Ford felt a nudge in his ribs from the other direction. Melissa Corcoran was holding out a bottle, offering to refill his glass. She looked flushed.
“Steak’s perfect,” she said. “Nice work, Kate.”
“Thanks.”
“Rare—just the way I like it. But hey,” she said, gesturing at Ford’s plate. “You haven’t touched yours!”
Ford took a bite, but he had lost his appetite.
“I bet Kate’s been telling you all about string theory. It’s pretty cool stuff—even if it’s sheer speculation.”
“Not at all like dark energy,” said Kate, an edge to her voice.
Ford immediately sensed a history between these two women.
“Dark energy,” said Corcoran coolly, “was discovered experimentally. By
Volkonsky leaned over the table, and Ford caught a whiff of stale cigarette smoke. “Dark energy, strings, phffft! Who cares? I want to know what anthropologist does.”
Ford was relieved by the distraction. “We go and live with a remote tribe and ask a lot of stupid questions.”
“Ha-ha!” Volkonsky said. “Maybe you heard, the redskins are coming to Red Mesa. I hope it isn’t scalping party!” He gave an Indian whoop and looked around for approval.
“That’s not funny,” said Corcoran acidly.
“Lighten yourself up, Melissa,” Volkonsky shot back, tilting up his chin, the tuft of hair on it quivering with sudden anger. “Don’t PC me.”
Corcoran turned to Ford. “He can’t help it. His doctorate was in horse’s-assery.”
Volkonsky said, “I think Melissa has drink the wine a little too well this evening. As usual.”
“Ja, of courrrse,” she drawled, in a devastating imitation of Volkonsky’s accent. “Better I shoot vodkas like you, late in ze night!” She raised her glass, “Za vas!” and downed the heel of wine.
“Now, if I may interrupt for a moment,” Innes began, his voice rotund with professionalism. “While it’s good to get feelings into the open, I would suggest—”
Hazelius waved him silent and looked steadily at Volkonsky and Corcoran, back and forth, the pressure of his gaze inducing silence. Volkonsky sat back, the corner of his mouth twitching. Corcoran crossed her arms.
Hazelius allowed the awkwardness to build before he said, “We’re all a little tired and discouraged.” His voice was low and mild. In the silence, the fire crackled. “Right, Peter?”
Volkonsky said nothing.
“Melissa?”
Her face was red. She nodded curtly.
“Just let it go . . . . Easy does it . . . . Forgiveness and mildness . . . For the sake of our work.”
His voice was calm, soothing, with a rhythmical, hypnotic quality—like a trainer calming a spooked horse. Unlike Innes’s, it held no trace of condescension.
“That’s right,” said Innes, jumping in, his voice shattering the extraordinary calm Hazelius had created. “Absolutely. This has been a healthy exchange. We can air some of these same issues at the next group meeting. As I said, it’s good to get these issues out in the open.”
Volkonsky stood up so abruptly, he knocked his chair over. He balled up his napkin and chucked it on the table. “Screw group meeting. I have work to do.”
The door slammed as he departed.
No one spoke. The only sound was the rustle of paper as Edelstein, having finished his dinner, turned another page of
8
PASTOR RUSS EDDY EXITED THE TRAILER, threw a towel over his skinny shoulders, and paused in the yard. Monday had dawned brilliantly clear at the mission. The rising sun threw a golden light across the sandy valley, gilding the branches of the dead cottonwood next to the little house trailer. Behind, Red Mesa rose up gigantically on the horizon, a pillar of fire in the early morning sun.
He looked up to the sky, placed his palms together, bowed, and said, his voice clear and strong, “Thank You, Lord, for this day.”
After a moment of silence, he shuffled over to the Red Jacket pump in his front yard and tossed the towel over an old hitching post. He gave the handle a dozen energetic creaks. A stream of cold water gushed out into a galvanized washtub below. Russ dashed a handful on his face, slipped a cake of soap into the water, sudsed up, shaved, and brushed his teeth. He washed his face and arms, dashed more water over his face and concave chest, plucked the towel off the post, and gave himself a vigorous drying off. Then he inspected himself in the mirror hung on a rusty nail in the fence post. His face was small, thin tufts of hair on his head sticking out. He hated his body; he looked like a wobbly little bird. Long ago, the doctor had told his mother it was a “failure to thrive.” The implication that his physical weakness was somehow his fault, a personal failure, still stung.
He combed the hair carefully over the thinning spots, grimaced, inspected the crooked teeth he could never afford to get fixed. Somehow, he was reminded of his son, Luke—he’d be eleven now—and the feeling of anguish deepened. He hadn’t seen Luke in six years, all the while being stuck with child support he had no hope of paying. A sudden vision of the boy flashed through his mind—the way he ran all skinny through a sprinkler one hot summer day . . . . The memory was like a knife slitting his throat—the way he had seen a Navajo woman slit the throat of a lamb, which struggled and bleated, still living but already dead.
He trembled, thinking of the injustices of his life, his money problems, his wife’s unfaithfulness, the divorce. He had been victimized again and again, through no fault of his own. He had come to the Rez with nothing but his faith and two cartons of books. God was testing his faith with a hardscrabble existence and a constant shortage of money. Eddy hated owing money all over, especially to Indians. But the Lord must know what He was doing, and Eddy was slowly building his congregation, even if they seemed more interested in the free clothing he gave away than in the sermon. None of them ever laid more than a few dollars in the collection basket—some weeks it held only twenty dollars. And a lot of them went on to Mass at the Catholic Mission to load up on free eyeglasses and medicine, or the LDS Church in Rough Rock, for the food bank. That was the trouble with the Navajos: they couldn’t tell the voice of Mammon from the voice of God.
He paused for a moment to look around for Lorenzo, but his Navajo helper had not yet made his appearance. At the thought of Lorenzo, he flushed. The collection-plate money had disappeared for the third time, and now he had no doubt it was Lorenzo. It was only fifty-odd dollars, but it was fifty dollars his mission desperately needed— and, worse, it was stealing from the Lord. Lorenzo’s soul was in danger for a lousy fifty bucks.
Eddy was fed up. Last week he had decided to fire Lorenzo, but for that he needed proof. And he would soon have it. Yesterday, between the collection and the end of the service, he had marked the bills in the collection plate with a yellow highlighter. He’d asked the trader in Blue Gap to keep an eye out for anyone spending them.
Pulling on his T-shirt, he stretched his skinny arms and glanced over his humble mission with a mixture of affection and disgust. The trailer he lived in was falling apart. Near it stood the ProPanel hay barn he had bought from a rancher in Shiprock, disassembled, transported, and reerected to be his church. A backbreaking labor. Plastic chairs in different sizes, shapes, and colors substituted for pews. The “church” was open along three of the four sides, and during his sermon yesterday the wind kicked up and blew sand through the congregation. The only thing he owned of any value was back in the trailer, an iMac Intel Core Duo with a twenty-inch screen, sent to him by a Christian tourist passing through Navajoland who had been impressed by his mission. The computer was a godsend, his lifeline to the world beyond the Rez. He spent many hours a day on it, visiting Christian newsgroups and chat rooms, sending and receiving e-mail, and organizing donations of clothing.
Eddy walked into the church and began straightening out the chairs, putting them back in neat rows, and sweeping the sand off the seats with a hand brush. As he worked, he thought about Lorenzo and he became angrier, banging the chairs around and shoving them roughly into place. This was something Lorenzo was supposed to do.
When he finished adjusting the chairs, he carried a push broom to the wooden preaching platform and started
