Crossroads

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?”

There wasn’t an animal to be seen, not even a raven. From the direction of the mine came a muffled boom.

“The mine sucks water,” Clyde said. “Peabody could shut it down tomorrow, the water wouldn’t come back for twenty years. And you think Keith didn’t know that? He read the leases, and the leases came with water rights. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

Russ didn’t want to believe it—there had to be another side of the story. And yet what did he really know about Keith Durochie? He remembered being smitten with him, remembered the delight of feeling accepted by him, the pride he’d taken in being friends with a full-blooded Navajo. What he couldn’t remember, now that he thought about it, under the dust plume from the strip mine, was any particular warmth from Keith’s side—any real curiosity or sentiment.

“That’s your friend,” Clyde said bitterly. “That’s your tribal council.”

“I feel for you,” Russ said.

“Oh yeah? You know the Sierra Club? They’re the crazy bilagáana that stopped the government from flooding the Grand Canyon. We went to them to try to stop the mine. We said we didn’t want a power plant on sacred land, and they were exactly like you. They said, ‘We feel for you.’ And they didn’t do shit for us. They only care about saving white places.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Frances said suddenly.

Clyde seemed startled that she had a voice.

“If we’re the bad guys,” she said, “if everything we do is automatically bad, if that’s the way you feel about us, why should we try to do anything?”

“Just stay the fuck away,” Clyde said. “That’s what you can do.”

“So you can go on hating us,” she said. “So you can go on thinking you’re superior to white people. If somebody like Russ comes along, somebody who actually cares, somebody who takes the time to hear you, somebody who’s good, it messes up your whole story.”

“Who’s Russ?”

“I’m Russ,” Russ said.

“I don’t hate your guy,” Clyde said to Frances. “At least he came up here—I respect that.”

“But we’re still supposed to get the fuck out,” she said. “Is that the idea?”

Talking to a woman appeared to discomfit Clyde. He kicked some gravel over the edge of the cliff. “I don’t care what you do. You can stay the week.”

“No,” Russ said. “That’s not enough. I want you to come down and talk to our group. You can do it tonight—bring your friends.”

“You’re telling me what to do?”

“It won’t change anything. You’ll still have this nightmare on your mesa—nothing’s going to change that. It makes me sick to see what’s happened. But if you’re angry enough to steal from us, we have a right to hear why you’re angry. I promise you the kids will listen to you.”

“Have their little Navajo experience.”

“Yes. I won’t deny it. But you’ll experience who we are, too.”

Clyde laughed. “The thing about your promises? There’s always something you didn’t tell us.”

“That’s bullshit,” Russ said. “That’s self-pitying bullshit. If you keep getting cheated, you need to be smarter. If you end up feeling like we’ve cheated you, you can go ahead and say so—we can take it. The question to me is whether you have the guts for an honest dialogue. From what I’ve seen, the only thing you’re any good at is saying ‘Fuck you’ and walking away. I’d hate to find out you’re nothing but a bully and a thief.”

Did words give expression to emotion, or did they actively create it? The act of speaking had uncovered a love in Russ’s heart, a love related to Clem, and he could tell, from the uncertainty in Clyde’s sneer, that his words had had an effect. But the fact of the effect was problematic. The very act of caring was a kind of privilege, another weapon in the white arsenal. There was no escaping the imbalance of power.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to us.”

“You think I’m afraid of you?”

“No. I think you’re angry and you have good reason to be. You’re under no obligation to spare us the discomfort of your anger.”