Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
“We’re going to Willy B’s to have a drink,” Frank told the sheriff. “These visitors have had enough for one day.”
“Go on,” the sheriff said. “Get them out of here.”
* * *
Carla Ozburt and DeLesseps Johnston and their new best friend, Frank Donald, were settled down in a booth at Willy B’s, a
sports bar on the main street that was the meeting place for everyone who was anyone in Weggins. Willy B’s had been the local
drugstore when Frank’s father was a boy, then a restaurant, and, finally, when a man who had been in the Korean War and played
football for his regiment there came home to stay, had turned into a bar with three large television sets, “no smoking” signs
everywhere, and a bartender who kept the place as clean as a barracks and allowed no bad behavior. There were always flowers
on the tables because the bartender’s girlfriend owned and ran the local flower shop.
“What time is it?” Carla asked. “I feel like I don’t know where I am anymore.”
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon,” DeLesseps said. “We ought to call the service station again and see what’s happened
with the Lincoln.”
He took Carla’s cell phone and called and the owner said the tow truck had just pulled in. The tow truck driver got on the
phone and assured DeLesseps that the Lincoln would be at the dealership in Bishop before it closed at six.
“We’re moving across the desert leaving things behind like the early settlers did,” DeLesseps said. “I’m starting to feel
light.”
“There’s no point in hoping you’re going to get that stuff back from the motel,” Frank put in. “If I was you I’d just get
a night’s sleep and then drive that Intrepid on wherever you are going. You said you’d called the insurance people and it
all was covered, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Carla sipped her Diet Coke. She had stopped drinking twenty-six years ago when she was pregnant with Mitzi and had
never started again. She didn’t go to bars. Willy B’s was the first bar she had agreed to enter in years. “I’m sorry about
your clothes, DeLesseps. I know how much you liked that jacket.”
“It’s okay.” He was sipping a light beer and feeling better. He had expected Carla to go into one of her moods, but she was
acting nice. You never could tell with Carla what she might decide to do.
“So where are you folks heading?” Frank asked.
“We are going to San Francisco to see about my daughter, Mitzi,” Carla said. “She is in love with a priest. You can see why
I’m in a hurry.”
“So how does that play out?” Frank asked. “I was raised a Methodist. I don’t know what Catholics do. We have problems with
our preachers sometimes, that way, you know.” He put his hands around his beer bottle and tried to get the feel of the problem.
“It doesn’t play out,” Carla said. “I’m going there to talk her out of it or bring her home to Louisiana.”
“What does she say about it?”
“She won’t talk to me. I have called her sixteen times and left her messages and she doesn’t return my calls.”
“Far out. How old is she?”
“Twenty-six years old. She’s my only child.”
“Well, I guess you better drive on up there and see about it. Just drive the rental car and come back through Bishop and pick
up your Lincoln on your way home.”
“That’s what we’re going to do,” DeLesseps put in. “That’s our only option, don’t you think?”
“There’s another hour of sunlight,” Frank suggested. “We could go out and see the Hopi ruin. It’s not far from here. I think
you’d be glad you saw it. It’s about the most interesting thing around Weggins.”
“Let’s go.” Carla pushed her Diet Coke to the middle of the table and the men left their beers and followed her to the Intrepid
and she handed Frank the keys. “Take us to this Indian place.”
“It’s on a mesa,” Frank told them as he drove down the two-lane highway going east. “The land flattens out at Weggins, but
there are still mesas out here. This kiva is the last one. They told us in school it was the last one ever found this far
west of the Painted Desert. They don’t know much about those Hopis. They died out, but when they were here they must have
been real smart because they built these cliff dwellings just like the way the earth throws up mesas. And some of them have
lasted so long now. They had a real civilization and they were peaceful people too. We had a family of Hopis in Weggins when
I was a kid but they moved away one summer. They were nice people. There was a boy a year younger than me who was a good athlete.
We hated to see him go. Look out there, you can see the land starting to go up. See the mesa.”
