Clyde’s smile became pained. He looked around at the pine trees and then, shaking his head, walked over to the other trailer. From the dirtied sky came a faint sigh of industry, from the trees the chirring of a nutcracker. Frances’s eyes were fastened on Clyde as if she expected him to get a gun.
“We’re safe,” Russ said gently.
Her eyes moved to him without seeming to see him. Clyde emerged from the other trailer with the two guitar cases and set them on the ground. “Now get out of here,” he said.
“No.”
“Seriously, white man. You got what you came for.”
Clyde went inside his own trailer, and Frances gripped Russ’s arm. “We should go.”
“No.”
“Please. For God’s sake.”
Russ’s anger had turned to sorrow. There was beauty in a young man’s righteous anger and no joy in overpowering it—no satisfaction in bringing a white man’s legal rights to bear, asserting white ownership, reclaiming his possessions from a man who had nothing. The moral victory was Clyde’s. Thinking of what it cost him, Russ felt sorry for him.
He went and rapped on the door of the trailer. Rapped again.
“Listen to me,” he said to the door. “I want to invite you to come down to the school and talk to our group. Will you do that for me?”
“I’m not your performing Navajo,” came the voice from inside.
“Goddamn it, I’m showing you respect. I’m asking you to do the same.”
After a silence, the trailer shifted with movement inside it. The door opened a crack. “You’re a friend of Keith Durochie.”
“I am.”
“Then I have no respect for you.”
The door fell shut. Russ opened it again. Inside the trailer were the smells and disarray of solitary male living. “We came here to listen,” he said.
“Your lady looks at me like I’m a rattlesnake.”
“Can you blame her? You make threats, you break into the school.”
“But you’re not afraid of me.”
“No. I’m not.”
Clyde pursed his lips and nodded to himself. “All right. I’ll show you who your friend is.”
He stepped into a pair of boots, and Russ gave Frances a reassuring smile. She looked furious about what he was putting her through, but when Clyde came outside and led him down a sandy trail, through the pine trees, she followed them.
The trail was short and ended at an outcrop overlooking the devastated plain. Dust continued to billow from the strip mine, and the intervening slopes were treeless, lifeless—water-starved and grazed to death. Clyde stood so close to the cliff’s edge that Russ’s rectum tightened.
“Looking at this,” Clyde said, “is like watching you rape my mother.”
“It’s bad,” Russ agreed.
“It’s sacred land, but it’s full of coal. You see that smoke?” He gestured to the north. “That’s electricity for your cities. It’s not for us—there’s no electricity on the mesa.”
“Do you want electricity?”
Clyde looked over his shoulder at Russ. “I’m not a moron.”
“I’m just trying to understand. Is the problem the coal mine, or the fact that you don’t have electricity?”
“The problem is the tribal council. Your friend thinks this shithole is a good thing. Modern economy, man. Gotta deal with the bilagáana, fact of life, can’t live without ’em. That’s what your friend says.”
“Keith cares about his people. I don’t like what I’m seeing here any more than you do, and I don’t guess Keith likes it, either. But the money has to come from somewhere.”
“Keith doesn’t have to see it. He’s down in Many Farms.”
“He’s not well, you know. He had a stroke last week.”
Clyde shrugged. “Somebody else can cry over that. He fucked my family, and we’re not the only ones. The leases are shit and they last forever. We should be getting two or three times the money. And the jobs? My buddies are down there right now, eating coal dust. That’s the new Navajo—Peabody Fucking Coal Company.”
Frances was faintly shaking her head, her expression neither frightened nor angry, merely desolate, as if here were another door she was sorry to see opened.
“What did Keith do to your family?” Russ asked.
“This whole slope, he had the grazing permit for it. His wife had the permit on the back side, too. We knew the back side was no good—you probably saw it, coming in. But this side was still good. Keith cleared out and sold us the permit, and bang, a year later the council signed the deal with Peabody. He knew what was coming—we didn’t. We had healthy herds, the maximum allowed, and now look. You see any stock down there?”