When boys become rabbits

Running. Out of breath. Hoping. Scared. Hiding. Running again. It was in just that order we scattered to the wind after a drunken Navajo man kicked his car door open and jumped out waving a bat wildly in the air threatening to hit homeruns with our heads as baseballs. His car was hopelessly hung up on a rock barricade we built earlier that morning. The rock barricade was a great idea at the time. After building it we decided to lay in wait for just this moment, only Greg and Ollie were standing up and didn’t think to hide.

You should have felt the adrenaline when we heard that car coming. Our hearts were beating in our ears and we had on these crazy smiles and wild eyes. This was going to be good. What we didn’t expect was for a drunken man at the wheel to come racing down the dirt road at high speed, hit the rock barricade with magnificent force, losing his front bumper and his muffler and come to a dusty metal-on-rock screeching stop. We didn’t even count on an irate drunk exploding out the front driver’s side door with a bat. We didn’t think that we’d have to run for our lives. But that’s exactly what happened.

When we saw that crazy man there was no question about it: we were out running like rabbits down a maze of deep arroyos with stagnant filthy smelling water at the bottom. And just like in the cartoons, we came to a fork in the arroyo; four boys went one way, and two ran the down the other way. I remember thinking and running, God please let that man go down the other arroyo and not after me and Joe. We ran like hell sloshing through that stinky mud. No way out unless you could climb straight up arroyo walls like Spiderman.

We ran forever before the walls gave way to narrower and smaller walls. Joe, who was eleven years old was whispering loudly and out of breath, “What are we gonna do when we run out of arroyo Delbert?” Crap, I didn’t know. But just when I was about to say I didn’t know I saw a small tree with some good cover growing out the side of the arroyo. Being thirteen years old at the time, I jumped up and crawled in and turned around and hoisted Joe up into our hiding place. And we waited.

After what seemed like forever under that tree, we started to whisper.

“When can we get out of here Delbert?”

“I don’t know… but I think we better just wait ‘til night time.”

“Oh man, my dad’s gonna kill me if I get home after dark.”

“That crazy man out there will really kill us if he catches us. We just gotta wait Joe. If you want I’ll talk to my older brother to talk to your dad and…”

And right about then Joe’s eyes got super huge and he couldn’t point except to shake all over and look scared. I stopped talking and saw a shadow draw up over Joe and the tree we were hiding in and I swear it felt like that was the last time I would ever be alive.

The crazy man was out side of our hiding spot and breathing heavy. He came after us. This time his footsteps sounded odd. There was a metallic clanging to his steps and I heard that noise before when my dad was carrying his rifle hunting rabbits out at the farm. Oh God! The crazy man had a gun and a bat! It’s funny now that I think about it seeing Joe trembling and wetting his pants. God that was hilarious, but back then I was on the verge of darting out from under that brush like I seen rabbits do when my dad was out hunting. But we sat there, still, quiet, our ears flattened against your skulls, trying to make ourselves smaller and invisible. The crazy man walked right by us and soon we could hear him in the distance in not so good English with a heavy Navajo accent, “You boys come back here! I ain’t gonna hurt you. Just put them rocks away where you found them!”

Something about his voice told me and Joe he was lying. There was no way in hell we were gonna hop out and say, “Sorry mister, we didn’t mean to rip your car all to pieces.” No way in hell.

So we hid out there and waited and waited. We watched the shadows of the tree’s branches crawl from the west to straight down, and then to the east. We waited forever before moving. But before moving, Joe and I started whispering about who was gonna take look out and see where that crazy man went to. I decided Joe was too little to dare this risky move. So, like a prairie dog with a hawk flying in circles way above, I slowly peeked out and around, ever ready to pop back down or make a run for another hiding place. Man, I was tense. I looked this way and that, frustrated by the tall rabbit brush blocking my view. Nothing. I looked back toward where the car was. Nothing. I dropped back down and saw that Joe was crying.

“I don’t see him Joe. He’s gone. Don’t be afraid,” I said trying to calm him down. Joe was my best friend. And then he started stuttering. So today, if you ask me where Joe started stuttering, I can tell you it was right there under that tree along the arroyo and after building that stupid barricade. That was when his S’s were one to many and his D’s got dragged out way too long.