Ten minutes later they had parked the car by the side of the road and were walking across flat, scrub-covered, hard-packed
red soil toward a hill with structures that looked like they had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Around the base of the
mesa were sawhorses and bright orange tape held down by steel spikes. A pickup truck was parked beside a pile of stones. A
young woman wearing khaki pants and a pale blue jacket was sitting on one of the stones, writing on a legal pad.
“Nellie Anding,” she said, getting up and holding out a hand. “I’m a geologist from the University of Nevada. We’re excavating
here, as you can see.”
“Frank Donald,” the driver said. “I live in Weggins. I’ve been coming out here since I could drive. You don’t mind if I show
my visitors the kiva, do you? I mean, you aren’t keeping people out, are you?”
“No. I hope you won’t move any of our markers, of course, but I won’t be territorial. We have a permit to dig, of course,
but not to tell anyone they can’t be here. Would you like me to give you a tour? Everyone else is gone. I’m just cleaning
up some paperwork.” She smiled and put her notebook and pen down on the ground beside a backpack.
She was about five-seven, wiry and athletic, with dark hair pulled back into ponytails. She was wearing a large man’s watch
with a compass. In her ears were long silver earrings, very shiny and simple against her small, pretty face. “It gets lonely
out here in the afternoons. It’s a holy place and you feel it when the sun starts going down. I’m glad to have company.”
“Where are your headquarters?” Frank asked, moving in. “Where are you guys staying?”
“We were camping for a couple of weeks, but now we’re at the Best Western in Weggins,” she said. “You live there? We’re trying
to hire some local people to help with the sorting. You might put me on to someone. It’s not hard work, just tedious.”
“I might do it,” he said. “What can you pay?”
“Ten dollars an hour, as of yesterday. We just got our funds renewed by the university. We’re celebrating that.” She smiled
again, the same beautiful, wide, intelligent smile that had greeted them when they came walking up. Then she turned her attention
to Carla and DeLesseps. “I don’t know how much you know about Hopi culture,” she began. “Come on, walk this way. You’re lucky
to see the kiva in this light. It gets really spooky when the sun starts moving down those mountains over there. That little
range.” She pointed due west.
“I don’t know much,” Carla said. “But I had a book of photographs by Edward Curtis with Hopis in it. The best photograph in
the book was a group of Hopi women. I copied it, I traced it and drew it and colored it. I used to paint when I was younger.”
“These ruins might make you paint again,” Nellie said. “Follow me.”
They climbed the mesa to a set of small steps that led up to the flat-topped ruin. Very carefully, one at a time, they climbed
to the top and then went down into the kiva and stood there with the red and purple and orange light of the setting sun lighting
up the stone- and mud-daubed walls, and it was very, very holy. It was a long time before Carla remembered what she was doing
there and thought to say a prayer for Mitzi. “Guide her to the right way,” Carla prayed. “Take over, God, because I’m about
to give up.”
She climbed out of the kiva and sat down upon a stone outcrop and put her head into her hands and began to cry. DeLesseps
followed her and sat beside her, patting her on the back. “I’m sorry about the jewelry,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Carla said. “I hate all that old heavy stuff anyway.”
Frank and Nellie stayed in the kiva being quiet, then they moved up the small stairs and walked around Carla and DeLesseps
and began to climb down to where there was a smaller room on the far side of the mesa. “We think this is an apartment where
people lived,” Nellie was saying. “We have excavated this for weeks and can’t find a thing but one comb that isn’t Hopi.”
Carla reached into her pocket for a small gold rosary she had brought along for emergencies. As she touched it her cellular
phone started ringing. She glanced at the number and then answered it.
“I’m really sorry, Momma,” Mitzi started saying. “I know you’re mad at me for not calling you and you should be mad but something’s
going on that I just had to… well, not talk about just yet. What do you know?”
“That you are living with an ordained priest and that’s what I expected to happen when you went to California.”
“Momma, listen. You don’t know the rest. If you’d let me explain you’d feel better.” There was static on the line. Carla stood
up and walked down to a cleared place on the mesa and tried again.
“Can you hear me?” Mitzi said.
“Yes. I am in Arizona, Mitzi. I am on top of a mesa at a kiva of the Hopi Indian Nation. The air is very clear up here. I
haven’t had to take an antihistamine all day. I am coming there.”
