Blue Rodeo Read online

  “The same one that told you to leave that paper in my mailbox, I’ll bet.”

  “Will you look over there? It’s the tribal president,” Owen said, ignoring her. “He’s going to make a speech. Must be important business for him to come down off the rez.”

  Like the abrupt absence of a heartbeat, the drumming ceased while the mayor gave a little talk about the town and its recent achievements, how the successful fund-raising for the fire engine now had them functioning at a state-of-the-art level with Albuquerque. Then he turned the microphone over to the Indian president, who welcomed the dancers in the Navajo language. His words were glottal clicks and foreign syllables to Margaret, but Owen knew enough to translate the gist of his speech.

  “He’s after changing their name from Navajo to Diné,” he explained, pronouncing the word din-AY. “Navajo was the name given them by the Spaniards, and it means ‘thief,’ or ‘clasped knife,’ depending on whose translation you buy. Diné means ‘the people,’ and he feels it’s a more accurate description, so he’s asking the tribe to vote to make it a permanent change.”

  Angry words were exchanged between the chief and some of the high school kids. Owen laughed.

  “What did he say?”

  “The boys don’t agree. He told them their minds were wrecked from satellite dish television and that they ought to spend time studying with the elders if they want to redeem themselves as members of the Diné nation.”

  The boys hung their heads and melted back into the crowd of their peers. Unlike Peter and his friends, these kids still seemed to hold respect for authority, or at the very least they bit their tongues in public.

  After the speeches the dancing resumed. Joe Yazzi danced by Margaret again, his muscled body glazed with sweat. He was sober faced, there with her and Owen in body, but his spirit was caught in the dance of some other world. Turkey feathers, painted to resemble sacred eagle feathers, trembled as he matched his feet to the beat of the drum. He moved into the crowd and took a tiny baby from a woman’s arms and hugged it to his scarred chest, then danced it along in the circle. Despite the noise and the jouncing, the baby didn’t cry. The drummers were chanting now. If it had started out as a celebration of a small white town, that layer had peeled off and blown away in what seemed to be the last of the summer season. The street and the land beneath it belonged to the Indians now, the Diné, who had been here growing food and praising the earth long before self-supporting libraries, mysterious cowboys, or itinerant mothers moved in.

  The darkness gathered them together. Owen’s hand released Margaret’s and he casually placed his arm around her shoulder, tucking her into the warmth of his body. They were so near the same size that from the back, they might have been brothers. But their differences went beyond gender. He was a lonely man with enough integrity to ask outright for her hand, risking her saying no. She ached to hold on to that baby Joe Yazzi seemed to celebrate with such ease, but she did so in a silence she could not bear to break. She longed to feel the music move through her the way Joe did, transporting her from a tall, displaced woman on a small-town sidewalk to wherever it was he went.

  When the dancers took a break, the children brought out their entries for the Blue Dog competition. They ran the animals through a modified version of the companion dog course; Margaret recognized some of the commands from the Westminster show on cable television. Back home, recuperating, bored to death, Peter would flip channels, settle on the dog show, and make fun of the obese handlers in their sequined gowns, running around with sculptured poodles and beribboned Maltese. Quick, which one’s the dog? he’d say too loudly, having not yet figured out how to modulate his voice. But behind his sarcasm there was genuine interest. He wouldn’t have let on, but he would have enjoyed this competition. Margaret missed his snide remarks, the easy way a teenager who couldn’t ever imagine himself old or obese spoke. She missed his rainbow hair colors, different from one week to the next, and the earrings glinting in his pierced lobes. There were times she felt close to missing picking up his damp towels from the bathroom floor.

  “I’m putting my money on old Sadie over there,” Owen said. “She does what she’s asked, all right, but I think she’s holding back. That old shepherd mutt’s got a surprise or two left in her. You watch.”

