The Darkness Rolling (25 page)

More nodding.

The house of my entire life collapsed on my head.

I tried to stand up in the rubble. Disbelief made me dizzy. This could not be happening. I stupidly forced out the words, “
Whose
mom?”

Grandpa thumped my chest with his fist, his eyes boring into me.

“
My
father is with
my
mom?
Now?
”

Grandpa’s head, arm, fist, and every part of his body that could move jumped up and down hollering,
Yes.
Then he scribbled on the paper,
ADIKAI.

Then one more scribbled word—
BAD!

I ran the truck off the road onto scrub desert.

I had no fucking idea what …

I said to myself, loud, “Drive like a madman.”

And I did.

Twenty-two

The radio was sounding off, but Zopilote ignored it. He herded them both into Nizhoni’s bedroom, the .38 pointed at them, the shotgun still loaded with one shell held loosely in the other hand, the derringer in his pocket.

A gun barrel is very persuasive, and he wanted Iris to see everything. Maybe he could shoot her in a way so that she would live just long enough to tell about what she saw. Or maybe not. He would decide.

The familiar room, the familiar bed. Our room, not hers.
Ours.

He put a hand on the young woman’s back and shoved her toward a corner. With the barrel he motioned Nizhoni to the bed.

She laid down on her back. She knew what was coming.

“Yes, my unfaithful mate. But before it happens, you must picture every detail of your own death. You must feel every touch in your mind, imagine all the fear, all the loathing. You will experience my throbbing orgasm. You will feel the ultimate moment of terror rage through your body.”

Maybe those were the most words in a row for him in twenty-five years.

He signaled the young woman to sit down. She did, eyes wide open. She didn’t mewl, didn’t even whimper. He would have to keep an eye on her.

Buzzard drew his hunting knife out of his belt, gripped the hem of Nizhoni’s skirt, slit the cloth from bottom to waist, and laid it open. She wore that silly underwear. He cut it off.

He took her blouse in both hands and ripped it wide, popping the buttons. A brassiere. He cut it, deliberately tickling his wife’s throat with the tip of his knife, so that a single tear of blood dribbled sideways.

He feasted with his eyes. He hadn’t seen her naked in a quarter of a century. He liked it. She was his wife, and she was still beautiful.

He undid his belt, dropped his pants, and stepped up close to her face.
See my full power.

Nizhoni looked, paralyzed.

Zopilote whirled his head toward Iris. Sure enough, she was pushing herself to her feet.

He fired a pistol shot within an inch of her head. The sound in the room made his blood thump.

Iris sank back to the floor.

Nizhoni began to cry.

He straddled her chest.

“Now, my dear, my betrayer, my whore, give your attention to what I am about to do. My words will be the last you hear in this world. My hands will be the last touch you will feel. Well, not quite the last touch you will feel, Nizhoni.”

Still straddling her, holding the gun in one hand and with the other squeezing the cock almost touching her eyes, he told her everything he would do, in detail and as lasciviously as possible.

Then Zopilote said, in a throttled voice, “I love you.”

Twenty-three

I surveyed my home, and it didn’t take long. Colin was lying dead on the ground behind the post, his neck broken. Jake Charlie was gone, probably dead, too. “Go back to the truck, lie down on the seat, and stay there,” I said to Janey. She went.

My skin rolled into spasms. I had to approach carefully, had to see, had to understand. Otherwise I could not save Mom. Or Iris. I would just be another victim. No help in that.

Must be calm.
At any moment I might hear a scream or a gunshot that would mean my mother was dead. I would not let that thought come into my mind again.

I chose her bedroom window, looked inside.

Mom lay spread-eagled on the bed, naked, knees up, legs wide. A stranger—my blood father?—knelt between her legs.

Vertigo whirled me around once. I squeezed my mind tight and ordered it to be still.

A pistol was in my father’s hand, Grandpa’s shotgun propped in a corner. Iris slumped in the opposite corner.

I took four steps back, bulled forward, leapt, and crashed through glass into the bedroom.

Chaos!

I hit the floor and rolled.

My father shot at me and missed.

My mother rolled away.

