Robert Tanenbaum - Counterplay

Moving in and out of the assemblage, John Jojola soared and screeched like the golden eagle he represented. Eagles, Marlene thought in her dream, John believes that they carry prayers to the Creator. The sight of the Indian police chief filled her with such an overwhelming sadness that she cried out in her sleep. Hearing her, he turned and winked before flapping his great wings and rising above the dancers, circling up and up until he was lost in the sun.

Then Vladimir Karchovski appeared in the middle of the dancers. He was not dressed differently than he would have been for any of his summertime walks along the Brighton Beach boardwalk, just the usual linen suit and black beret. He gazed fondly at Marlene as he did whenever she came to visit, and held up a piece of paper.

Before she could reach out and take it, however, a shadow passed between them and stole the note. Marlene realized that the shadow was Azzam, who began trilling in the way of Arab women who have lost their men, circling the old man like a-

“-vulture, not a raven,” Marlene said aloud as she sat up in the dark of the room of the mission house where she was staying on the Taos reservation.

She got out of bed and walked over to the door leading to the Spanish-style courtyard outside her room. The stars overhead shone brilliantly-not the weary specks of light she was used to in the East, but three-dimensional bodies of light that had substance and dimension. “Billions and billions of stars,” she said as she entered the courtyard and sat down in a hanging chair next to a large clump of lilac bushes. The fragrance of the tiny lavender flowers permeated the predawn morning.

The drums from the pueblo were growing louder and seemed to be trying to match the syncopation of her heart…or maybe it’s my heart trying to keep the beat. Holding her breath to listen, she heard the far-off high-pitched keening and chanted songs as the people of the Taos Pueblo mourned the death of their police chief and warrior John Jojola. A coyote’s howl joined in the grieving from a bluff near the house.

She would have liked to have attended the funeral. But it was a private ceremony, part of the sacred rituals that the Taos Indians had kept secret from all outsiders ever since the Spanish conquistadores arrived in 1540.

The pueblo was thought to be the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America, and its people had been one of the only tribes that had not been forced from their lands by other Indians or whites. The seven pueblos in the Rio Grande Valley, of which Taos was the best known, even spoke a unique language, Tewa. They didn’t teach the language to anyone else. However, Marlene’s daughter, Lucy, a language savant, had a passing knowledge of it from listening to conversations as she helped out at the Catholic mission on the Taos reservation.

Even allowing Marlene to stay in a house on the reservation’s Catholic mission grounds was a breach in tradition while the reservation’s borders were closed to outsiders, as they were now. When she was dropped off at the house, she’d been told, politely, that she was to remain in the house until someone from the tribe arrived to escort her to the memorial service in the morning, now only a few hours away.

Closing the reservation to everyone except the Red Willow People, as the Taos people were known, wasn’t unusual. It happened several times during the year for special ceremonies, as well as for most of the winter. About fifty families, including Jojola and his son, lived year-round in the actual pueblo-an apartment-like complex as high as five stories made of adobe, a mixture of mud and straw, that had been there for perhaps as long as a thousand years. Most of the rest of the tribe’s population of nearly two thousand lived in houses and trailers scattered around the reservation. During the winter and on festival days, many of the families living outside moved into their ancestral homes in the pueblo to touch base as a people and pass on their extensive oral history to their children and grandchildren. The ceremonies and dances performed in those times were for themselves, not the tourists with their cameras.

The reservation was also closed sometimes during times of community trauma, or to discuss matters important to the future of the Taos people, or to mourn the passing of a leader like Jojola. At the word from the tribal council, police officers wearing the traditional black skirts over their pants maintained roadblocks at the reservation entrances and patrolled the roads to keep the curious and un-invited away.

Marlene knew that decision to let her stay she owed to the legacy of Jojola, and the thought of her friend’s death brought tears to her eyes again. He’d once told her that he didn’t fear death because it represented only the passing of his spirit from one world into the next. But it wasn’t a world she could enter, not without leaving her family, and she missed her friend. The lethal rage she felt toward Kane, the old street justice anger at injustice and the evil of men who perpetrated it-an anger she’d tried to leave in the past with Jojola’s help-threatened to blind her at a time she needed to stay levelheaded to protect her family.

The morning after Jojola’s death, she’d flown to Albuquerque where she was met by a Taos County sheriff’s deputy who drove her to the town of Taos. She’d insisted on going straight to the hospital where she found Lucy sitting in a chair asleep with her head on Ned’s chest.

Ned had been wide awake but trying not to disturb her daughter. Hello, Mrs. Ciampi, he whispered when she walked in the room.

Hi, cowboy, heard you’ve been taking on the James Gang.

The young man blushed. Tell the truth, I was scared, but it was either fight or die, he said. Lucy was the brave one. And John and Tran who got there just in time…for us.

And that, of course, is pure hogwash, said Lucy, who’d awakened. Ned was better than John Wayne ever dreamed of being.

Ned was now turning a dangerous shade of bright red, which only got worse when Marlene kissed him on the cheek. Thank you for saving my daughter’s life…again.

Lucy burst into tears. But John died saving us. They’d all cried then, even Ned.

What about Tran? Marlene asked, wiping her eyes.

He’s okay, Lucy sniffed. You know Tran. He didn’t want to be there when John’s men showed up. I think he’s gone back to New York.

She’d left Lucy with Ned, not that she would have been able to coax her away, and was driven to the house on the reservation, where she’d called her husband. She’d told him that Jojola would have understood, but in reality she was relieved that Butch had remained in New York. Her relationship with Jojola-call it teacher to student, brother to sister, one old soul to another-had been a private one, and she preferred to say good-bye to him in her own way. When the memorial service was over, she hoped to watch the sunset on a rock outcropping above the Rio Grande Gorge where they’d spent many hours talking.

A thin gray line was separating the sky from the black silhouette of the mountains to the east, and the coyote howled again, much closer. Getting up from her chair, she wondered if she might see the animal if she went over to the gate leading to the desert beyond the courtyard. In Indian folklore, the coyote was known as the trickster-always playing practical jokes, not all of which turned out well for himself or his subjects. Jojola had a special affinity for the animal.

A second coyote howled, only differently. She hesitated, the second coyote sounded to her like a person trying to imitate a coyote. Slipping into her room, she retrieved her gun from beneath the pillow on her bed and returned to the courtyard. Marlene aimed at the gate. Then a voice said, “Oh please don’t shoot honorable Vietnamese man, Missy.” The voice’s owner laughed.