Stealing Fire (18 page)

Wright and my grandfather were with John Wayne, and they were talking like old buddies. I supposed Wayne was about ten years or so older than me. He was handsome. A man's man. Big guy with a boisterous laugh. I don't know what Wright had said, but John Wayne thought it was a riot.

We waved hello, asked them to save us a place, and went into Harry's office to use the phone.

Our mothers were safe and sound. They had also decided to get a Great Dane. A retired cop in town told them a Dane, particularly a black one, would scare off anyone. Frieda was afraid of guns. My mother was trigger-happy. A big dog seemed like a good compromise. The cop had friends with a nine-month-old Dane, he was too much for the elderly couple to handle, and they were ready to let it go to a good home. So we'd have a new family member when we got home. The dog's name was Shorty, the moms had him all of three hours, and they were already arguing over who he liked best.

I wasn't sure how the dog would work with Iris's cat, but Iris told me that it doesn't take long for a cat to teach a dog who is the boss.

Iris put her hand on the phone and whispered to her mother. All I caught was “Yes, Ma. I know, Ma. I promise, Ma.” Then Iris handed the phone to me—my turn. My mother said Wright was a bad customer, and I needed to dump him and get my tail back home with the money he already owed me. Monument Valley was no place for Iris after what she went through there last year, I was not even to
look
at one glamorous movie star, and she didn't want Grandfather getting too attached to the trading post. That was past and done with as far as she was concerned.

All I'd really wanted was to know if they were safe and to tell them I was hiring a PI to watch their house. Only a mother can make a grown man feel like a ten-year-old boy. It's a real knack.

 

Twenty-nine

By the time we'd gotten back to the long table where everyone was eating, Wayne did not look as enthused with Wright as before. He had lost his smile and was staring at the man. He could have been thinking about what to ask the guys to get on their next run to the general store … anything. Wright was in love with his own voice, and he didn't notice he was holding an audience of one, my grandfather.

“I've been accused of sedition since the 1930s. I told the papers at the time, ‘I am what I am. If they don't like it, they can lump it.'”

Grandpa got a kick out of that.

“The FBI,” Wright said, “J. Edgar, no less, sent a note to the assistant attorney general trying to get them to shut me up. The attorney general said there was nothing to prosecute me for and no need for further investigation. Still, the FBI is all over me, as you were witness to, and my designs and work have suffered. I've lost several terrific projects because of it. I'm sure I will lose more.

“Can you imagine anything stupider than being called un-American because you want peace?” he said. “Two Feds even showed up at Taliesin West. One of the kids found them in our shed, wearing their standard-issue suits and striped ties, rummaging through our tires. The students ran to get me.

“I was in the middle of a meeting, but the young man yanked me out. On the way to the barn, he grabbed a couple more students. I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it with my own eyes, but
yes!
They had waltzed right in, two strangers wearing shoulder holsters, and no probable cause to search.

“Our young men shoved them against a wall, clicked the magazines out of their guns, and told them to produce a search warrant.

“‘What is it,' I asked them, ‘that you want?' They gave me some cockamamie story about us having bootlegged tires. That was the trumped-up charge they wanted to stick me with, although certainly not their most ridiculous.”

Grandpa pounded his fist on the table, and Wayne woke up.

“Unbelievable!” That was my grandfather.

“The atom bomb has changed our lives,” said Wright. “We're off kilter. We're all humans. Don't others want to live in peace as we do? It would be reasonable to assume so.”

“Mr. Wright,” Wayne said, “that's very idealistic, and there are many peaceable people in the world. But when trouble shows up, you've got to fight fire with fire.”

“And who starts the fire? Once it is started, who puts it out?”

Politics. You never knew what was going to rile someone up. For me? Protect your home, protect your family and friends. Yourself. That's all. Probably too simple, and in this complicated world, probably unrealistic. I didn't want to make a jackass out of myself by speaking up.

“You know what I did?” The old genius turned to me. “This should interest you, Yazzie.”

