Coyote and I chuckled over this, and Granuaile knew Oberon had said something amusing, but she refrained from asking what it was. She was still trying to keep her amusement over the Oprah revelation from showing on her face.
Sensing this, perhaps seeing the flicker of a smile at the corners of Granuaile’s mouth, Coyote chose to move on. “Look, Mr. Druid. A long time ago, I f**ked things up for people. Brought death to the world, you know, made it permanent. It’s tough to live that down. I’ve always done things to satisfy my own hungers; seems like I’m always hungry,” he said, gesturing to the stack of empty plates in front of him. He paused as the waitress arrived with his four additional orders of sausage and cleared away his dishes. Then he continued, “But I see now there are other hungers than mine to feed. An’ I want to do somethin’ about it. I want to do somethin’ that is one-hunnert percent good. People will look an’ say, where’s the downside? What trick is Coyote playin’ now? But there won’t be any. An’ that’ll be my finest trick of all.”
Coyote ate his sausage even faster than before, then got up to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back. That meant I got stuck with the bill; I should have seen that one coming. The trickster was waiting for us out in the parking lot with a grin on his face.
“Took you long enough,” he said. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah, let’s do this.”
Coyote called shotgun and was visibly surprised when I moved to the rear door. “She’s driving?”
“Yeah. It’s my car,” Granuaile said, then arched an eyebrow. “Is there a problem?”
“Hell, no.”
“Good.” She beamed at him briefly, then ducked into the driver’s seat.
"You almost died again, Coyote. Close call," Oberon said.
At Coyote’s direction, we drove on 160 northeast toward Kayenta, but before we got there we turned off on a dirt road just on the far side of a massive sandstone wonder called Tyende Mesa. It was rough, dry country, covered in red rocks and infrequent attempts by plant life to make a go of it. The trees were scrub cedars and junipers; there wasn’t the cactus you’d find to the south in the Sonoran Desert. People tend to picture the state of Arizona as all saguaros and rattlesnakes because that’s the sort of postcards they keep seeing, but saguaros don’t grow on the Colorado Plateau. Parts of the plateau are pretty lush with pine, like the southern tip of it known as the Mogollon Rim, but on the reservation the topsoil is shallow and sandy and mostly unable to support large trees, except in the bottoms of old washes.
The road was extremely rough in places. Discarded tires bore mute testimony to the fact that the thin layer of sand covered sharp rocks. We crossed a one-lane metal bridge that spanned a narrow defile—a flash-flood canyon that eroded anew every time it rained and the water trailed off the bare rock of the mesa—and, shortly after that, Coyote directed us to pull over onto a cleared patch on the left side of the road. There, the mesa rose up steeply in a sort of terraced fashion until it flattened out again, then two magnificent buttes jutted up almost like the dorsal fins of some massive, mad creature, an avatar of erosion swimming in sand. The flash-flood wash we had crossed no doubt began between those buttes. In the other direction, the plateau was flat and covered with various bunch grasses and a few stunted trees, all the way to Kayenta and beyond. We took some canteens with us and began hiking up the mesa toward the buttes.
“First thing I need you to do,” Coyote said halfway up, “is make a nice smooth graded ramp here to speed up the construction of a road. Down there where the car’s parked,” he pointed to the flat, arid plateau, “we’re going to build the work camp that will eventually become a town. And once we build the factories for our solar and wind companies, it’ll be a proper city. A carbon-neutral one too.” He put a hand next to his mouth and whispered as if he were sharing a secret, “I learned that carbon-neutral shit from a hippie in Canyon de Chelly.”
We continued to hike until we crested the first terrace. The next layer, sort of like a wedding cake, loomed on either side. We walked west down a valley dotted with scrub cedar for about a quarter mile, until Coyote stopped and spread his arms wide to indicate the northern butte face. “Here is where you make my people rich,” he said. “Move the gold underneath this mesa. We’ll put the entrance to the mine in that little cave right there.” He pointed to a small depression at the base of the butte that qualified more as a niche than a cave.
