TWO

I wish I could recapture the elation of that first moment, when the sound rolled over my perch among the rocks more than a hundred feet above the desert floor.

Even more than the sound, the feeling. I was a mile away, and out of sight around a bend, but still the rock beneath my feet quivered like a nervous horse, the air shoving hard against me so briefly I thought maybe I’d imagined it. Until I saw the smoke, a great dark cloud heavy with red earth. I lost my dignity then. Hollered, jumped up and down, punched the air with my fists. Forgot, for that moment, my doubts and protests. All those months of planning, and it actually worked exactly the way it was supposed to. Maybe it was the right thing to do after all. I went down the ladder twice as fast as I’d gone up and forced myself not to run the long circuit back to where I’d parked my car in a thicket of piñon and juniper on a side road. It wouldn’t do for anyone to see someone running, not on this day, raising a line of dust that would mark my passage. I’d been told to stay away, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to see the results of all those months of planning. Even as I sauntered, my excuse at the ready—an early morning trip to the cliff houses to be among the ancestors—I heard the sirens. A grin stretched my cheeks. No matter how they felt about the mine, everybody on the rez hated that damn sign with its damn fake Indians.

I figured I’d see matching smiles when I stopped by the café right at nine, just like I did whenever I was home from college. Set a pattern, I was told. Stick to it. To the minute. No Indian Time for this boy. But when I strolled through the door and asked for a cup of coffee with room for cream, Leona greeted me with reddened, puffy eyes. Her hair, usually bound in the traditional complicated knot at her nape, hung in ragged hanks about her face. She turned away with a hiccupping sound. I looked around the room. I’d expected a hum of excitement, the whole reservation buzzing with the biggest thing to have happened in a long time, the gossip pinging around even the farthest-flung chapter houses with an immediacy that mitigated the fact that the Internet was still a long way from reality in most parts of the rez.

The café wasn’t much, just a prefab on a side street with a few mismatched tables. There was no menu, no need for one. Everybody knew it was eggs or pancakes in the morning, hamburgers or Navajo tacos for lunch and dinner, and spaghetti and meatballs on Fridays, when Leona packed the place. Its location meant that few tourists found their way to it, and the ones who did always looked around with apprehension, surprised at finding themselves surrounded by so many brown faces, sometimes backing out with embarrassed looks. Which was a shame, because it meant they were missing out on the best coffee on the rez. But you couldn’t blame them for feeling overwhelmed. Most of the places they went, museums and cultural centers and trading posts and such, were designed just for them, meaning that while the waitresses or front desk people or sales clerks were Navajo or sometimes Hopi, the tourists were mostly among their own kind. Even if that kind included the German and French and Japanese tour groups whose members walked right up to the line of obsession with our culture, they all seemed to have more in common with one another than they did with us.

A sullen silence surrounded me, seeping into my bones. Leona thrust the coffee toward me. “Who died?” I asked, seeking a smile. She burst into tears.

I turned to the closest table, populated by the same elders who were there every time I came in. For all I knew, they never went home, just curled up on the floor at night, then rose and stretched stiff muscles each morning before ordering up Leona’s pancakes. Courtesy demanded that I wait for them to speak first.

Harold Bitsinnie obliged, pursing his lips over toothless gums as if gathering strength for the words. He wore his Korea Veteran cap—Forever Proud—and he removed it now, twisting it in his permanently bent fingers as he spoke.

“Somebody blew up that big billboard this morning. You know, the coal one over by the dinosaur tracks.” His voice shook.

Harold hated the coal company. So it could have been excitement playing games with his voice, but the look on his face, all the lines pulling downward, told me it was something else.

“This bombing. Did it mess up the dinosaur tracks? Those tracks, they’re how Shizhé’é makes his living,” I said, using the Diné term of respect, “My Father,” applied to male elders. I felt sick. Through all the planning, that possibility had never once come up, and I voiced my fears before I could help myself. “At least he doesn’t set up till late.”

Again, that closed-in feeling in the room. Something clamped itself around my lungs. Squeezed. I struggled for air, and heard Harold’s next words through my own rasping breaths.

“He set up early today.”