“Not unless,” she added, “they have blond hair and blue eyes.”
Debbie knew she couldn’t ask Betty Craft if her baby had blond hair and blue eyes but she bet Ellen would have.
“What’s next?” Cappy asked when they were back in the van.
“This doctor is teaching these mentally retarded people about sex. Or, they’re getting married and he gives them this course about sex in marriage.”
He stared at her.
“What the hell are we going to cover it with?” he demanded.
“I don’t know.” She was reading the assignment sheet. “It says it’s an interview and to ask him if he knows any couple we can talk to.”
“Retards?”
She nodded.
“Oh, great,” he moaned. “Who thought this one up?”
She shrugged. It sounded okay back at the station.
“How the hell you gonna get releases on them?” Cappy demanded. “You can’t shoot these people. You have to have a release. Man, this is impossible.”
He shook his head.
“Harding is an idiot. He knows we have to have releases. He knows that.”
He could already see it would be another two hours before he hit the brown bag.
A few miles away the counselor waited. He was not a doctor nor had he given George Harding that misinformation. In front of him were the teaching materials he used in his sessions with the young men and women who believed they were in love and wanted to marry. They were black and white line drawings of naked couples in sexual positions. He doubted the cameraman would use them.
He bet the reporter would ask him about his feelings about these people having children. He grimaced with the thought. Funny, what they considered news.
*
“Take Indian School all the way,” Ellen told the handsome black man drving the van. “We should probably get there sometime tomorrow.”
Photographer Clifford Williams gave a short laugh.
“Why do they call it Indian School?” he asked.
“It’s where the Indians go to school. They used to bring them in off the reservations after we took over their land. Haven’t you ever seen those pictures with all the little Indian kids dressed up like they were white?”
He shook his head.
“We wanted them to look and act white. Now they come to the school because there aren’t a lot of schools on the reservations. Maybe it’s a way to get away.”
She wasn’t surprised Debbie wanted to cover Indians. She wanted that as well back in New Mexico. She wasn’t fascinated with the Indians in the city who sold their jewelry along the plaza in Old Town or in Santa Fe. She saw a sullen meanness about them that was changing, not for the better, with the look of a new merchant class, attractive young women with glasses and too fast smiles.
What fascinated her were the Indians she did not see, the ones who lived far off the freeway on the sand and hard earth that ran for hours between Grants and Window Rock.
“It’s a bitch trying to do a story on Indians,” she told Clifford.
“Why’s that?”
“You have to get special approval for anything you want to do. It’s a real pain.”
She came up against it a few times in Albuquerque when she tried to cover some story on a reservation.
“We’ll bring it up before the council,” would be the standard response.
“Okay.” She would keep her voice calm and low. “When will that be?”
“Next meeting is in a month. We’ll talk about it then.”
She once traveled to a council meeting, hoping to be allowed to film afterwards. They told her to wait outside. She napped in the car while her photographer sat in the meeting. They never got permission to do the story.
“Damn,” Clifford swore and hit the steering wheel. “I am hot.”
The van’s air conditioner had been broken for two weeks but George said he couldn’t spare it for a day or two of repair work. The heat from the massive engine filled the front of the van. Searing hot air blew on them from the open windows.
“You got any money?” Clifford asked.
She fumbled through her big purse stuffed with notebook, cigarettes, pens, wallet, mirror, and lipstick for the stand-up she would have to do.
“Nothing. Not a dime. I didn’t get a chance to get to a bank,” she said.
“I am going to die if I don’t get something cold to drink. I am so fucking hot,” he moaned.
She laughed. The sweat dripped down her neck.
He leaned back in the seat. “Man, I should be driving a goddamn Bekins van. My goddamn back is gone, shuckin’ and jivin’ this shit all over town. And we don’t even have a fucking quarter for a fucking soda.”
He sighed deeply and peeked over at her.
They both exploded in laughter. They still had a story to shoot west of town and an hour’s drive back to the station. The sweat dripped down her back. She shook her head and turned to her window.
The first time she saw an Indian was in a grocery story in Albuquerque. She watched as the Navajo woman passed in her long black skirt, her bright blue velvet blouse and her turquoise jewelry big and heavy on her chest.
“Interesting,” she commented to the cashier as she reached for her change.
The girl followed her eyes. “Yeah, well,” she said between quick chews on her gum. “I grew up with them. They ain’t so interesting when you know them.”
She watched them, the women with their long dark skirts and their wide silver belts and rivers of necklaces. She studied the tiny serious-eyed children. At stoplights, she stared into the windows of the pickup trucks at the young male drivers with their cowboy hats decorated with a single feather. She watched but neither she nor they ever let their eyes meet, except for the children. They would stare solemnly back at her.
“Man,” Clifford Williams sighed again as they continued their way west, “not one fucking quarter.”
10
Back at the station, they told Debbie about the release problem. First it was Tony Santella, the weeknight producer handpicked and trained by Jim Brown.
“You get releases on a story like
