TEN

One minute I’m driving up to Gar and Naomi’s, giving it some gas because I’m late. The next, people are hitting the dirt like I’m one of those World Trade Center bombers. Guess I’d better not make jokes about bombing, though. Not with what happened at the billboard.

There were two of them, Gar’s brother and his white wife. Oh, and their little girl. That’s three. Four if you count their three-legged dog. The brother, Charlie, doesn’t look anything like Gar. Taller and twice as wide. Not fat, though. Solid, the way a lot of our people are. Got that cop look to him. Alert. Makes you nervous, like you’ve done something wrong. Which I haven’t. Not intentionally. The wife, just about as tall as he is. On the scrawny side, kind of like Naomi, only Naomi wears it better, always dressed in something stylish. This woman looks like she throws her clothes on in the morning without taking a good look at what she’s pulled out of the drawer. Lots of curly hair, fair skin. She’s not doing well in the heat, you can tell. Neck all red and blotchy. I’ll give her credit for one thing: she’s not all Indianed up like a lot of white women who marry our men. No turquoise, no feather earrings. No T-shirt with an image of armed Apaches and a message reading Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492. Not a dream catcher in sight.

Their little girl, though. She’s all Indian except for her eyes. Those are light like her mother’s, and they drill right through you. Falling off Valentine knocked the wind out of her. But when I went to help her up, she gave me a look and told me she’d get herself up, thank you very much. They’re going to have their hands full with that one. Maybe they already do.

Naomi and Gar acted like it was all a big joke, the way that woman thought my car backfiring was a bomb, or shots, or something. I didn’t think it was so funny even though I laughed and went along. Their being here complicates an already complicated situation. Charlie’s a cop, like I said. Not a Navajo cop, but cops can’t help themselves. Something goes wrong, especially something like this, and their noses start twitching like dogs on the hunt. And it turns out the woman is a reporter. You ask me, that’s worse. Cops, at least they follow rules, most of them anyhow. You get crosswise with them once or twice, as I might have done—stupid kid stuff, no permanent record—and you know how they work. The way they see things. If something doesn’t fit, it’s not like they throw it away completely, but it goes off to one side, ready to be retrieved if something else comes up.

I haven’t dealt with reporters as much; not at all, really. But I’ve seen them at tribal council meetings, the way they sidle up to people afterward, hit them with questions nobody saw coming. Far as I can tell, they don’t have any rules. And, like cops, they’re always on the clock. This woman, Lola. The way she was asking questions after dinner last night, you’d think she was a hotshot for the Navajo Times. And that business about Coyote. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’d made it up just to mess with me. But how can she possibly know about Coyote?

I fed her the story about the mesa. That always gets them. Fits into the whole Indians-screwed-by-whitemen narrative. It helps that it’s true. Here’s the thing. Most people, white people and, hell, even Indians, they hear that and it’s enough. But this woman just kept those gray eyes of hers on me after I’d finished talking, not saying anything. Thinking. Turning it over in her brain, looking for the piece that didn’t fit. Like she was on to me, even if her cop husband wasn’t. Yet.

We’re going to have to decide what to do about her. About both of them.