The first thing I do after I drop my boots by the back door is to head for the kitchen. I’m hot, hungry, and angry. The air-conditioning isn’t working in the truck again, and I skipped lunch. Normally, none of these things would bother me, but today everything and everyone gets on my nerves. Especially Paige Patterson, who is determined to get into trouble and has somehow become my responsibility.
In the kitchen, my mother pushes around ground lamb in a skillet on the cooktop. It smells delicious. Reaching around her, I grab a sample off the top and pop it into my mouth. She hits me lightly, but the smile in her eyes forgives me. “Any news of the missing girl?”
“No.” I think of Jeremy and grind my molars into the now-tasteless lamb.
“God,” she sighs. “I was hoping today…” Her words trail off, and she gives a small shake of her head. “Go wash up. Dinner in fifteen.”
I head through the living room where Harold sits in front of the widescreen television, playing a video game. He doesn’t look up as I turn down the corridor to my room.
The back of my shirt still clings to my skin from the hot ride home in the truck, as does the dust from the park, but instead of heading to the shower, I walk up the three steps that lead to Uncle Billy’s room.
Pausing outside the door, I listen. All day, the need to talk to him has played in the back of my mind like a song stuck in my head. The fear of what he might say wars with the need to ask him. I know he won’t soften his words; if there’s blame, he will lay it without hesitation on my shoulders. I already carry the burden of things he’s said.
And yet, here I am, hesitating at the doorway. I’d head for my room if it wasn’t for Paige. Am I wrong to help her? At this point, how can I not?
Leaning forward, I strain to hear inside the room. Is he drunk? Sober? Can I really trust what he says in either case? I hold my breath, frozen in doubt.
And then, as if he sees me clearly through the wood, my uncle calls, “Come in, Jalen.”
The handle sticks, and the wood bows a little as I put my shoulder into it. It pops open, and the heat of the room wafts across my face, at least five degrees hotter than anywhere else in the house, which I guess makes sense. The room used to be an attic before he moved in with us. Fifteen years later, it still looks like an attic with its low ceiling, sloping walls, clutter of unpacked boxes, and mismatched furniture.
The room smells stale, airless, slightly sour. Uncle Billy has forbidden my mother from cleaning. It’s probably been years since the rug has seen a vacuum, never mind dusting. Yet this is the place that pulls me like none other in the house. Here is the past—hidden sometimes in boxes, but visible in the artwork on the walls, the shelf of kachina dolls, a feathered headdress that was my grandfather’s, a sheepskin rug worn bare in the center. Here there is no fusion of cultures, no walking a line between two worlds. Everything here is Diné. To Uncle Billy, I am completely Diné, and this is where I belong. The fact that my mother is white is insignificant.
To be defined, to be able to point to a heritage and say “this is who I am; on this side of the line I stand” is not a bad thing.
My uncle looks up from his desk. His eyes are deeply hooded, and the lines carved into his cheeks make him look years older than my father, although he is younger by three years.
“How is the hunt for the girl going?”
To get to him, I have to twist around the boxes and stacks piled on the floor. “The same,” I tell him. “They haven’t found anything.”
My uncle nods. I strain to read the level of alcohol in his eyes. They look a little red, moderately shiny. A mug sits near his elbow. I’m sure it holds whiskey.
“What are you making?” I ask. It isn’t the question that’s bugged me all day—the same one that’s burning me up inside and has been since Emily disappeared.
He looks down at the block of wood in his hands and then holds it up for me to see. “A kachina doll,” he says, although this already is clear to me.
Over the years, he has made quite a few of these. For a long time, my father used to try to convince him to sell them at the park, like the other people who spread blankets and sell their jewelry on the grass near the entrance.
“The tourists will pay good money for them,” my dad said. “Your craftsmanship is exceptional.”
“They would not be used correctly,” Uncle Billy said scornfully. “They are not idols or household decorations.”
“You’re not selling our people out,” my father argued. “You’d be making a living.”
“Food can be found,” Uncle Billy told him. “But who we are needs to stay with us, to be honored by us. What would we be teaching our children?”
“That our people cannot isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Our cultures have always traded. This is just another form of it.”
My uncle looked him in the eye. “Trading?” he scoffed. “They steal our children and you call this trading?”
Looking at the nearly two-foot-long block of cottonwood root in my uncle’s bony hands, I realize it has been a long time since he has carved anything at all. “What kind of doll are you making?”
His face softens. “The yellow corn maiden.”
Why the corn maiden? When he puts the doll down and lifts the mug to his lips, I want to knock it out of his hands. He hasn’t told me what I’ve come to ask him, what I’m still afraid to ask.
“Uncle,” I say as he takes a long, slow sip and then half-closes his eyes as if he savors every inch of the liquid’s passage through his body. “The girl who disappeared. The one you played the drums for. Was she the one you told me about?”
He opens his eyes and looks at me. The puzzlement in his face makes him look almost childlike. “What?”
“The night the girl at the park disappeared. You sang the death chant.”
His brow wrinkles, and he cocks his head as if the memory is a sound that might be heard if he listens hard enough. Finally he sighs. “She came to me. She was lost. I wanted to help her find her way.” He gestures to the doll. “I need yellow yarn for the hair, and more paint. Will you take me to Walmart?”
I lean closer, see the spiderweb of gray claiming what was once hair as black as mine. “Is she the one you warned me about?”
He shakes his head. “What are you talking about?”
“The girl in your dream, uncle.”
“I told you. She was lost. I was trying to help her find her way.”
“And was she the same one you dreamed about before?”
His brow furrows. “I dreamed about her before?”
He doesn’t remember. All the anger that was slow-burning in the back of my mind leaps to the front, and I want to shake him until he tells me what I need to know. “Think, Uncle Billy. Is the girl who’s lost the same one you warned me about, or are there two girls?”
He shakes his head slowly and then picks up a piece of black sandstone and rubs it gently over the wood. “I’m sorry, Jalen,” he says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I stare at him. How could he forget the night he came into my room, stood beside my bed, and screeched like an eagle to wake me?
“You’ve got to remember, Uncle. You had a dream and you came into my room dressed as the Eagle kachina and told me about it.”
Uncle Billy looks at me blankly. I can tell he doesn’t have a clue what I’m asking. Too late, I remember something else about alcoholics. When they’ve been drinking, when their blood alcohol rises to a level you can measure in their eyes, they will forget things. You can tell them what they said or did, and they will deny it and believe with every fiber in their being that you are making it up.
They will not remember that they were drunk or that they woke you at two in the morning dressed in Eagle’s feathers. They will not remember that they told you that you would be responsible for someone else’s death.