Free The Darkness Rolling by Win Blevins Page B

friends.
    When the sun started its soft purple fadeaway, I felt like I’d made a long journey, a river crossing from innocence to experience. I would never be the same man.
    When we came out of her room for dinner, there was Julius, leaning against the opposite wall, waiting. He kept his face carefully blank, but the stogie corkscrewed, and he tried to get her attention. She ignored him. Julius had one hell of a job, and I didn’t envy him.
    After dinner we spent the night back in bed, blasting through the rides in the amusement park, all of the human male and female possibilities, with a couple of contortions tossed into the mix.
    In the morning a paper was slipped under the door, the bill, Linda said. She flung it at Julius when we checked out, and said the front desk owed them an apology. It was not her job to be aware of the details.

 
    Five
    Driving north from Flagstaff, through the Painted Desert and then east into Navajoland, Linda was mesmerized by the mesas and buttes. I’d like to think I put that glow on her, and maybe that was partly so. But she loved the scenery of the desert Southwest so much she’d bought a little ranch in New Mexico some time before. I watched her while pretending not to.
    I liked the car, a 1940 Cadillac 90 Town Car, with the driver’s compartment separated from the passenger seats by a barrier of etched glass. Linda and I sat in back, hooting and howling at our own lines. Julius had to be my chauffeur as well as hers, and that didn’t bother me one bit. Luxury tasted fine.
    But the rockety-rock on a rutted road made for a long day, and after a while the glory of landscape fades.
    For a minute I studied Julius’s profile through the closed glass. It struck me. “Linda, your two bodyguards are as different as day and night.” I spoke softly, even though I knew he couldn’t hear us.
    “What do you mean?”
    “My grandfather’s Jewish, and he’s the only father I ever had, but I grew up Navajo. I’m descended from Changing Woman, mistress of the cycles of the Earth. I was raised to be aware of sun and sky, mountain and river, plant and animal, and the human walk through all this Fourth World.” I doubted that Linda wanted to hear the old myth, and so I moved on. In the rearview mirror I looked up at Julius’s cynical eyes and the tough-guy stogie.
    “But Julius wears his life like it’s a pretty rough-worn road.”
    “It’s his job to be suspicious,” she said. “And don’t be too critical. He’s been on that road a long time.”
    I looked at Julius again. “I hope I don’t turn into that.”
    “Everyone has their own path. Sometimes it rolls in front of us and it doesn’t feel like a choice, Yazzie.”
    “I’ve chosen hózhó, harmony in living. It’s hard to…” I turned the complicated meaning of h ó zh ó over in my mind and left it twisting in the air like the last leaf on a tree.
    She put her hand on my inner thigh. “I was raised mish-mash, a practicing pagan. Maybe it has made me what I am.”
    I chuckled. “I like that.”
    She stared ahead, opened her purse—more powder. No words.
    When at last the time came, at the end of a long day, I said, “Behold, Monument Valley.”
    My homeland opened her eyes wide.
    “Wow,” said Linda, “this is something .…”
    I never had words for it, either.
    By shooting Stagecoach here, Mr. John had made the valley a big deal, at least in the film community.
    And this sunset was a supreme moment. The sun was disappearing in the west, right over our trading post. The light of what Mr. John called the “magic hour” was transfiguring Monument Valley into … Again, no describing it, just let it float.
    “Magic time,” I told her softly. “They’re using the last of the light.”
    She perked right up and pressed the button that let her talk to the driver. “Julius, stop where I can see.”
    He eased the town car to fifty yards away from the false-front version of Tombstone, all the buildings on one side of