YELLOW AND RED DON'T MIX. 15 YEARS AGO. NEW YORK CITY
Willard Yellowhorse felt the noose tighten against his throat. Breathing was labored now. His life force was slipping away and there was nothing he could do. The last of the thick red paint that once covered the upper two-thirds of his body had slowly dripped off and was now captured on the fine linen painting canvas below. The swirl of red color formed rivulets of viscous paint on the covered floor. The image mirrored Willard’s own bound torso, which stood precariously on a chrome barstool. An odd yet symmetrical pattern was taking shape: his death shroud. The image was compelling and not altogether dissimilar to his expensive artwork that contemporary art fans clamored for, but never in a million years would he have chosen to make this painting. Inexplicably, Willard had seen this image before: not suspended here in a cold-storage unit in a dicey New York neighborhood, but in a much more comforting surrounding. The same composition had been drawn two weeks earlier by his grandfather, a powerful Diné medicine man.
Hastiin Sherman, Willard’s grandfather, had foreseen Willard’s current predicament during Willard’s curing ceremony on his last trip back to the Navajo Reservation. Sherman had sternly warned his grandson of an abrupt end in the sacred sands, his life path line stopped. “Change course or suffer the will of the gods,” cautioned the old man. A bad coyote spirit, Ma’ii ni, had Yellowhorse’s scent and soon would capture his prey.
Now Willard Yellowhorse wished he had listened. He had known the power of his grandfather’s visions—they were legendary. But Willard had become too much like the whites he now lived among in New York, not listening to Mother Earth’s rhythm. It would cost him his life. Too late now. His neck was securely in the spirit coyote’s jaws with no way out.
Drip by drip, the last holes filled in from white to red, the canvas nearing its completion. Willard’s nude body shivered uncontrollably, his handcuffs tinkling like a glass chandelier, sending small, faint red-paint droplets splattering along the canvas edges. The cadence eerily reminded Willard of his grandfather’s scattering of powerful sacred corn pollen during the end of the curing ceremony.
Willard knew death was approaching and considered trying to write some note with the last little drips, maybe the initials of the man who had taken his life. He was paralyzed, yet in awe of the image below him that had miraculously come to life. The design was complete, the exact one his elderly grandfather had formed earlier with his sand painting on the brown Arizona dirt floor of his ancestral summer hogan. Willard’s mind regressed to when he was sitting in the hogan watching the intensity of the old medicine man’s execution of the complicated sand painting. Its beauty and intricacy had impressed Willard, a respected artist who understood creative talent when he saw it. The feat had taken Hastiin Sherman a full day.
Willard’s consciousness drifted back to the present, realizing the slightest movement on his part would cause him to lose balance and die. He fought the death chindi, even though he innately understood the now-finished design had already sealed his fate. His toes gripped the stool, valiantly fighting gravity. Each rapid heartbeat was visible along Yellowhorse’s carotids. The accentuated neckline was tangled in long, flowing black hair caught in a tight hangman’s noose, the coyote’s jaws. Only his superior balance and muscular legs prevented strangulation. Legs that had grown strong running the backcountry of his Navajo homelands herding his grandmother’s sheep now fought death.
Time stood still for Yellowhorse. In the background, music erupted. He could hear the old Eagles tune “Seven Bridges Roads” playing in the distance, muffled yet the words were clear: “There are stars in the Southern sky.” The imagery of stars in the sky, and the number seven intermixed with an eagle flying overhead. Yellowhorse wondered what death would be like and which ancestral spirits would be meeting him at the sacred Canyon de Chelly cliffs. His shivering body began to warm and a peace slowly engulfed him. Like his mind’s eagle, he would fly soon, though only a short distance.
As the second verse began and the words reverberated in Yellowhorse’s sweat-drenched ears—“There are stars in the Southern sky”—Willard Yellowhorse’s balance finally gave way and with a loud snap of fracturing cervical vertebrae, STRUGGLE was complete: his final death-star painting, drips of red paint and yellow urine mixed on a white canvas. It would be worth millions.