Russ’s disappointment must have been obvious. An hour later, when he was typing a report on camp hygiene, Ginchy came out to his desk with a roughly scrawled letter and asked him to do it up on letterhead. Reading the scrawl, Russ felt as though warm syrup were being poured over his head. It was love that worked miracles; no force on earth was more powerful.
To whom it may concern: I am the director of etc. etc. My assistant R.H. wishes to inquire into work needing performance on the N reservation. Please give him any assistance he may require. Yours etc. etc.
“Nobody cares what I do anymore,” Ginchy said. “My only concern is your safety. You can take the old Willys if you can get it running, but you’ll need to bring a partner.”
Though Russ was friendly with the men in his cabin, Ginchy’s favoritism hadn’t endeared him to them, and neither had Russ’s seriousness. The camp was like college that way.
“I’d rather go alone, sir.”
“That’s very Indian of you, but I’m the one in hot water if something happens to you.”
“Things can happen to two people, too.”
“Not as often.”
“I don’t need a partner. You can trust me.”
“That also is Indian. I offer you an apple, and you want the whole basket. Speaking of which—‘Thank you’？”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I will, of course, expect a full formal report.”
For his mission, after he’d repaired the Willys, Russ packed a bedroll, a change of clothes, his Bible, a notebook, twenty dollars of saved allowance, a canteen, toilet paper, and a box of food. He was still so dazzled by his luck that he was halfway down the forest road, on the morning of June 20, before it occurred to him to be afraid. He could be robbed or beaten up. The truck could wind up in a ditch. By the time he reached Tuba City, he ached from the work of keeping the Willys on the road. His shirt was soaked in the June heat.
Neither Charlie Durochie nor his truck was at the little house in town. When Russ found a woman down the street who spoke English, she said that Charlie was gone for the summer and Keith was with his wife’s people, up on the mesa. She nodded in a direction where there was only glare and dusty vacancy, no mesa.
Russ was now additionally afraid that his mission would be a bust, because, in all the vast reservation, he knew only two men to speak to. Inside the baking Willys, he shut his eyes and prayed for strength and guidance. Then he drove in the direction the woman had indicated.
The road up to the mesa was in places barely passable, the country relentlessly deserted but nevertheless dotted with bleached, shriveled cow patties. The Navajo men Russ encountered, one whittling a stick in the shade of an outcropping, two others watering horses at a tank beneath a rusted windmill, seemed to assume that a twenty-one-year-old white man looking for the Fallen Rocks people, as Keith Durochie’s in-laws were evidently known, must have had some reason. The men stressed, in their crude English, that the distance wasn’t short.
He had to stop every half hour to shake his cramped hands. When the air cooled and the shadows grew long, he pulled over by a decrepit stock pen and a tank into which water trickled from a crusty pipe. Small birds, ghostly in the twilight, were drinking from the seepage. The water was bitter, but his canteen was empty. On the mesa road, in six hours, he’d seen two women on a motorbike, one boy with a dog herding sheep, one old man driving a truck with coils of wire strapped to its bed, various free-roaming horses, and nothing resembling a town. He ate pork and beans from a can still warm from the day’s heat. Then, fearing scorpions, he bedded down inside the Willys. He missed George Ginchy. Through the windshield, he could see a sky clotted with stars and nebulae, but he was too homesick for the camp to get out and admire it.
In the cool of early morning, he traveled through an upward-sloping basin forested with juniper and pinyon. Along the road, on flats too dry to be called meadow, sheep grazed among thorny shrubs. There was a magnificent desertion to the country, rutted tracks branching off with mysteries at the end of them, a sense of lives present but hidden. He drove fifteen miles before he saw another person, and then it wasn’t one but a hundred.
Close to the road, beside a corral, were cook fires, horses, some trucks. Older men and women of all ages stood or sat around a structure of tree boughs festooned with scraps of red cloth. When Russ stopped and asked the nearest man, who was saddling a horse, where he might find the Fallen Rocks people, a scent of fried mutton entered the Willys. The man nodded up the road.