“What did you do, Mr. Wright?” That seemed like a neutral question.

“I wrote to Harry S. Truman and told him I thought the capital should be moved west of the Mississippi. He wrote me back, saying he agreed, but couldn't throw his support behind it.”

“Well, it was something, anyway,” Wayne said. “How many people have the president's ear? I agree, people in the West may as well be invisible, except for the make-believe world on the big screen, at least as far as those Easterners are concerned. Farming, ranching, water rights, mining, Indian people, Mexicans? Easterners haven't got one single opinion that's worth a damn.”

Time to cut in while they were on the same page.

“How's the movie going, Mr. Wayne?” I said.

“Folks are going to love it. It's got the scenery, of course, which is uniquely American, and John Ford to show it off at its best. It's also got an underlying predicament between people who've learned to get along with Indian folks, and those who barge in, thinking they know everything. Terrific work, as always.”

“Ford,” Wright said, “is a genius. He captures feelings and shapes and light and puts them on film like no one else.”

Their disagreement had turned 180 degrees. I could sit and enjoy my lunch, and Danny's accordion music, without feeling as if the food was stuck halfway between my mouth and my stomach.

Iris had missed the entire thing because she was over in the corner of the tent drinking a beer with the crew, sketching them, and trying to feel normal in a world that had gone seriously askew.

“Yazzie,” Wayne said, “I want to have a little talk with you.”

“Yes?”

“Nothing urgent, but I've bought some land just east of here. Might get into a little ranching, a little mining. I wonder if, before the shoot is over, you could give me your opinion about what might be worth investing in. Sometimes, I think I'd like to live out here, a getaway, you know? Probably haven't got the nerve, or the dough, to cut off from film, but I'd like some other source of income. Also another kind of pleasure.”

“Yazzie's mine,” Wright said.

“Pardon me?” That was Mr. Wayne.

“He's on my payroll right now. He's protecting me.”

“From what?”

“Mr. Goldman and I are uncertain about the root of my troubles, though neither is more probable than the other. I believe someone wants to get hold of my plans for the Guggenheim.” He patted the tube, resting across his lap.

“I read about that museum. Sounds real nice.”

“Yes, the curving shapes, walking within them, are truly an architecture of the human spirit.”

“Well, that's one museum I look forward to seeing.”

“I think they're going to ruin the whole design with the art, but that's the way it goes.”

John Wayne laughed at that one. “Well, it's like movies. Some projects are harder to pull off than others. After they're over, you walk away.”

“It's been a calamity of egos, but I think we have it straightened out.”

“What's Yazzie's opinion? He's your muscle.”

“He thinks that a man I'm designing a home for in L.A. is hot under the collar because I owe him money.”

“Whatever the reason,” Wayne said, “has this person tried to take your life?”

“He has threatened me. Mr. Goldman is trying to keep the threats from escalating.”

“And it's over a bad debt.”

“Yes, can you imagine anything more foolish than being threatened over a paltry twenty grand?”

“Gas stations get knocked off for a hundred bucks.”

“Oh, this is a professional man. A man with means.”

“And you're designing a home for him in Los Angeles?”

“Yes.”

“Where? Maybe I know the guy and could have a few words with him.”

“In Bel Air. His name is Fine, Jake Fine.”

Wayne sat back and put his boots on the chair next to him. “I'm sure your plans are worth a lot more dough than twenty grand. I'm also sure Mr. Fine is going to get his money back.”

“You know him?”

“Not personally. He's involved in building some nightclubs in Vegas. Heard of him.”

“What's your opinion, Mr. Wayne?”

Wayne patted Wright's shoulder and gave him his sparkly blue eyes. “I'd say you're in a pickle. And, if I had to take a guess, those plans and the money got tied up together somehow.”

He took his hat off and put it back on at a jaunty angle. “There's plenty of time for us to talk after you clear up this jam, Yazzie.”

“Be happy to.”