We finally decided it was time to move. I told Joe to wait while I made my way along the bottom of the remaining lengths of the arroyo to the end where it gradually raised up to meet the surrounding landscape. I looked back and saw Joe sticking his head out from under the tree looking at me with eyes all big. I waived to him to come but to keep low; that day our war games we played was real, what with that lunatic out there hunting us down like rabbits.

After meeting up we discussed that the safest route out of that mess was to go to the trading post about a mile away and use Joe’s only quarter to call my brother Steve to come get us. We leapfrogged from one bush to the next, ducking and diving and looking and waiving to each other to come. Finally we made it to the road. After crossing the road one at a time we made it across Grandma Helen’s field and in the middle we stopped frozen, dead in our tracks. At the end of the field a man stood with his arms out waving wildly. We both squinted as best we could; squeezing rays of light into a thin beam that bounced off the back of our eye balls making the man come into sharper focus. It was Grandma Helen’s scarecrow.

Finally, after a day of hiding and running, we made it to the big cotton wood tree near the trading post and stopped dead tired. It was just a little further to go, not more than 20 yards to the pay phone. We started moving again and we heard a burst of laughter. The old gang was there already, all four safe and sound. It sure was good to see them laughing and waving us over to the cool shade of the trading post.

When we got there Anthony, Vernon, Greg and his little brother Ollie were sipping cold sodas. Anthony started laughing hard and said, “From here we could see you moving across the valley like real army guys!” His nick name was Ants.

“Ants, man, when did you guys get here?” I asked taking a cold drink of soda from Ollie’s bottle.

“We ran straight here man. We didn’t stop for nothing when we saw that crazy dude chasing you and Joe.”

“Was he really behind us?” I asked.

“Shoot, he was so close to grabbing Joe that I was sure you guys were getting the crap beat out of you when we lost you guys.”

“And you didn’t call Steve or the police or anything when you got here?”

I was sick and tired of Ants. This was why he wasn’t my best friend. He never thought of anyone else except himself and what made him laugh. He was really laughing now.

I looked down at Ollie and Greg’s feet. Their father was a white doctor at the Presbyterian clinic near the old school. They were wearing flat pieces of sand stone rocks on their feet, taped up with duct tape; somewhere during our escape Ollie and Greg lost their flip flops along with their nice $20 dollar fishing poles and tackle box. I swear they looked like cavemen with their crazy rock sandals.

I asked Ants about Ollie and Greg’s rock sandals and Ants said when they saw the crazy man chasing after me and Joe they knew they had time to stop and look for flat rocks to tape to their feet. I remember thinking it must’ve been nice for Ants, Vernon and Greg and Ollie to just stop running for their lives and stroll around looking for rocks to make sandals. Just great.

We started out for home after finishing up a call to my big brother Steve. Steve was in the 11th grade. Steve said we could go screw ourselves because he wasn’t going to leave his summer job, drive across town and pick us up, except he used the F word instead of screw. Steve was a big jerk sometimes.

We could hear the old car roaring along without its muffler minutes before we could see it coming. That noise sent us running again, this time into the hills behind the trading post. It was long past sundown when we finally got home and sure enough, there was Mr. Yazzie waiting for Joe. My big brother Steve hollering for me to come to dinner. When I got home Steve said I better get ready to tell mom what happened. Walking through the door I thought it would’ve been better for that crazy man to have caught a hold of me.

Unintended target

Across the brushy reservation range land near the bottom of a mesa two Navajo men sat in a blue 1978 Ford F-250. Intermittently one or the other would raise their hand and a container it held to their mouth, pull long and hard, and finishing, throw an empty beer can out the window. This had been going on for some time. Besides the wind blowing through juniper trees and the sound of the Navajo men talking loud, you could hear the tribal AM radio station blaring old forgotten country tunes from Waylon Jennings or Johnny Cash. Between them was a rifle, butt-stock firmly planted between the four wheel drive shifter and the seat, barrel pointing to the roof of the cab, and a caliber .223 Remington hollow point bullet, with 69 grains of propellant, chambered.