I shook my head. “You know, Coyote, this makes no sense geologically. You can’t put gold underneath this kind of rock. Geologists will scoop out their eyes with a melon baller and ruin their shorts when you start hauling precious metals out of here, because it will put the lie to everything they know. Then you’ll have prospectors searching for gold underneath every chunk of sandstone around the world and getting pissed when they don’t find any.”
“I don’t care, Mr. Druid. This is the place.”
“It has to be here? We can’t pick a spot elsewhere on this huge reservation that makes more sense in the natural world?”
“It has to be here. I’ve gotten permission to build here from the Kayenta chapter, I’ve gotten you permission to live here while we do it, and my workforce and business connections are all in Kayenta. This here is where we change the world, Mr. Druid.”
"But no pressure or anything, Atticus."
Chapter 4
As we were hiking back down the hill, three white work trucks rolled up behind the car. They were full of people in jeans and orange T-shirts, some wearing cowboy hats and others wearing hard hats. One man in a hard hat started giving directions, and the workers moved to get stakes and sledges out of the truck beds along with surveying equipment and one of those portable toilets. A woman and an older man stood next to the man in the hard hat. They weren’t wearing orange shirts, and thus I concluded they weren’t technically part of the work crew.
All three of them were very happy to see Coyote. They shook hands and traded smiles full of affection for one another. Their faces turned expressionless, however, when Coyote began to introduce the white people. He remembered our fake names, thankfully.
“Reilly and Caitlin Collins,” he said, “this here is my construction foreman, Darren Yazzie.” The man with the hard hat nodded at us and mumbled a “Pleased to meet you.” He was a well-muscled fellow in his mid-twenties, his eyes mere slits in a sort of perpetual squint from working outside all the time. He wore his hair long and braided in the back in a single thick queue.
Coyote pointed next at the woman, who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. She wore a thin black Windbreaker over a yellow polo shirt. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a simple ponytail, and she had a pair of eyeglasses with thick black rims resting on her nose. A hundred subtle cues of body language told me that there was a keen intelligence behind those eyes; I knew she was important to this project before Coyote said a word. “This,” he said, “is Sophie Betsuie, the head engineer.”
“Hello,” she said, shaking our hands firmly. “Nice to meet you.”
The elderly gentleman had character carved into his face, arroyos and washes of years trailing above and below his mouth, around his eyes, and down his neck. His black cowboy hat sported a silver band set with turquoise in the front, and he had a buttoned-up broadcloth shirt tucked into his jeans. He had a giant chunk of turquoise floating at the base of his throat, because he’d apparently missed the memo that said bolo ties were out of style and quite likely had never been in style at all. His belt buckle was an enormous silver job worked in fine detail, though I couldn’t say what the design was, since I didn’t take time to examine it carefully. I was too distracted by his aura, which had the telltale white light of a magic user in it.
“That’s Frank Chischilly,” Coyote said. “He’s a hataałii.”
"Did he say hot tamale?" Oberon asked as I shook hands with Frank.
No, he said hataałii. In the Navajo language, it kinda sorta means a medicine man.
"Who needs medicine?"
Excellent question.
“I’m honored to meet you, sir,” I said.
“Likewise,” he replied. To Granuaile, he didn’t offer his hand but rather tipped his hat and said, “Miss.” His voice was scratchy and warm, like a wool blanket.
“What brings you out here, Mr. Chischilly?” Granuaile asked before I could.
“Well, he has to be here,” Coyote explained.
“Oh,” Granuaile said, nodding, then added, “Sorry, but why does he have to be here? I’m not too clear on what that thing was you called him. Are you a tribal official, Mr. Chischilly?”
“Nope,” he said, a faint trace of a smile on his chapped lips. “I’m here to do the Blessing Way ceremony, once we get a hogan built up there.”