Wayne looked up at the sky, and then he looked back at me. “Yazzie, there's all kinds of ballyhoo going on about people I've known most of my working life. Some of it hot air, some not. I'm a hundred percent American, and we need protection, meaning I'm for the FBI. After saying that, I'll tell you that I think the Feds and the mob do occasionally team up to catch one of the bad guys. You may be looking at three enemies wrapped in one.”

“I've already figured that out. I can't figure out exactly how, or why, but I will.”

“You know what fries me? These mobsters, we run scared of 'em, but the only thing anyone catches them on is penny-ante stuff like taxes or snitching out another mobster. They should all get tossed in the slammer or sent back to Sicily or wherever they came from. God, if I told you the taxes I pay out for each movie, you'd have a fit and fall in it. But those guys, they don't give the government one damned dime.”

“Maybe it's an internal war we're fighting now,” I said.

“You're right on that one,” Wayne said. “You in the war, Mose?”

Grandfather said, “Too old for both of 'em.”

“How about you?” Wayne said to Wright.

“Besides being a pacifist, I was long in the tooth for both wars,” he said. “I would have enjoyed meeting Teddy Roosevelt, but the Battle of San Juan Hill? Please.”

Wayne looked long at Wright, decided not to say whatever it was that was on his mind, and said, “Yazzie, how about you?”

“I was in the service.”

“I had bad knees from college football,” Wayne said, “and was excused from WWII. Ford thinks I should have pressed my way into service. Maybe I could have done that. Should have. Don't know.”

“You regret it?”

“I don't regret much, and I should probably regret that.”

“I regret taking on this case—excuse me, Mr. Wright, but I do.”

“Can't help you in the regrets department, big guy,” Wayne said to me, “but I think you'll do fine. You're a strong man. Honest. You've got guts.” He stood, shook my grandfather's hand, shook Wright's hand, said he had a shot to get to, and that it had been a pleasure talking with us.

Something about Wayne telling me I was strong, the weight of his hand on my shoulder when he talked to me, all that blew this whole thing up into something larger, yet simpler. He was a man who was easy to believe and didn't look like he'd run from much. I had seen blood on my wife's shirt. Nothing like that would happen again. The end.

 

Thirty

Supper was done. The magic hour, when light plays the bluffs like wind plays a celestial harp, was over. Wright and Grandfather went to the cabin by the Gouldings' house.

Mike showed us to our room. I didn't know who she'd kicked out of their home so we could hole up in her cozy house. Frankly, I didn't care. It had been one hell of a day. There was a warm, homemade quilt on a wrought-iron bedstead from the turn of the century. Layers of enamel paint on the frame. Black over yellow over red over white, chipping off the headboard. A layered history of time and a story of paint in the desert. Slick surfaces dry out. They do not last long. (Maybe that's why my people are resilient. We are anything but slick.) A braided rug made from fading fabric. Lovely white lace curtains framing a window that faced out to Monument Valley.

“Yazzie?” Iris said.

“What, sweetheart?”

“What are we going to do now?”

“I'm angry enough to walk out on the whole catastrophe.” Though I knew I wouldn't.

“I think we have to see it through, otherwise it'll just follow us home.”

“Iris, part of me agrees with you, but I hate to see you in it.”

I looked at her, exotic, buoyant, vulnerable, and tough as nails. “Okay,” I said. “Here's a plan.”

“Already?”

“We go down to dinner and talk about it tomorrow.”

*   *   *

Good smells, knock on the door—it was Mike inviting us to have a late dinner with her and Harry. For that small slice of time, just between sleep and not, life felt normal.

We trundled to the kitchen and pulled up chairs. There was a Navajo saying on their wall, framed, written by a young man, nineteen, who died the previous year. I can't share the words, too intrusive, but it put our lives in perspective. Whatever problems we had now would pass. Life would go on. It would be full of joy, tears, surprises—the whole ball of wax. I felt like a lucky man.

Mike and Harry chatted about the trading post and how they'd be glad to have Grandpa's help with pricing. He had an instinct for the sweet spot—a price with room to bargain, and room to sell at a profit.