Four days ago on Tuesday the men’s mother smoldered with anger that another coyote jumped the corral and killed a sheep that was nearly ready to drop a lamb. In unflattering Navajo she cussed the devil for the fifth attack in a month. Brushing aside traditional teachings, which was to find a medicine-man to determine the meaning of these attacks, she told her boys to hunt the coyote and kill it dead, adding that her boys might as well do something useful for once.

Smarting with their mother’s insult, one of the boys, Jack, got up from the dinner table and walked to the closet and dug out the old semi-automatic rifle while the other, Sam, went to fetch the bullets from his dresser drawer. They both walked outside to the truck and drove to the earthen dam. Noon passed into afternoon, and finally at early evening the boys gave up and headed for home. No coyote.

Day in and day out this was the routine. Load up, park at the dam, look through old BIA binoculars, sleep some, get hungry, and drive back home. And at every one of the evenings they would hear their mother cuss the coyote at the dinner table and scold them because they weren’t looking hard enough, “Probably just sleeping up there, too,” she finished.

But today was different out there on the range land near the mesa. Dark clouds were forming in the north and a cold breeze blew through the juniper trees. In Navajo Jack said he didn’t feel any good. Sam looked at him through eyes connected to a body that consumed nearly seven cans of beer. Focusing a minute, and refocusing the next, he asked if Jack was afraid of the messenger, coyote. It was said in Navajo that the coyote brought bad omen.

“No, I ain’t afraid of nothing!” Jack said in a too loud voice.

Sam looked at his younger brother and wondered if in fact Jack was too loud for his liking. He’s always like that, too damn loud and always looking for something to be mad about, Sam thought. Before he fully comprehended what he was doing, Sam was pointing his finger at Jack and said even louder in slurred English, “You’re a chicken.”

Looking at Sam, Jack smiled and thought about the time Sam couldn’t get up the nerve to ask Ruthie out to the country western dance at the boarding school gym and said so.

“And let me tell you, Ruthie sure kisses good,” Jack said. Sam’s quick glance and outrage told Jack he hit the target good.

“You go to hell!” Sam said in Navajo, which literally was translated as, “You go the land of the evil spirits!” Sam regretted ever telling Jack he liked Ruthie.

From behind a large sage bush near where the blue truck was parked, the coyote cocked its head a little sideways and turned an ear toward the sound of the men arguing. It turned its nose upward smelling the wind and looked again. Calculating the danger, the coyote started out for the sheep corral taking a circuitous route behind the truck nearly a hundred yards distance. From years of dodging vehicles and the people in them, the coyote knew that it was better to go behind them than in front.

Jack and Sam’s argument turned to who was the one more afraid to go the outhouse at night, alone, when they were kids.

“You couldn’t even go to the outhouse without waking me up to walk you over there! You were a chicken then and you’re a chicken now!” Jack taunted.

Just about the time Sam was going to bring up Jack’s childhood bedwetting, Sam looked into the rearview window and saw the coyote trotting along, head turned and looking at him right in the eye. Sam blinked and looked again, focusing better, and sure enough he saw the coyote. Jack noticed and turned and looked too. They were in shocked disbelief for a good second.

When the second was over and in the mad scramble for the rifle a shot went off in the truck. The blast was deafening and the muzzle flash from the gun momentarily blinded both men. In the quiet that followed, Jack saw what was left of the top of Sam’s head and started to shout his bother’s name, frantically trying to stop the bleeding. It was no use. Sam was dead as a door nail.

Down at the house, their mother heard the rifle go off and thought, finally, I hope those no good boys have killed that damned coyote. She opened the curtain and dried her hands on her apron and looked toward the mesa with her old binoculars and could see one of her boys running wildly around the truck and do something on the other side, what it was she couldn’t tell. And she saw the coyote standing there on the hill side looking at the truck and she thought it odd, why aren’t they shooting at that devil!

Christmas, 1968

The Navajo winter of 1968 was exceptionally cold. Tribal elders across the reservation were unsure about the meaning of the bitter winds and deep snow. While they thought about these things and put more firewood into their stoves, a great wind howled down through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and finally howling across barren stretches of the Bisti badlands in northern New Mexico.

