As she spoke, his eyes moved from her face to the other faces in the kitchen. She saw the movement, the checking out of the audience, the possibilities. Slowly, reluctantly, the eyes moved back to her.
“Yeah,” he said, “but what is it you really do?”
She left.
Back in her apartment, over a glass of scotch neat, she studied the poster on the wall in front of her. It was the drawing of a tough-looking woman wearing a black top hat, a cigarette hanging out of one side of her mouth. Orbs of neon-colored lights fanned out behind her. She knew she bought it because it reminded her of herself when she was younger. The colored lights, she thought, could be the lights of a circus or a stage.
12
By August, Debbie had her Indian story. A phone call from a newsroom friend in Albuquerque gave Ellen the lead and she passed it on.
“Radioactive leak or something up on the Navajo reservation. The thing is nobody is really covering it here. It was in New Mexico, close to the Arizona border. Might be a good story if they let you do it.”
“Don’t you want it?”
“Hell no. I’ve got enough to do.”
Debbie started making the calls.
“The thing is,” she told Ellen, “this dam broke up by this milling operation, something they do with uranium, and all this contaminated water ran into this river. But, this is what’s so interesting, the river runs into our state.” Her face was flushed with excitement.
“That’s your hook,” Ellen told her. “Give it to George.”
“I can’t,” George told her. “Everybody is on vacation. Maybe in September.” He tried to turn away.
“September? It won’t be a story then. Nobody has it yet, George. Nobody. Please. I’ll set it up so we can get it in three days. Please. I’ll do some interviews here. I’ll do it on the weekend. Please, George.”
“Three days?”
“Three days, maybe four.”
“I don’t have anybody to send with you,” he kept trying. He couldn’t afford to lose a reporter and a photographer and a van for even one day.
“Clifford said he’d go. He said he’d do it on his days off.”
She wasn’t going to back down on this one. This was a good story and nobody in the state had it or seemed to care about it.
“Well,” the government man in Washington told her, “it would be different if somebody lived out there.”
“Do you believe that?” she shouted to the newsroom. “He said it would be different if somebody lived out there. I told him they did, Navajos.”
“Not the same,” someone called back.
It took her three days of phone calls made in the few minutes she had between stories to find out who was monitoring the spill, who was testing the river water, and where the tests were sent. She spoke with people across the country, in Dallas, San Francisco, Santa Fe. Even if they did know something about the spill into the little river, they seemed confused by her questions.
“We’ve told them not to use the water from the river for drinking or washing.”
“What about their sheep, their livestock?” Ellen asked Debbie.
“What about their livestock?” Debbie asked the people.
“They shouldn’t drink from the river either,” they told her.
“God,” said Ellen, “those bastards.”
*
“Man, I am glad to be getting out of town,” Clifford told Debbie as they drove the long hours it took to get to the reservation.
“We are really going to have to move fast,” Debbie told him. “We only have three days.”
Ellen had laughed at the timetable.
“You’ll be lucky if any of them show up for interviews. I mean, Indian time is different. It’s a whole different animal.”
Debbie passed on the warning to Clifford.
He nodded. Outside of movies, the only thing he knew about Indians was that somebody used to make them go to school in the city. He did see people he thought were Indians walking downtown, tall, thin, hawk-faced men. The women he saw were short and fat with long black hair and tight dark pants. Could be Mexicans.
“Ellen says they’re good people,” he told Debbie.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “The Navajos were real fighters, warriors, but now they are more farmers than anything else, or they have cattle, sheep, you know.”
“Still live in tents or what?” He was only half-joking.
“Never did. That was the Plains Indians. All that war bonnet stuff and teepees, that was on the prairie. Ellen was telling me that.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know that.” He sighed with pleasure.
This is what he liked about television, being able to get out, to see the land, to meet new people. Best of all, he liked leaving George and his whiny ass behind. And, he liked Debbie. She was easy to be around.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. They were sure to get some looks when they checked into the motel up in Gallup. This was cracker country, the whole state. He knew that. He wondered if Debbie did.
At the motel, the only thing they cared about was that Debbie and Clifford were from a television station.
“You need some help?” the desk clerk asked him.
“Nope.”
The next morning the sky was crystal blue, the land dry and brown.
“Man, it’s empty,” Clifford said as he drove the van down miles of dirt road.
“Yes, but isn’t it beautiful,” said Debbie.
“We’ll have somebody out there to meet you,” the tribal officials told her. They were waiting, a young woman and a boy.
They followed the woman, the small boy tagging behind Clifford.
“I will help you,” he said softly. “I will carry that.” He pointed to the recorder.
“Watch the dial,” Clifford told him. “Tell me if it doesn’t move or if that needle goes into the red. Okay?”
“Yes,” promised the boy solemnly, “I will.”
The woman led them down along the little river.
“We have to haul in our water from Gallup,” she told Debbie. “For our water and