I grabbed a chair and hurled it at the center of the bed.

The monster dived off the end of the bed and twisted to get another shot.

Iris dived at my father as he aimed at me. His shot numbed my ears.

A spurt of blood from her chest—she’d been hit. The two of them rolled and thumped across the floor.

I used the bed to cannonball myself right onto my goddamned father’s chest. My hip knocked Iris aside, and my butt got him hard. He squealed like a stuck pig.

I went for the pistol. He slid it far under the bed.

Iris ran to the shotgun.

My father and I grappled. I grabbed him by his long hair, but he got one hand on my throat. He didn’t choke me. On either side of my Adam’s apple he dug his fingertips in. Agony.

I jerked his head forward and pounded it hard against the floor.

Iris was aiming, but she could get no clear shot.

“No!” I shouted.

Probably she’d never fired a gun and might hit either or both of us.

We rolled a couple of times, and I splayed my legs to end up on top. From outside I heard Janey yelling. I couldn’t make out the words and didn’t give a damn.

He was about to rip my Adam’s apple out.

Iris fired.

My father bellowed, lurched, and lost his grip on my throat. I felt buckshot sting my calf, and he must have taken the brunt in his knee.

I gouged my so-called father’s eye with my thumb.

He screamed.

I had the bastard. I kept that thumb where it could pop his eyeball out in an instant.

“I want some answers, now, you asshole.”

At that moment Grandpa lurched into the room on a two-by-four crutch and fell facedown on the floor, his head whacking my father’s elbow.

Grandpa raised—of all the goddamn things—his belt.

“Answers,” I bellowed at this fake father.

Then, with his good left hand, Grandpa slammed sharp the tip of the belt into the father-monster’s throat.

Twenty-four

The father-man was breathing. I wanted to memorize his face, to hear his voice, to get his words. I sat on the floor next to him. Bright arterial blood spouted from his neck.

“That man is about out of time,” Janey said.

So I had only a couple of minutes, out of a lifetime, with the man whose blood ran in mine. I said, “Why?”

His eye, bloody, stared into mine. “It was me raped your fancy woman.” His voice was a rasp.

“Why?”

“I hate your mother,” he whispered.

“Why?”

“Betrayal,” he wheezed.

“I am your offspring,” I said. That word seemed better than “son.” “Do you have anything to say to me?”

He racked with coughing, and his blood splattered my chest. A gift for his son.

He squeaked out, “I curse you for being born.”

His face contorted into something strange and terrible. Maybe elation, maybe horror. Maybe the real face of evil arriving from a place we know nothing of.

He tried to clutch at his throat, twisted, and convulsed.

And was still forever.

Twenty-five

Mom was weeping, lying in a ball. A torrent of quiet pain, fear, and humiliation ran from her eyes to her neck.

“Are you hurt?”

The volume of my voice jolted even me.

Mom shook her head no.

Next, Iris.

“Never mind your modesty,” I told her. “I’m pulling up your blouse.”

She raised her arm on the side of the wound. No sign of penetration into the chest. I felt carefully along—

“Ow, that hurts!”

Janey’s hands pulled my arms away. She said, “Let me do that.”

She palpated the length of the wound. “Nothing but ribs,” she said. “X-rays will show whether any of them is cracked, and that would be the worst case. Very lucky.”

It was hard to live inside this scene and think that anything could be called lucky. But I hoped Janey was right.

I bent over Grandpa, who seemed half in another world. His left leg was still bent and crooked. I couldn’t imagine how he managed to crutch his way into the house. His will. His amazing will.

I looked at Janey.

“He did it by himself.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t stop him. I yelled at him, but…” Some embarrassment on her part. I guessed she was thinking,
A small woman, but a crippled man—why couldn’t I control him?

I took off my cowboy boot and found two pellets just below my knee. Several more had gouged the top of the boot. I flipped the two out and said to hell with all that.

Another look at Mom. She was murmuring to Janey, voice soft as birds’ wings, her breathing rhythm ragged, saying that she was all right. Janey was bending over her, making comforting sounds. “She’s okay, physically,” Janey told me.