“Cool!” Granuaile said, a huge grin lighting her face, and then it disappeared, replaced by uncertainty as Frank’s vague amusement vanished. “Oh. I mean … I didn’t mean to assume. I would love to watch, but I’m not sure if that’s allowed. I actually don’t know what the Blessing Way ceremony is, so forgive me if I just sort of stepped on your toes there, I feel really stupid if that makes you feel any better, and—”
Chischilly raised a hand to stop her stream of apologies and gave a shrug. “Hey, it’s okay with me if it’s okay with Mr. Benally.”
Before I could ask who Mr. Benally was, Coyote said, “It’s okay with me.”
Interesting. Granuaile and I pivoted on our heels to face Coyote with our eyebrows raised, and Oberon said, "Hey, if everyone around here is going to use a fake name, then I should have one too!"
“Thank you, Mr. Benally,” I said, emphasizing the name.
"I want to be introduced to these people as Snugglepumpkin. You have to say it seriously too, Atticus; you can’t laugh."
Sophie Betsuie chose that moment to ask, “Is this your dog? What’s his name?”
“Snugglepumpkin,” I said.
Sophie snorted in disbelief but recovered rapidly, wiping a nascent grin off her face. “Oh. That’s really his name?”
"Tell her yes! Play it straight."
But why?
"Just do it!"
I nodded somberly. “That’s his name.”
“Oh. Well, that’s … simply … adorable.” Sophie put her hands flat on her thighs and bent her knees a bit as she looked at Oberon. Her voice took on that saccharine-sweet tone people use when they talk to something they think is cute. “Yes, you’re adorable, aren’t you? Are you a good boy, Snugglepumpkin?”
Oberon wagged his tail and came over within petting distance.
“Oh, yes, you are a good boy, yes, you are.” She stopped making sense and instead made high-pitched squeals of delight as she scratched Oberon’s giant head; the rest of us stood and watched as a woman with an advanced degree completely lost her mind.
Okay, explain to me what you’re doing, I said.
"I’m testing a hypothesis, and so far it’s working. It states that any human female who can be classified as a “dog person,” when confronted with a friendly-looking dog of any breed bearing a ridiculously cute name, will begin to make sounds at least two octaves above her normal register within thirty seconds of meeting said dog. She went there in less than ten seconds." He sounded particularly smug about that last part.
Oberon, you shouldn’t have done this.
"I am Snugglepumpkin. Hear me roar."
When she snaps out of it she’s going to be embarrassed, and we just met her.
"Bacon is the Way and the Truth! But I’m beginning to have my doubts. These noises she’s making are kind of annoying."
Bark once and she’ll stop out of surprise.
Oberon barked.
“Oh! You’re getting excited, aren’t you, Snugglepumpkin? I’d better stop, then.”
"Hey, good call, Atticus."
“So how long you think it’s gonna take you to get that road graded for us up to the top of the mesa?” Coyote said, redirecting us back to business. “I wanna start buildin’ that hogan as soon as possible.”
“Should be good to go by tomorrow morning,” I replied.
Sophie frowned. “I beg your pardon? You’re going to have a functional road built to the top of that mesa by tomorrow morning?”
This was also news to Darren Yazzie, whose workers would presumably be accomplishing all this. “Wait, how are we gonna do that? We don’t have the right equipment out here.”
Whoops. Coyote had already clued me in that these people weren’t aware of his true nature—or mine—but I’d answered him without adjusting for “normal” ears. I covered brilliantly: “Uh—”
“I think we’re talkin’ ’bout two differ’nt things,” Coyote interrupted, a sly smile on his face and a glint in his eye that told me he was enjoying my mistake. “Don’t mind Mr. Collins here. He’s just a geologist. Completely worthless when it comes to buildin’ shit. He can ’splain the f**k outuva rock though, heh heh.”
I shot Coyote a glare while Granuaile coughed to hide a laugh. Darren and Sophie confined themselves to smiles, but Frank Chischilly chuckled hoarsely.
"I think he got your goat, Atticus! And I’ve been meaning to ask you about that expression. When people get your goat, what do they do with it? Do they eat it or hold it for ransom or what?"