, the dumb theology.”

“Oh, you.” She shook her head. “At my age I should cease to be surprised. If you look at those stories literally, they're silly. If you seek the deeper truth in them, they will comfort your heart. The same is true of Bible stories, and the old stories of the Navajos, and the stories of the Greek, Norse, and Hindu gods. In the years I taught school, I taught all the stories this way. One bishop tried to correct my thinking. I told him to go home and grow up.

“The Navajo way is beautiful. It teaches harmony with the self, the family, the community, the earth. The Christian ways are beautiful, all of them, including Mormon. They teach people to love each other. If I were pushed, I might admit to preferring the Navajo, if only because they were woven into the fabric of my soul at an early age. However, Winsonfred and the local bishop walk separate paths up a single mountain, and they go toward the one summit.”

Red felt properly chastised, and enlightened. Clarita pinched the dead-out end of the joint, put it in a Baggie, and dropped it in her purse.

A knock on the driver's-side window made Red jump. It was Winsonfred, and Zahnie stood next to him sporting the world's biggest grin.

“Time to play,” she said.

She was spectacular. A scoop-necked velveteen blouse of pale, shimmery green topped a full purple skirt. Her glossy black hair was held back on the side by twin barrettes, each with fire opals. Her wrists flashed silver bracelets with gleaming topaz and onyx stones. Her feet were shod in Navajo moccasins, tops the color of the red rock of the canyons and soles bright white. Her neck was ornamented with a heavy silver necklace that showed off a huge and handsome oval of turquoise, with lovely meanderings of ochre through the blue.

When she saw him looking at it, she caressed it with a finger and said, “It's a Carico Lake stone.”

“You're a vision,” he blurted.

“You ready?” Her smile was luminous.

“Absolutely.”

The fair was in full swing. The four of them sauntered slowly around the grounds. Booths were set up everywhere, jury-rigged affairs of plywood. Fortunately for Red's belly, they sold food. Fry bread here, mutton stew there, cans of soda pop.

“Over at Shiprock Fair,” Zahnie said, “things are different.”

“There's more
bilaganna
things at Shiprock,” Winsonfred said, “like cotton candy, hot dogs, hamburgers, stuff like that.”

“
Bilaganna
just means ‘white man,'” explained Zahnie. “There's no offense in it.”

Clarita stooped to pat a kid on the head and spoke to him in Navajo. The kid looked puzzled. She didn't resort to English but just strolled on.

“There's a story about that word,
bilaganna,
” Clarita said with a wide smile, a queen getting risqué. Originally, it meant ‘those who fight with their penises.'”

“It was the first white men in here,” Zahnie put in. “They took Navajo women.”

“Of course,” said Winsonfred. He looked Zahnie up and down. “Who can blame them?”

Clarita's eyes sparkled. Red couldn't keep his eyes off Zahnie.

They zigzagged on. Winsonfred acted a little tired, clutching one of Red's forearms. The Ancient One waved vaguely toward the center area with his free hand. “The main thing here,” he said, “it's horse races. We already had three or four, but I didn't wake you. You'd just lose your money.”

Zahnie said, “He's bragging. Winsonfred always wins. Show us your wad, old man.”

Winsonfred rummaged in a pocket of his shapeless pants and after a long while pulled out a roll as thick as a baseball. He flicked the edges—no ones in it, just fives, tens, and twenties. He touched the roll to his head. “It's experience. Horseflesh is experience. But you'll like the next two races, coming right up.” When he looked into Red's eyes now, his expression was almost flirtatious. “And I intend to compete myself!”

Zahnie and Clarita tittered.

Clinging to Red's arm, Winsonfred almost pushed them toward the starting line. When he let go and lined up with the other old men, though, he looked independent. There were maybe twenty men, and most looked a lot less fit than Winsonfred.

Red hustled back to Zahnie and the others.

The finish line was a pile, looked like clothing. The starting gun sounded. The geezers did their paddety-pad to the pile.

Winsonfred seized what looked like a 44 E-cup bra and modeled it. The cups perched in his armpits. He dipped into the pile and held up some pink panties, dangling from one finger and big enough to fit a water barrel. He stepped into them and pulled them up. They formed a moat around his waist and puddled between his knees. He preened for the audience, and everyone roared and whistled.

Red saw now that some old men were ahead of Winsonfred. Several were pulling up full skirts, and one had his head buried in a pullover blouse.

One geezer shoved the buried head, and the body toppled.

Winsonfred grabbed the hem of a skirt and pulled it down.

Two of the old men pulled a guy's skirt up over his head and started knotting it there.

Things degenerated fast. Instead of trying to win, Winsonfred had a good time hog-tying a man with a giant pair of panty hose.

Eventually a man got fully cross-dressed and hobbled back across the starting line, winning the prize. Red laughed like an idiot, but he decided never to tell anyone all the details, bearing yet some sense of the dignity of his sex.

And all this
hosteen
hop for the grand prize of a sack of groceries! Red thought for that performance the old guy should have won a trip around the world.

*   *   *

Just then Clarita touched Zahnie's arm gently and pointed with her lips. Zahnie said, practically in Red's ear, “Oh, shit!”

Red could get tired of “oh, shit” really quick.

Red followed Zahnie's eyes, and there loomed Charlie Lyman. Out of place and out of uniform, he was extravagantly western, from black ten-gallon hat to snap-down mother-of-pearl buttons.

“He here to roust us?”

“The reservation is not within his jurisdiction,” enunciated Clarita.

“He's cruising for drunk women,” said Zahnie. “That's what predators do, hunt.”

What Charlie Lyman searchlighted at that moment was them. He cruised over like an eighteen-wheeler, clumsy and magisterial and arrogant all at once. He gave Red the cop look, and Red gave him a
screw-you
look back. It was Zahnie Charlie spoke to.

“We're treating Tony like any other jailbird,” he said. “Who's next?”

“You,” said Zahnie.

That earned her a good, solid cop glare.

Red offered, “You got a vein in your temple turns the color of eggplant when you get mad. Cute.”

Zahnie laughed.

“Where are you staying in Moonlight Water, her bed?”

“Who could resist her?”

Zahnie arced her hands over her head and did a show-off spin.

Charlie flashed a look at Zahnie that was truly ugly. “You deserve to get your ass kicked,” he said with a snarl.

Suddenly Clarita spoke. “Charles Lyman, you're a bad man. Even in the fifth grade you were rotten.”

Charlie's smile turned rictus. “You're a wonder, Miz Shumway.”

“Begay-Shumway,” Clarita said softly.

Charlie fixed his eyes back on Red. “Keep an eye out. The Redrock County jail ain't got the amenities of the Granary.” He winked and strode off.