In the middle of these badlands, at a lonely section of Highway 371, tufts of Indian grass and Juniper trees poked through snowdrifts. In the sky, storm clouds darkened out the sun so that in the distance a light from a kerosene lamp could be seen at a window of a hogaan, the traditional Navajo dwelling.

Standing at this place by the road, Marine Cpl. Keyanni looked toward the hogaan a half a mile away in the distance, the collar of his military issued jacket turned up against the wind. In 1966, William Keyanni was one of the first boys to stand up at the tribal boarding school when a Marine recruiter asked if any young Navajo men wanted to become a US Marine. Two years later on Christmas Day, Billy was finally home standing by the road and looking at the light in the window.

Inside the hogaan Billy’s aging mother and father sat at a table covered with cloth hand-sewn from cotton sacks that once held Blue Bird Flour. The table cloth was a beautiful pattern of blue birds sitting on top of golden wheat bushels, and if you looked long enough you could imagine hearing the bluebird’s summer song.

On the cooking stove a pot of mutton stew with potatoes and dumplings was coming to a boil. Sitting by the stove were the twins, Billy’s youngest brother and sister named Sally and Sam, warming their faces and playing Navajo string games. As quick as Sam would show Sally different string design he would bring his hands together and make another design and Sally would laugh. Turning from flattening dough into perfectly round tortillas, Billy’s mother would shush her saying in Navajo, “Do not be too loud. Sit quietly,’ and soon the sound of the boiling stew would fill the silence again.

Out side by the road, Billy started out for home walking across a snow covered field, his foot steps crunching along the way. At a small rise, he turned and looked back at his foot tracks and clapped his hands, rubbing them together and placing them over his ears. It was cold. He looked around to the Chuska Mountain range in the west and the tip of Mt. Taylor to the southeast. He took a deep breath and held it and then let it go. He was finally home. Last winter Billy was sat behind walls of empty ammunition crates filled with dirt and huddled under roofs made of olive green sand bags as two divisions of the North Vietnamese Army pounded Khe Sanh with mortar and artillery fire for 77 straight days and nights. Now he was on a small hill near home and it was so quiet he could hear his heart beating and he found peace unsettling.

After stirring the pot of boiling stew and lifting the last tortilla from the smooth cast iron surface of the old cooking stove, Billy’s mother wiped her hands on her apron and ordered her family to wash their hands and to get ready to eat. She reminded her family by saying in Navajo, “A long time ago, it is said, a holy person was born named Jesus. Because of that we are going to have a special meal today.” At the wash basin, Billy’s father waited patiently while Sam and Sally splashed water on their hands and giggled, causing their mother to shush them again. When their father washed his hands his turquoise ring banged against the enameled wash basin, making an odd metallic sound.

The small Navajo family sat down at the table and steam rose from the stew pot and the children looked at the tortillas. Billy’s mom sat down and took a deep breath and looked to the wall where a picture was hung of Billy in his Marine uniform. She bowed her head and prayed in Navajo for her son. At the Navajo words for, “across the ocean,” she stopped praying and held her breath a moment and cried. Billy’s father took her hand and continued on with the Navajo prayer. At the end of the prayer Billy’s father intoned the Navajo holy words, “It shall all be returned to beauty,” repeating these words four times to the four directions as he had been taught by his father and grandfather years ago.

Billy stood at the hogaan and waited, putting his ear to the southeast wall and listened. When he heard his mother stop praying his mischievous smile disappeared and he thought about how fortunate he was to make it home. He heard his father praying and whispered along. Only at the end he wiped his tears and thanked the holy people for brining him home safely.

Billy turned the door knob and opening the door he shouted, “Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!” The twins were out of their chairs and running to Billy before mother and father lifted their heads from prayer. Billy’s mother started to cry, “Shi yazhi! Shi Yazhi!” my child, my child, as she got up from the table and ran to him. Billy’s father sat frozen in disbelief. Every one stood at the doorway hugging and crying.

For generations of this small family winter’s bitter winds and deep snows came to mean the love and rejoice for a son once lost returning home.