THIRTEEN

I didn’t do anything this time. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. “I’m out,” I said a couple of days ago. “This killing—”

The reply came cool and quiet as spring water. That was an accident. The same words I’d told Shizhé’é when he came to me, after.

But at least I got a promise: Never again. Not for you.

Which didn’t mean I was done. There was another job for me, a strange one this time, so strange I should have known. I was to go to the road outside the mine between ten in the morning and ten fifteen and leave a large gym bag in the westbound lane, just to one side of the center line. The idea was, it would look like the bag had fallen off a car. The tourists are always tying all of their shit on top of their cars. The bag was already scuffed up pretty bad, just like it had bounced along the road a ways. It even had some clothes inside, men’s jeans and T-shirts and underwear and socks. An old disposable razor, a ratty toothbrush, a half-squeezed tube of off-brand toothpaste. The clothes were worn, like someone had had them for a long time. I figure maybe they came from a secondhand store. There’s a few on the reservation, people giving us their castoffs—even their underwear, for Chrissakes—rather than letting us develop businesses where we could work jobs that would let us buy our own damn clothes. Businesses other than the mine, I mean.

“What’s this for?” I asked, hefting the bag. I just got a look, one that said Don’t ask. My chest seized up. A Dopp kit was added to the bag. I didn’t look in it. I guess you could say I knew after all.

Between ten a.m. and ten fifteen. Westbound lane. A little off the center line. Then get out of there.

So I did it. Spent the night in my hiding spot, high up the cliff, in one of the houses of the ancients. I crept down at first light, sat in brush a few yards back from the road for four hours, shifting a pebble from one side of my mouth to the other to fight thirst, fretting over a mistake I’d made. I’d left my bookbag behind. By the time I realized I’d forgotten it, it was too late. The cliff dwelling tours would have started. All I could hope was that nobody would find it. I went over all the things that could go wrong and ended up feeling as good as I could under the circumstances. Nothing in the bookbag would identify me. I’d taken out my books the night before so as not to have any extra weight. Just a water bottle and a sandwich. Even when my brain went all CSI and I started worrying about fingerprints and DNA, I calmed myself down by remembering that mine weren’t on record anywhere. Besides, I’d worn gloves against the night’s chill, and their fabric had probably wiped the bottle clean of my fingerprints. The plastic wrap around the sandwich, thank God, I’d crumpled up and stuffed into my pocket so as not to leave trash.

The key chain bothered me a little. I don’t use it for keys, just carry it because I like it. Half the people on the reservation, and even more tourists, have those key chains. Betty Begay makes them. Once she realized how much money she could make stocking trading posts around the reservation with those little trinkets she could turn out in no time at all, compared to the months it took to weave a good-sized rug, she turned mostly to them—which had the effect, of course, of making her true rugs all the more rare and therefore worth even more than they’d been before. Betty Begay could have taught the supply and demand segment of my Econ 101 course in about five minutes flat.

I sat under that brush, alternately worrying and reassuring myself, until ten. Each time I started out from under my shelter, I’d hear a car approach. By ten after, I was sweating. At twelve after, the road was bare. I dashed out and positioned the bag just so, laying it on its side so it would look even more like it had just fallen, and sprinted back to the brush. I waited a few minutes, then began a retreat, dodging from one clump of brush to the next. I could hear tires screeching as cars approached the bag and swerved around it. They had to be careful. The shoulder there was soft. I was almost to the side road where I’d parked my car when I heard a deeper rumble. One of the trucks from the mine, I figured. I didn’t look back.

Until I did.

The blast was bigger this time, or maybe I was just closer. The air did that thing again, pushing against me, sucking back. Long time ago, my parents took me to California, to the ocean. I stood in water up to my thighs, feeling it tug at me. That’s what the air was like. Again the cloud of smoke and dirt, bits and pieces of truck kicked into the sky by the blast, the red dirt swirling counterclockwise across the desert floor. I fell to my knees and wrapped my arms around my head.

“I didn’t do it,” I whispered. “I didn’t.” Even though I knew that, in some crucial way, I had.