“There’s a Tewa story about a mother sneaking her twins out of the pueblo and leaving them with Spider Grandmother to raise.”
“Yeah? See, if there was a story like that, people knew it was wrong to let them die.”
“Knew it was hard. Not wrong, necessarily. When Leander and I were bad, our mother said she was like poor old Spider Grandmother, got stuck with the War Twins.”
“Were you bad a lot?”
“Just twice as bad as a regular boy.” He laughed. “People called us ‘Twice as Bad.’ Our sisters talked about us like we were just one boy. They’d say ‘he went out riding,’ or whatever. I think we thought we were one person. One boy in two skins.”
“Hallie and I feel that way sometimes.”
I could see clear crescents of water collecting on Loyd’s lower eyelids. “You don’t have to talk about this,” I said.
“I don’t ever talk about him. Sometimes I’ll go a day or two without even thinking about him, and then I get scared I might forget he ever was.”
I laid a hand on his gearshift arm. “You want me to drive?”
He stopped and turned off the engine. We sat watching snowflakes hit the windshield and turn into identical dots of water. Then he got out. I pulled on my mittens and followed him.
Outside the cab it was impossibly quiet. We’d climbed a little now, and were in forest. Snowflakes hissed against pine needles. Jack sat in the truckbed watching Loyd carefully, exhaling voiceless clouds of steam.
“I ever tell you how I came to keep Jack?” Loyd asked.
I thought about it. “No. You told me how you took in his mother and she had pups. You didn’t say how you picked Jack.”
“He picked us.” Loyd was leaning against the truck with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked cold. “Dad meant to drown the whole litter. He put them in an empty cement bag and tied the top real good and drove down to the river and pitched them in. He didn’t know what he was doing; he was drunk as seven thousand dollars, I imagine. On the way back he picked me up from work and I said, ‘Dad, here’s one of the pups in the back of the truck.’ He was hiding down in a box of pipe T-joints. Dad’s old truck was a junkyard on wheels; you could find anything in the world back there. So I says to Dad, ‘Where’s the rest of them?’” Loyd’s voice caught, and he waited a second, wiping his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m getting all broke up for. God knows what I would have done with seven mongrel coyote pups.”
God knows what I’d have done with a baby at sixteen, I thought. It’s not the practical side of things that breaks us up. I leaned on the truck beside him and took his left hand between my mittened palms. It felt like a cold bottle. “So what happened? Why did you lose Leander?”
“Why?” He looked up at the sky. “Because we left the Pueblo. We were like the War Twins, I guess. A lot for our mother to handle. Our sisters were all older and having their own babies by that time. And people thought boys should go out in the world some. Be with our dad. He’d been down at Whiteriver more or less as long as we could remember. If we’d stayed up there in Santa Rosalia it would have worked out, but we came down here and Leander just ran into trouble. We didn’t have anybody looking after us. Dad couldn’t look after himself.”
“Doesn’t sound like it,” I said.
“Everybody always talked like Leander died of drinking, but he wasn’t but fifteen. Not old enough to sit down and order a beer. Everybody forgets that, that he was just a kid. We drank some, but I don’t think he was drinking the night he died. There was a fight in a bar.”
“What did he die of, then?”
“Puncture wounds. Internal hemorrhage.”
I drove through the pine forest, thinking off and on of Hallie, mindful of the slick road. Loyd was quiet, but took the wheel again when we descended into the Navajo reservation. He pointed out areas that were overgrazed. “It seems as big as the whole world, but it’s still a reservation,” he said. “There’s fences, and a sheep can’t cross them.”
As dusk took us the landscape changed to an eerie, flat desert overseen by godheads of red sandstone. We were out of the snow now. The hills were striped with pinks and reds that deepened as we drove north and the sun drove west. It was dark when we left the highway and made our way down a bumpy road into the mouth of Canyon de Chelly. We passed several signs proclaiming the canyon bottom to be Navajo tribal land, where only authorized persons were admitted. The third sign, sternly luminous in the headlights, said, “Third and Final Warning.”
“Are we allowed in here?” I asked.
“Stick with me. I can get you into all the best places.”
Down in the canyon we bumped over rough road for an hour, following the course of a shallow river. There was no moon that I could see, and I lost any sense of direction I might have had while we still had sun. I was exhausted but also for the first time in weeks I felt sleepiness, that rare, delicious liqueur, soaking into my body like blotter paper. I almost fell asleep sitting up. My head bobbed as we crossed and recrossed the frozen river and climbed its uneven banks. Finally we stopped, and slept in the truckbed, cuddled like twin mummies inside a thick wrapping of blankets. We turned our bodies carefully and held each other to keep warm. Outside the blankets, our lips and noses were like chipped flint striking sparks in the frozen air.
“No fair, you’ve got Jack on your side,” I murmured.
“Jack, other side, boy,” Loyd commanded. Jack stood up and walked over the
