Even Arizona had become a clouded prospect. Enough kids had signed up for the spring trip to fill three buses, and his plan was to leave two of them at the base of the Black Mesa while he led a third group up to the school at Kitsillie. The Black Mesa was in the heart of Diné Bikéyah. Nowhere more than up in its thin air, in the mind-and landscape-bending midday sun, beneath night skies pressing down with the weight of a million stars, had he felt more connected to the Navajo spirit world. Kitsillie’s primitive conditions would also be an opportunity to show Frances how capable he was of handling them, and they would test her appetite for new experiences. If, unlike Marion, she turned out to have a taste for roughing it, the possibilities for further joint adventures would be limitless. But when, after much trying, he reached Keith Durochie on the telephone, Keith bluntly told him, “Don’t go there.”
“To Kitsillie?”
“Don’t go there. The energy is bad. You won’t be welcome.”
“That’s nothing new,” Russ said lightly. “I wasn’t so welcome in the forties, either. You remember how you wouldn’t even shake my hand?”
He expected Keith to laugh at the memory, as he had in the past, but Keith didn’t.
“You’ll be safer in Many Farms,” he said. “We have plenty of work here. The people on the mesa are unhappy with the bilagáana.”
“Well, and I know a thing or two about building bridges. Why don’t we see how things look when I get there.”
Keith, after a silence, said, “You and I are old, Russ. Things aren’t the same.”
“I’m not so old, and neither are you.”
“No, I’m old. I saw my death the other day. It was on the ridge behind my house—not far.”
“I don’t know about that,” Russ said, “but I’m happy to think I’ll be seeing you again.”
On the morning of Ash Wednesday, he left his car in the First Reformed parking lot, so as not to let it be seen too suspiciously long at Frances’s, and walked uphill on sidewalks wet with the melting of dismal, clumpy snowflakes. The hour, nine o’clock, felt more suitable for a doctor’s appointment. Frances’s house was freshly painted and rather stately, a reminder of how much money she’d received from General Dynamics, and he rang her doorbell with a foreboding which he could only pray that marijuana would dispel.
“So much for my idea,” she said, leading him into her kitchen, “that you wouldn’t show up.”
“Do you not want me here?”
“I just hope we’re not making a big mistake.”
She was wearing a wide-necked brown sweaterdress and thick gray socks. Seeing her as she was at home, not in one of her smart Sunday outfits, not in her Tuesday-circle tomboy attire, he had an unsettling strong hit of her reality—her independence as a woman, her thinking of thoughts and making of choices wholly unrelated to him. To glimpse how it must feel to be her, inhabiting her own life, round the clock, was exciting but also daunting. On the counter by the kitchen stove, she’d already set out an ashtray and a crudely fashioned marijuana cigarette.
“Shall we get right to it,” she said, “or do we need to discuss it to death first?”
“No. Just assure me you’re really okay with doing this.”
“I’ve already done it—sort of. I don’t think I had enough.”
She reached and turned on the stove fan, and he wondered if there was underwear beneath her sweaterdress. The dress had slipped down her shoulder without exposing a bra strap. The skin of her upper back, which he’d never seen before, was smooth and lightly freckled. It, too, was real, and it gave him a pang of nostalgia for the safety of his fantasies. He’d been managing all right with fantasies; he could probably keep managing indefinitely. And yet to shy from the reality of Frances would confirm Marion’s belittling assessment of him. She’d given him permission because she didn’t believe he was man enough to use it.
“Let’s see what happens,” he said.
They hunched forward, side by side, under the exhaust fan. The marijuana smoke was scalding, and he might have stopped at one lungful if Frances hadn’t insisted that one wasn’t enough. She took sip after sip of smoke, holding the little cigarette like a dart, and he followed her lead. They didn’t stop until the remainder was too small to be handed back and forth. She went to the sink, dropped the “roach” in the garbage disposal, and opened a window. The snowflakes outside struck Russ as peculiar, artificial, as though strewn by someone standing on the roof. Frances stretched her arms above her head, raising the hem of her dress and with it, again, the question of underwear.