  Owen was right. Though she’d tied in points with two other dogs, Sadie stole the show when it came to the talent segment. With nearly invisible hand gestures that made Margaret think of ASL, the chubby adolescent girl handling her was able to make the dog perform several extra maneuvers; walking low to the ground as if stalking prey; guarding her mistress with quick darts and feints, as if she were herding an errant sheep; mournfully howling out loud when the girl turned her back and pretended to walk away. When the girl asked her to come, she did so, circling back to pick up a fallen bell tie one of the dancers had dropped and returning to offer it to the girl. In unison, the street full of spectators let out a collective “Awww.”

  It was official. Sadie accepted her award—a collar of bells and blue beads—and walked entirely off leash next to her handler, Olivia Maryboy, who earlier that evening had also been crowned Best Girl.

  “‘Best Girl’—what’s that mean?” Margaret asked Owen.

  “The tribe’s singled her out to the others as an example,” he said. “She had some trouble last year, and now she’s back on track, so she’s wanting to pay back those who helped her.”

  Olivia handed out “gifts” to the crowd: bags of candy, lengths of fabric, skeins of wool, loaves of homemade bread. People cleared space in the street for the girl and her family to pass, and the crowd was silent except for the low drumming of the men.

  “Some say the legend’s as simple as this,” Owen said into her ear as they watched. “Long time ago, a man traveling horseback through Four Corners neglected to take enough water along. He got delirious in the desert, fell off his horse. The rank old horse took off on him. Being just a man, he’d lost his animal instincts and was too weak to follow. To further this insult and prove luck just wasn’t with him, he lived through three long days and nights craving water. On the third night, under a three-quarter moon, this blue dog appeared and said, ‘Mister, I’m telling you true, plenty of clean water’s right over that next ridge. Follow me, and I’ll sure enough take you to it. But I want something in return.’ The thirsty traveler was more than ready for any kind of bargain, so he followed the dog, crawling on his hands and knees like a baby. True to his word, the hound led him to the Animas River, clean enough for drinking, and the man kept his promise.”

  “Which was?”

  “Some say to name this town after the dog. But I don’t know. It’s one of those things that changes depending on who you ask. Twenty years back, there was talk of changing the town’s name to Fuller, after an oilman who settled here and built up a bunch of the Victorian houses. The Blue Dog diehards wouldn’t hear of it, started up the parade, and now kids’ll spend all year training a dog for the competition. Keeps them out of trouble, anyway.”

  Or from cutting school and swimming in polluted pools, Margaret thought, but said nothing about Peter, or the events leading up to his meningitis. On their way out, she stopped and bought five chances on a Navajo Storm Pattern rug to be auctioned off the closing night of the festival.

  “Five dollars for paper chances. You must fancy weavings,” Owen said.

  “They’ve had a hold on me for twenty years. Sometimes, in the right light, they remind me of the stained-glass windows I used to stare at in church, rather than get scared by the priest’s sermon, back when I was a child. They give me that same reverent feeling but none of the fire and brimstone. I could look at them all night.”

  He adjusted his hat. “Well, you came to the right town then. See that woman in the purple dress? That’d be Verbena Youngcloud, one of the best weavers in the state.”

  “You know her?”

  He smiled, that same enigmatic cowboy grin, the one that said little out loud but much i
n its silence. “It’s a small town. I can introduce you.”

  “She looks busy with her family.”

  “True enough, there’s no shortage of children or grandkids when it comes to that household. We’ll catch up to her another time.”

  Margaret realized they’d bought their bread at the weaver’s booth. Twenty years ago, what she would have given up to meet this woman, ask her questions about art, about vision. But now those concerns seemed foolish, the shallow musings of an immature girl who had yet to learn what constituted art. The weaver was surrounded by children, many of them still in costume from dancing. A few hugged and kissed her as they showed off ribbons and helped to pack up the makeshift kitchen.

  It was the end of the evening, and people were heading home. Loosening herself from Owen’s grip, Margaret took back her hand.

