“It is bad,” a shepherding Navajo told them. “It is bad, very bad,” he sang.
“We sometimes wonder, you know, if anyone cares,” the young woman said.
“They will after we put this story on the news,” Debbie promised.
“Hmm.” The woman nodded. She left the reservation years before for Albuquerque and the university, but not for lack of love of her land. The Chairman’s office asked her to make the trip back to work with the television people. She understood both white man’s time and white women.
“You know I think I might be frightened living here,” Debbie said as they sat together by the side of the slow-moving stream.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. All the radiation. All that. I might be afraid.” She blushed with the words.
“It’s really something,” Clifford said and shook his head. He meant the land and the few people they had seen, but mostly he meant the great stretch of land and the cloudless sky with the red rocks jutting out suddenly from the brown earth and cutting jagged holes in the horizon. He’d never seen anything like it.
That night they filmed the lights of Gallup from the Santa Fe rail yard. They worked as a team, Clifford shooting while Debbie handled the tapes and monitored the audio levels on the recorder.
“Tape,” Clifford would order.
“No sound. You’re not getting any sound,” she would caution.
Both nodded to their work.
In the morning they went to tribal headquarters. Now the softness of the people and the land was gone. Now it was business.
“You tell me if anyone cares,” the man from the Chairman’s office demanded. “You tell me where the authorities are. You tell me if we are going to die from cancer. Do you know? Does anyone know?”
They had what they needed, the anger at the federal government and the company that mined the uranium, the fury at the questions no one was answering. Millions of gallons of uranium-contaminated water had flowed into a river that was the lifeblood of their land and their animals and no one seemed to care.
One young Navajo flung at her, “We are last on the white man’s totem pole. Always have been. Always will be.”
They talked about the story during the six-hour trip back to the station. Three parts, probably, done and on the air in a few days. She drove while Clifford lay in the back surrounded by his equipment.
He was exhausted, every muscle ached, and once back at the station they had at least another hour unloading and spot-checking every tape for bad audio and poor video. Better to know now.
“I want to edit this baby,” he told her. “I don’t want nobody else touching this.”
“I don’t want anybody touching it either. It’s yours and I don’t want to work with anybody else putting it together,” she assured him.
He felt some relief but not enough. There was no guarantee a photographer would get to edit his own work. He mentally traced his shots, the land, the red rocks. He could see them, see them the way he shot them.
“Start with the river,” he said. “That’s where you should start.”
“How? How would you do that?”
“Open with a tight shot on the river, the one where I pull back to a wide shot. That’s where you start talking about the river and the spill, during that pull back.”
“Okay, okay, that’s good,” she agreed.
“Sure was a great kid,” he said of the boy who had helped him. “Hauled that recorder all over the place. Wouldn’t let it go.”
He laughed at the memory.
“The thing weighed more than he did. I finally had to tell him it was more important to carry the tapes.”
She laughed and Clifford closed his eyes.
*
She took the tapes to Brown on Monday morning.
“Good work, really good,” he pronounced from his seat in front of the monitor. “You’ve got yourself an award winner here.”
She smiled. It was as good as she thought.
“Clifford did a great job,” she said.
Brown nodded. On the screen, the sheep moved along the river.
“He really wants to edit this.”
Brown said nothing, his eyes on the screen.
“And we can get it together in a couple of days.”
He fiddled with the sound, bringing up the tinkling of the bells around the necks of the sheep.
“Okay?”
He reached out and punched the stop button on the tape deck.
“No.” His lips pushed out the word. “No, I don’t think so.” He shook his head and turned to face her.
“I don’t think that’s who you want on this one,” he said and stood up. He walked back to his desk.
“Yes, yes, I do,” she said quickly. “I do.”
“Not this one,” Brown said. “No, no.” He shook his head again as he sat in his chair.
“But why not?”
“He isn’t good enough or fast enough.”
“He is good enough.”
“No, he’s not, Debbie,” Brown’s voice was firm. “He’s shot some fine things for you but, ah, I want Tim to work on this one. He’s the pro,” he said of the chief editor, Tim Johnson. “You’ll see.”
“You don’t understand. This means a lot to him. It’s his story too. Please,” she begged. “He knows where all the shots are. He knows what he wants to do.”
“Tim will do a great job.” Brown smiled. “You’ll see. You’ll get an award on this one.”
*
“But why?” Clifford demanded.
“He said he wanted Tim to do it.”
“That’s crazy. This is mine. I know what I shot.”
“I know, Clifford. I told him that. Maybe if you talk to him?”
“Fuck that shit.”
His body stiff with anger, he marched away from her and into the photographers’ room where he paced and swore. The other photographers stayed away from the room. Later they could give him a pat on the back and tell him about the stories that were taken from them and edited by some idiot who knew nothing. Finally, Tim Johnson himself would search him out and tell him he was sorry and he would do the best job he could.
Even the reporters would shake their heads and tell