Which meant the damage was emotional. And it was serious.

*   *   *

The ambulance got there in time to confirm what we already knew. My fake father was dead, and Grandpa would have to go to a hospital to get his leg set, but Iris could be patched up right there.

I told her, straight out, no time for delicacies, “Colin’s dead. Broken neck.”

A flicker of shadow streaked her face at an angle, like a storm-tossed sky’s gray sheet through a windowpane. Then it was gone. She squared her shoulders and became a force.

“Mr. Goldman is not going in any ambulance,” she told the driver and Janey, “and he’s not going to Flagstaff. I’m taking him to Santa Fe myself.”

Grandpa nodded and grumbled his approval.

“But your ribs…” I said.

“Yazzie, I’m sure nothing is broken. I am taking Grandpa to Santa Fe, and do not argue with me.”

“You,” Iris said to Grandpa, “you’re going to get physical therapy while you’re there, and there’s no arguing about it.”

Grandpa made a raspy “O” sound, which may have been an attempt at no. But he wasn’t going to win this one.

The ambulance guys forced pain meds down his throat. On their way out, I asked them to bring us news of Jake Charlie. Dead or alive, he had to be close by.

Sitting up on the bed, Mom spoke her first words. “While we drive, we’ll talk. And eat. And be thankful for our true family. And then I will tell you a story.”

Mom and Iris may not have been related by blood, but they sure were by courage and determination.

Mom sat at the table while I threw together a meal for the drive. I suppose it was some kind of therapy for me. I wanted my mother to rest. I wanted to be the person taking care of her. After all, I had left her alone. I wanted her to scream or give voice, in some way, to the horror that took place inside our house. For myself, I could find no words, no cries. I was dry as the desert.

Iris and I shouldered Grandpa to the pickup. Mom carried the basket of fried Spam sandwiches, potato salad, and gherkins.

As we walked out, Officers Cly and Etcitty spun their squad car into the yard. I didn’t ask where the hell they’d been. Simply said, “We’re leaving, no questions now.” I pointed to my grandfather. “Look at that leg.”

They saw.

“We’ll give our statement to the cops at the hospital.” I didn’t say which hospital.

“But—”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. At the hospital.”

They nodded and left.

With four people in the pickup, the front seat was crowded. I drove, and Grandpa sat with his back against the truck’s passenger window and his legs across Mom’s and Iris’s laps. Somehow it was comfortable, all of us jammed together.

No one knew what to say.

Iris spoke first. “What the hell happened there?”

Between Mom and Grandpa, looks of emotion passed that I couldn’t decipher.

Finally, Mom told the story in a bare-bones, dry-fact way. The man who was not my true father, who was a rapist, a killer, a destroyer of lives, who was another reason I would have to do an Enemy Way ceremony—this monster was Adikai Begay, which in Navajo means Son of Gambler. The name explained Grandpa’s mangled utterances, “odd” and “dick.”

My so-called father came from the Chuska Mountains to the east, a handsome fellow when he was young. A man who liked the ladies. Though people in our part of the rez didn’t know him, he was a bronc rider, and a hell of a good one. Mom met him one weekend at an Indian rodeo, went to another rodeo the next weekend to be with him, and the next day married him in Flagstaff—a rare non-Navajo wedding that had county paperwork attached to it. Grandpa never met him until she brought him home to share her bedroom.

“My declaration of independence,” Mom said, words awash in irony.

I could hardly believe she’d been such a rebel, or that she was able to form the words to tell this story.

Her new husband didn’t do a lick of work around the trading post. He disappeared most weekends to go rodeoing, and then he’d be gone for two or three weeks to play poker and get drunk.

Mom added, “And probably to whore around.”

Before long he disappeared for six or seven weeks, and finally for three months. After nine months and four days of marriage Mom agreed with Grandpa to put his belongings outside the door. Navajo divorce, and screw the paperwork. Grandpa would play papa to the unborn child.

A curator from the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe, a friend of the family, came up that summer to see the post’s art, go out and meet artists, and acquire quality items for the museum. Mom fell in love with him. He proposed. They would get married at our family home in Santa Fe.