  “Wait here. I want to give you something,” she said as he opened the front door of the Starr farmhouse for her. She ran up the stairs to the studio bedroom and picked up the watercolor of Hopeful. She hadn’t stretched the paper ahead of time, so it didn’t lie flat. It wasn’t really finished, but it was more of a dog than the dirt drawing had been. Echo at her heels, she returned to Owen, who stood just inside the doorway, hat in hand. She pressed the paper into his hand.

  “It’s nothing great, just my way of saying thanks for giving me that push, buying me the paper. And for tonight.”

  He chuckled at the painting. “I’m going use my employee discount to invest in a frame for this one. Thank you, neighbor.”

  “You and your dog are both welcome. Good night.”

  That night, after he’d gone, she lay awake upstairs in the dark, stroking the dog, her restless hands making their way through the manual alphabet just to keep in practice. The therapist had told her to practice by spelling out a word, visualizing what she spelled as she made the letters—L, lamb. She tried to imagine the sheep Owen tended and their forthcoming babies. M, money—had she enough to live on? Yes, if she was careful. N, Navajo—and in her mind’s eye she pictured the Best Girl and her award-winning dog. O, Owen Garrett—neighbor and stranger. P—paintbrush. Her hands stopped. That hadn’t been her initial impulse—Peter’s name had. She saw his profile the day he finally began to consider what the doctors were trying gently to break to him, that he would never hear again.

  As an adult you could unequivocally state that there was a limit to what the human heart could take. You could even imagine the cut-off point where painful truths no longer felt sharp. But as a parent, watching her son sit in the middle of his hospital bed while a team of doctors stood over him, their arms crossed, faces drawn into impassive, deliberate lines, she knew all that was a crock. When it came to children, their capacity to withstand pain was never ending. When Peter said, “I can so still hear,” his fists clutching the white sheets into wrinkled flowers, she knew that at the same time, he was edging painfully toward that truth that said, Okay, you guys win. I’m deaf.

  But what came to her now as she lay in her bed was another shock, strangely related. For years, after she had shunted aside brief, awkward glimpses, Peter’s going deaf had provided her with an understanding of the reason she abandoned art when she married Raymond. It wasn’t about Ray’s insistence that she stay home and devote herself to having his babies, a decision she’d ultimately embraced as sensible and desirable. When Peter went away she could no longer couch her excuses under the heading of motherhood. Art took time away from other things, certainly, but creativity was a state of mind you fertilized and tended, not something you made room for. Even throughout those years when she wasn’t doing it, she remembered how art worked. The way color and texture carefully built their layers to create a story, the way pure emotion could leap out from the canvas and lodge in your throat. Peter had shown her that early on. He’d ask to have one of her cartoon drawings, and she would tear it off the scratch pad and give it to him. He’d carry those drawings around with him all day, and later she would find them, slightly the worse for wear but there on the same shelves as his favorite toys.

  She knew with enough instruction, over time, anyone with a shred of talent could learn to approximate craft. But the really frightening part was that so much of the time you spent facing down the colossal disappointment of your work remaining ordinary, derivative, bound to the canvas, unable to grow the necessary inches required to take the human spirit for a ride. Art thumbed its nose at you—Go on, peel off another layer of skin. Try harder. Simply put, she had turned away from art because good art exacted too heavy a price for her, one she was not willing to pay.

  Even if you did everything right—stayed married, kept painting, watched your child make the honor roll—he still might go deaf. Bad luck was as random as her miscarriages had been. When Peter went deaf, she realized that nothing in her hands was going to make it better. Not art, no amount of perfect parenting—nothing would make her child hear again. Her understanding had begun in that hospital room, with coastal sunlight streaming in through the window backlighting her beautiful damaged son and ended here in a dark bedroom of a rented house. Sun and angle and eye had given Peter’s profile a chiseled perfection the artist in any mother would cherish, and any practicing artist would sacrifice a finger to capture. But to harness the real thing, to make art, you had to peel your heart raw and constantly leave it open.

