“What do you have,” Durochie said.
“What Mr. Ginchy promised. Some food, some clothes.”
Durochie nodded as if the delivery were more burden than relief. From beneath the old truck came a thud, a strong oath, a wrench skittering out into the dirt. In Russ’s grandfather’s shop, it was a sin against a wrench to hammer on it. Always better, Clement said, to use leverage.
“Do you have a longer wrench?” Russ couldn’t help asking.
“If I had a longer wrench,” the younger man said coldly, “would I be using this one?”
He reached for the wrench, and Russ extended a hand to shake. “Russ Hildebrandt.”
The man ignored the hand and picked up the wrench. His shoulders were broad in a chamois shirt, his hair tied in a ponytail that had no gray in it. He might have been fifteen years older than Russ, but it was hard to tell with Indian faces.
“Keith is my brother’s son,” Durochie remarked.
In a canvas bag in the cab of the camp truck, Russ found a longer wrench. Keith took it from him as if he expected no less. Russ asked Charlie where they should put the supplies.
“Here,” Charlie said.
“Just on the ground?”
Apparently yes. By the time Russ and his partner had unloaded the sacks of food and two bales of clothing, Charlie had disappeared. The little girl now sat in the dirt watching Keith hammer on a steering arm. “What’s your name?” Russ asked her.
She looked uncertainly at Keith, who stopped hammering. “Her name is Stella.”
“Nice to meet you, Stella.” To Keith, Russ added, “You can keep the wrench.”
“Okay.”
“I wish there were more we could do.”
Keith sighted along the steering arm, checking its shape. Already then, he had a presence that later served him as a tribal politician, a charisma that invited touch and trust. Russ just wanted to keep looking at him. The assistant quartermaster was in the camp truck, tapping his fingers on the wheel. The thing about a Navajo silence was the sense that it could last indefinitely—all day.
“Say we sent a crew up here,” Russ said. “What would we do?”
“I told my uncle not to bother with you. All he got was a broken truck.”
“I’d like to help, though.”
“My uncle thinks from a different time. I try to tell him the new lesson, but he won’t learn.”
“What is the lesson?”
“Your help is worse than no help.”
“But if I came back with a crew? What would be entailed, exactly?”
“Go home, Long Wrench. We don’t want your help.”
When Russ returned to the reservation, two months later, Keith Durochie continued to call him Long Wrench, possibly a reference to his height, more probably to his thinking he knew better. Being given a nickname was traditional, but he didn’t know this when he left that day. He felt disliked by someone he wished had liked him. In the weeks that followed, whenever he had hours of leave in Flagstaff, he went to the library and read what he could find about the Navajos. Despite being intransigent and thieving—to the point where they were rounded up and marched, en masse, to a prison camp in New Mexico—they’d been granted an immense piece of territory, which, according to various authors, and in contrast to the peace-loving, farm-tending Hopis, they’d proceeded to overgraze with herds of horses too numerous to be of practical use. To the U.S. government, the Navajos were a problem to be solved by force. To Russ, who was haunted by their faces, what needed solving was the mystery of them. He later had the same feeling about Marion.
In June, after Germany’s unconditional surrender, when the mood in camp was festive, he again raised the question of the Navajos with Ginchy. “We should be there, not here,” he said. “If I could show you the reservation, you’d see what I mean.”
“You want to go back there,” Ginchy said.
“Yes, sir. Very much.”
“You’re a strange one.”
“How so?”
“A lot of men would kill for what you’ve got. People used to come here and vacation.”
“It doesn’t seem right to be on vacation when other men are dying.”
“You don’t feel fortunate. You’re not happy to be my aide-de-camp.”
“No, sir. I feel very fortunate. But I’d rather serve people in real need.”
“That speaks well of you. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait another twenty months, though.”