“Coming where?”
“To San Francisco or Berkeley or wherever it is that you have chosen to lose your mind in. I’ll be there tomorrow. The Lincoln
broke down. I’m driving a Dodge.”
“Oh, Momma.”
“DeLesseps is with me. He has been very kind. We are with thoughtful people who are caring for us and tomorrow morning we
will drive on to where you are. I don’t know how long it will take in the Intrepid.”
“Momma, I wish you weren’t doing this but I want to see you. I love you, Momma. I miss you very much and I love you.”
“You had better and you should. Tell me how to get there after we get into town.”
“It’s complicated. It depends on how you come. What road will you be on?”
“How would I know? You stay there at your house so I can call you.”
“I have to go to work. Do you have that number?”
“I supposed you’d quit since they said you hadn’t been there for a week.”
“Who told you this? How did you find out?”
“I won’t talk about that now. I’ll call you tomorrow. I have to hang up now. We are on a mesa as I told you. I love you, Mitzi.
Do not do anything you will regret until I get there.”
Carla turned off the cell phone and put it in her pocket. She turned to DeLesseps. “Well, she called. That’s a beginning,
I suppose.” She took his hand and they began to walk hand in hand down the mesa. At the steps he kept his hand on her sleeve
as she descended the steep, narrow little stairs. To the west the sun was all the way down to the horizon. Only the brilliant
red and purple and lavender and golden plumes were left to light the desert. “There will be splendid stars tonight,” Nellie
told them, when they had come to where Nellie and Frank were waiting. “There are stars out here some nights that are all the
philosophy a man or woman could ever need. Be sure and get out of town and look at them. You won’t see this in many places.”
They decided to eat dinner at a place Frank knew about that was nearby and then drive back to the kiva to see the stars. “Come
with us,” Carla said to Nellie. “We’re stuck in transit. We’d like the company.”
“All right,” Nellie said. “I’ll go with you. If there’s a restaurant near here I should find out about it for my helpers.”
“It’s not a restaurant,” Frank added. “It just has hamburgers and shakes and sometimes a few other things. It’s part of a
country store.” He paused. “They have pickled eggs and cheese and crackers.”
The store was not a disappointment. It sold turquoise and silver jewelry, and Carla couldn’t resist buying two bracelets and
a belt buckle. All four of the travelers splurged on chocolate milk shakes with their burgers. “I guess I’ve only gained five
pounds.” Carla laughed. “I don’t think I’ve gained ten.”
“You haven’t gained an ounce,” DeLesseps insisted. “You’re as thin as a rose.”
They went back to the mesa at dark. The stars were out in full battalions, millions upon millions of stars and galaxies and
shooting stars, and around and behind the stars the blackness of eternity moving past infinity into concepts no human mind
can grasp.
“Maybe there are reasons,” Carla said to DeLesseps. “Maybe he wasn’t really a priest. Maybe he was still thinking about whether
to be ordained.”
“We’ll find out soon,” DeLesseps said. “Look up there where the Big Dipper is near those Seven Sisters. Look at that bunch
of them down near the end of that. Good grief, Carla. How did we get here?”
“How does anyone get anywhere?” she answered.
M
ITZI AND NORA JANE
were sitting on stools in the kitchen. Nora Jane was drinking grapefruit juice. Mitzi was drinking a glass of white wine.
It was seven o’clock in the evening. Father Donovan was holding an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the church. Freddy was
at the bookstore. The children were in their rooms.
“They’ll be here tomorrow night,” Mitzi said. “God knows what they’ll do.”
“Don’t care what she does. Just tell her what you are doing. If she doesn’t like Donny, then that’s that. Tell her to go away.”
“You don’t know Momma. She’s going to start making everyone cry.”
“Maybe not. Well, don’t suffer it now and tomorrow night too. How are things going with his negotiations with the church?”
“They’re acting pretty nice. What with all the stuff that’s been going on this year, the church can’t afford any bad publicity.
They want him to keep running the Crisis Center and doing the AA meetings. He isn’t officially out until we marry. It’s weird,
they just keep stalling, hoping he’ll change his mind, I guess.”
“He won’t.”