  Profound adventitious deafness. The organ of Corti is missing in both basal turns. Striae vascularis atrophy…tectorial membranes ensheathed in syncytium…. Margaret hadn’t wanted to believe the permanence of those words anymore than Peter. To believe meant there was no footing beneath either of them, that they were stepping off the same steep cliff. Was it arrogance to dip her paintbrushes in the summer sunshine while her son struggled to reorder his world, a world she could never fully enter? All she knew was, right at this moment, she had nowhere else to go.

  Owen showed up two nights later. He couldn’t possibly understand how many hours Margaret had spent at this kitchen table, the Perigee Visual Dictionary in front of her, trying to get the words right.

  “Like a fool, I let Joe talk me into team-roping. Come on along and watch us. We’ll be wearing our numbers upside-down, riding for the practice, not money, but who knows, I might fall off Red, dent my hat good, and give the crowd a laugh.”

  She’d kept him standing on the front steps, the door open only a few inches. Outside the door existed an ordinary world a divorced woman could step into by choice. Inside she had a new language to learn, if she ever wanted to speak to her son. From divorced parents to broken ears, his world was a jumble. She wouldn’t be fit company for the walls in the house, let alone this good man who deserved more than her dark mood to spoil his evening. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I hope you understand.” And gently she closed the door in his face.

  In late September she watched Owen Garrett, on his own initiative, spend the better part of his Friday afternoon well into evening splitting firewood outside the barn. When he was done, he drove a truck bed full over and dumped it outside her front door. Margaret helped to stack it, wiped her brow, paid him in cash, then took him a tall glass of iced tea, and mumbled, “Thank you,” for his hard work. When she turned to go he called out.

  “Margaret. All this sweat and sawdust deserves some kind of reward. Go for a swim with me.”

  “The downtown pool closed at five.”

  He pointed across the pasture. “The river’s not too deep, and there’s not much of a crowd after nine o’clock.”

  “It’ll be too cold.”

  “Just a quick dip. We can wrap in blankets after and burn up a bunch of this new firewood.”

  “I haven’t unpacked all the way. I don’t know where my swimsuit is.”

  “Damn, Margaret, dunk your feet or swim in your underwear, I don’t care. It’s dark out, and I promise not to look.”

  Mild as it was, she took note. It was the first and only time she’d heard Owen Garrett use an expletive. It wasn’t as if he was asking h
er to skinny-dip. Get wet, get out, cool down in the process. The shock of cold water felt good to her feet and legs. As her underpants and bra took on water, she was aware at how they shone in the moonlight, the white fabric bright enough to show off her slight tummy, the V of her pubic hair. She sat down in the shallows, folding her legs up so that the water hit her just above the breasts. Owen followed.

  “Cold?”

  “Terminally.”

  He laughed. “Keep moving and you’ll warm up.” He looked up at the night sky. “You know, this is probably the last night we can do this, weatherwise. It’s fall, all right, shortest season of the year.”

  She rubbed her arms as they moved through the dark water, the moonlight occasionally illuminating their limbs when the cloud cover shifted. There weren’t that many stars; other nights she’d seen them in greater numbers and been dazzled by the white points piercing the sky. The cold water felt warmer now, her body buoyant, as if the river were a hammock. Tree branches scraped at each other like spindly arms. Against the swift current, she fluttered her fingers and found Owen’s hand, then interlaced her fingers with his. “My turn to take a hand,” she said, and felt him move closer, until she could sense his warm body next to hers, every solid inch of it.

  “Haven’t seen you out and about lately. What have you been up to these last couple of weeks?”

  She sighed. “There’ve been a lot of changes.”

  “Haven’t got your legs yet. Don’t worry, you’ll grow them. How goes the drawing?”

  “I’m getting pretty good at mediocre.”

  “That’s a far step beyond terrible.” He let go of her hand and swam out a few strokes to deeper water, where a tree limb hung low and thick enough for him to grab onto. He held on there. “You know, Margaret, one of these days I’m going to try to kiss you.”

  “Sooner or later I figured we’d come to that.”

  “Is it such a terrible prospect?”