NINE

Both the Navajo and Hopi lived on the mesa, the Hopi clustered in their traditional high-rise adobe dwellings to the south, the Navajo scattered about, a few still in hogans but most in the trailers and BIA bungalows that replaced them, tending sheep. Both groups depended on the profusion of springs that seeped from the desert rock, the Hopi for their ingeniously irrigated agricultural plots, the Navajo to water their sheep. And, of course, all the people for drinking water.

“It was so for centuries. Millennia,” Naomi said, words easing into a singsong. Lola thought of the elders at home reciting Blackfeet history, passing it down among the generations, rhythm and beauty given equal weight with facts in their choice of words. The fire flared and receded, underscoring the cadence of the words.

“The whitemen at first found no value in the land. Too high, too dry. If the Indian people wanted to scratch a living from its surface, then let them. The whitemen laughed and went away.” She paused and drew a long breath. A piñon log collapsed into radiant coals, throwing out a shower of sparks along with its beguiling fragrance.

“But they came back,” she whispered. Thomas took her hands. She bent her head to his, the circle of their bodies forming a sort of sculpture, graven, unmoving, until the fire’s glow highlighted the tears sliding down Naomi’s cheeks.

“But they came back,” Thomas echoed. “And this time they looked below the surface. They peeled it back with their giant machines, machines larger than even the dinosaurs that roamed the land without destroying it. Their machines bit into the earth, into the black rock beneath.”

“Coal,” Lola breathed.

“The more they took, the hungrier they became. And to take even more, they needed water.”

Naomi freed her hands from Thomas’s grip and pushed herself up from her chair. Indian people normally spoke in low, quiet tones, almost a whisper, which made Lola, however she tried to match it, feel loud and unmannerly in comparison. Now Naomi’s voice rose to a white level, a shout by Indian standards, a raw, ragged thing. “The springs dried up. The water that was left became brackish. Crops withered. Sheep sickened and died. Babies, too. Our precious children. No longer did they need bullets to kill us.”

Thomas unbent himself to stand beside her and again took up the narrative. He was taller than Naomi and his presence beside her had a visible calming effect, her rigid shoulders relaxing by millimeters, fists unclenching. “But the people persisted. They drove hundreds of miles every week to the towns, bringing back clean water. Tried to hold on. Until—”

The silence lengthened liked a stretched rubber band, the tension unbearable with the knowledge that the pain to follow would be worse. Lola held out as long as she could. “Until?”

“Until the whitemen went after the people, too.” Naomi again, her voice back to normal, if anything so layered with anguish could be considered normal. “Ordered them to leave the lands that were the pathetic remnant they were allotted as reservations.”

Lola struggled to put it into some sort of historical context. Tribes all around the country were only a few generations removed from the genocide that had accompanied the arrival of Europeans. Even so, Naomi and Thomas’s torment seemed unusually intense. “They tried to move your grandparents? Your great-grandparents?”

“Not my grandparents. My parents! Me! I was born on the mesa. I lived there until I was a teenager. Thomas was a toddler, but still he remembers.”

“My grandparents wouldn’t leave,” Thomas said. “We went to visit them there. All alone in a hogan, no electricity, no plumbing, hanging on in the old way. We’d bring them water, food, driving in at night with no lights so the whitemen wouldn’t get us for aiding and abetting the trespassers.”

“The land where they’d lived forever. Trespassers.” Naomi again.

Lola couldn’t make sense of this new information. The history of the reservations was one of relentless betrayal. In recent decades, though, tribes had turned whitemen’s weapons back on them, wielding the law as a far more effective defense than guns had ever been. And when white lawyers let them down, they sent their own young people to faraway law schools, trusting that they’d come back and advocate on behalf of the tribe. Edgar and Naomi would have been among that first wave, Lola knew, Naomi with her work for the tribal courts and Edgar on the corporate front, making sure the tribe, even though its people were not his own, got the money coming to it from the companies investing in its resources.

“How could this happen?” she asked. “Surely there were lawsuits. Congressional hearings.”

“Of course there were. And in most cases, they’d have been effective.” Edgar spoke quickly, quietly, a foil to the raw emotion emanating from Naomi and Thomas. “But this is Conrad Coal.”

Lola had heard of it before, vaguely. One of those big corporations whose names showed up regularly in headlines on the financial pages she never really read. “I take it they have money?”

“More than God. ExxonMobil type money. Walmart money. Aramco money. They’re not just national but international.”

“Oh, no.” No matter how many smart Indian lawyers the tribes threw at the case, no matter how many high-priced white lobbyists they hired in Washington, they’d be outmatched. That kind of money trumped everything else, every time. Lola had covered too many lawsuits and even criminal cases that dragged on forever, endless waves of appeals financed by limitless bank accounts, thousand-dollar-an-hour corporate lawyers with their buttery leather briefcases and retinues of paralegals and assistants arrayed against local prosecutors, in cheap scuffed shoes, trying to do justice to the biggest cases of their lives without shorting the rest of their crushing caseloads.

“Like the Russians,” Lola murmured.

“Pardon?”

“Something my father always said. The reason nobody could ever conquer Russia. Not Napoleon, not the Germans. Because the Russians had an endless supply of bodies to throw at invaders. Each time a row of them was mowed down, another row popped up to take its place. They could lose millions and millions and still have millions more left. Of course, nowadays I suppose that theory applies to the Chinese. And to dollars, of course. These companies have millions.”

“Billions,” Edgar corrected her. “Many, many billions.”

“You’re so screwed,” Lola blurted. She couldn’t figure out a tactful way to voice her question, so she made it a simple statement. “But you work for the mine.” She thought she was beginning to understand the strain between Edgar and his wife.

Naomi moved closer to the fire. She wrapped her arms around her torso, clad in its thin layer of silk, and disabused Lola of her theory. “It was my idea,” she said, as Edgar nodded agreement. “I thought it would be a good idea to have somebody on the inside.”

Lola was reminded of how Naomi seemed to have Thomas’s career planned out. It appeared she’d likewise dictated her husband’s path. She wondered if the considerable salary Edgar almost certainly pulled down from the mine had played into Naomi’s recommendation.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Naomi added, “given how Conrad Coal doesn’t fight fair. But now it looks as though somebody’s decided we shouldn’t either.”

Maybe it was the contrast between the dancing shadows thrown by the flames and the moonlit desert beyond, the landscape edged in hard bright lines of black and white, everything a little weird, out of kilter. Lola’s blood hummed in her veins. The air felt supercharged, jittery with overactive ions, as though readying itself for a crashing storm still hours from its appearance on the horizon.

“You mean the bombing,” Lola said slowly. “Terrorism. Ecoterrorism, I guess they call it.”

“Not terrorism.” Lola didn’t know if it was a trick of the firelight, but Naomi seemed to be smiling. “War.”