“Amazingly enough,” he said, “this is where I spent a summer.”
Frances wasn’t listening. Or was listening but was too tense to speak.
The little house, where he’d had his sexual revelation, had been stripped of its doors and its windows and its roof, leaving only the walls. The sunlight on it was bright but not as bright as it should have been. As Russ proceeded along the road, across the canyon and up the ridge opposite the farmstead, the yellowish pall became more pronounced.
Reaching the top of the ridge, he saw where it was coming from. In the middle of the wide plain below, the earth had been torn open—was being torn open. Dust was billowing from a gash that might have been a mile wide. Industrial trestles and a raw new road extended from the gash to the northern horizon. Russ had a sense of betrayal, born of his loyalty to the primitive mesa of his memories. Keith had mentioned that the tribal council permitted coal mining on the reservation, but Russ hadn’t had any reason to travel in this direction until now. He hadn’t imagined that the mining was so close to the Fallen Rocks land—so close, indeed, to Kitsillie itself—or that the scale of the operation was so immense.
Half a mile down the road, he saw Clyde’s pickup. In a clearing among sparse, stunted pine trees were two unhitched camper trailers, a structure of sticks and tarpaulin, a woodpile, and a larger, rusted truck with a water tank on its bed, everything filmed with road dust. Russ pulled over behind the pickup and cut the engine. A second sticker on its bumper said CRAZY HORSE WASN’T.
“So,” he said to Frances. “Maybe you should stay here.”
She was still staring at the windshield. “What did I ask you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“What was the one thing I asked you to do.”
It was interesting that her fear expressed itself as anger, as if it were his fault that she needed him to include her.
“Okay, then,” he said, opening his door.
As they approached the trailers, the flimsy rear door of one of them banged open. Clyde came out in his bare feet, dressed only in brown jeans and a fleece-lined denim jacket, unbuttoned. His chest was bare and hairless. “Hey, white man.”
“Hello, good morning.”
“That your wife?”
Frances had stopped a step behind Russ.
“No,” he said. “She’s an adviser in our fellowship.”
“Hey, pretty lady.” Again the smiling insolence. “What brings you up here?”
“What do you think?” Russ said.
“I think you didn’t get the message.”
“I got the message, but I didn’t understand it.”
“Get the fuck out of here? Seems pretty clear to me.”
“But why? We’re not bothering you.”
Clyde smiled at the sky, as if his amusement were cosmic. He was handsome in a strong-browed way, handsome and fit. “If I walked into your house in Chicago and you said, ‘Hey, red man, get the fuck out, I don’t like you people’—I’d get the message.”
Russ could have objected that his group wasn’t in Clyde’s house. But the Navajos’ home was in the land, not in structures, and white people had certainly given them reasons to hate them. It was only by chance that Russ, until now, had dealt with Navajos who didn’t hate them. He glanced back at Frances. She seemed entirely occupied with managing her fear.
“You’re right,” he said. “If you don’t want us here, we shouldn’t be here.”
“That’s better.”
“But first I want you to hear me as a person. Not as a white man—as a person. I want to hear you, too. I didn’t come here to argue with you, I came to listen.”
Clyde laughed. “Like hell you did. I know why you’re here.”
“If you’re talking about the guitars, then, yes, we will need those back. We’re not leaving the mesa without them.”
“You people are all the same.”
“No, we’re not.”
“Your possessions, your money. You think you’re different, but you’re all the same.”
“You don’t know me,” Russ said angrily. “I don’t give a damn about possessions. I do care about the two young girls you hurt by stealing from them.”
“How many guitars do you need? I left you three of them.”
“How many do you need?”
“I already gave them to my buddies. That’s the difference between you and me.”
“That’s bullshit. The difference between you and me is you steal from teenaged girls.”