Excerpts

1. The Songs of Gods to Me Sometimes I think I am insane. Why would anyone sane adopt a child with AIDS? It terrifies me to write this book. I am afraid. I am afraid of dragons. I am afraid of losing my mind. I want something no one is allowed to have. I want the mad ones. The children mad enough to struggle and survive. I want the children who have seen war. The children mad enough to question everything. The children who have had everything taken away from them. The children who are broken and mad enough to attempt to repair themselves. The children mad enough to spit and fight. Mad enough to laugh outrageously. Mad enough to make a music of their own. Mad enough to see themselves as individuals. I want children who will dance in rain. I want the mad, crazy ones. I want the ones insane enough to love hard, and brave enough to be vulnerable. I do not know where this book begins. I am haunted by deep, electric flashes of music, memory, dragons, and madness. I was out of my mind to do it. The child was sick. I did say no. I was fishing with my dog up at Navajo Lake on the Navajo Nation. It started to rain. I don't fish in the rain. I want things dry and safe. I pulled my anchor up. I have a small Johnson outboard motor mounted to an aluminum rowboat. I beached it. The dog jumped out. A Navajo man about my age helped me pull the boat in. A young Navajo boy stood behind the man, sort of like a shadow. The boy appeared to be about ten. He kept staring at me with sharp, darting, black desert eyes. I had never talked with these people before in my life. We were the only people at the lake. The shadows in this place danced a choreography of darkness and light. There was thunder in the distance. There was lightning. Thunder, rain, and lightning are not insignificant events in this place on the Navajo Reservation. This high-desert sacred landscape of coyotes, rock, and jackrabbit. Thunder, rain, and lightning are gifts from Begochiddy, the sun god. Begochiddy has given thunder and lightning to his son, Monster Slayer, so he might use these gifts to defeat the dragons who have been devouring the Navajo people. I believe in dragons. I believe in the power of the mythology I grew up with. Even if I am not entirely an Indian. My father was an Anglo. With skin as pink as peaches. Mythology is oblivious to the blindness of race. When you grow up surrounded by language and stories, you become the stories and the languages you know. The desert does not care who your parents were. Only people care about their genetic pedigree. I am a desert mongrel who howls at midnight moons. The mountains around us are the sleeping bodies of the dragons. Evidence that the skeletons of mythology are real. The Navajo know these stories. The Pueblo people and the Apache people know this mythology, too. They understand how old the mythology is. They understand the power of the enigmatic, and of things that breathe fire and fly about the midnight sky. I did not know who the man and the boy were. And yet I knew exactly who the man and the boy were. Magic speaks to me. I had to sit down. I was a little breathless, and more than a little bewildered. My heart was racing. This could not be happening. Yet it was. It was unfolding exactly the way it had unfolded at least a thousand times in dreams. Dreams of this rain. Dreams of this thunder. Dreams of this lightning. Dreams of this man and his son. This was madness. I was losing my mind. It was beginning to pour. The man suggested we could go sit in his truck. He had whiskey in his pickup if I wanted some. I did, but I declined. The man wanted to talk to me. The boy said nothing. He was painfully shy. I suggested we sit in my jeep. I knew exactly what was coming. I had seen it all a thousand times, and I would wake up, drenched in sweat. We sat in my jeep. I had a thermos of hot coffee, and some Styrofoam cups. The man and I sat up front. The boy and my dog, Navajo, sat in the back. I cannot relate the exact conversation. For one thing, I do not remember it. It is a blur. For another thing, I agreed not to do that. The issue of privacy is something I take very, very seriously. In the religious ceremonies of the Navajo, masks are worn by dancing participants. The masks must not be removed. To do so would be to strip away the faces of the gods, and you might not like what you see. The only thing I remember vividly is the sound of the rain on the top of the jeep. It had a soft top then. A top you could put down. Since then I have had a hard top put on the jeep since I am not someone who drives with the top down anymore. In my old age I am conservative and cautious. I avoid the wind. It poured like hell. It pounded on the top of the jeep like a drum at a Yeibeichai. When it rains in Navajoland, you remember it. Parents often seek me out. My work with disabled children in school districts all over the Southwest is not a secret. What I know comes from having worked with children in real, hands-on ways. It comes from experience. Not a book. The people in this part of rural New Mexico know about my memoir, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams. They've read it. Usually the parents are looking for advice. Simple. Sometimes they want you to actually work with their kid. Not so simple. Sometimes you can. Sometimes you can't. The man was sick. I could see that. His eyes were in that beyond exhausted place where everything goes numb. He moved his long, Navajo hair away from his neck. He wanted me to see. I did see, and then I looked away. Outside the window of the jeep, rain. I could not even see the lake. I looked over at the man again. I am not a doctor. Purple lesions ran up and down his neck like a road map. Something had exploded inside a plethora of dark veins that spread themselves out not unlike a spider. Now I knew what this was about. Something inside of me grew very quiet. Very sober. The man had AIDS. I would learn his wife had AIDS. The boy in the backseat with the dog had it, too. Thunder. Lightning. Pouring rain. The sky had gone black again. I do not know if the gods of white people actually speak to them. I think not. My gods speak directly to me. Unlike the traditional Navajo who live here, my gods look at you right in the eye, and they are not always good or benevolent. Begochiddy is no god I ever want to know. Begochiddy is the mythical Navajo sun god who cast his sons out, sending them to earth with enormous, almost impossible tasks to complete. Armed with lightning, intelligence, and the ability to adapt to an always changing world, the war twins defeat the ravaging monsters. Their father was always testing them. My little jeep shook. I could not do this. I was sorry. But I could not take some boy I did not know into my home. Into my life. The responsibility. Even if my house is empty not unlike the way some men are vacant shells. I am not a candidate to care for some child with pediat- ric AIDS. I had no advice. Sometimes you can be real slick, coolly professional, give parents referrals, and sit back smugly, like you've really helped them out. It is professional bullshit. You fool no one. The kid had AIDS. The parents could no longer care for him. They had probably done a rotten job of it from day one. But they had tried. They were putting their affairs in order. They were not terrific parents, but they wanted this child to have a chance at life. Or these two people would not be here. I'm sitting there thinking: just fuck me. Why me? I have gone by that house a hundred thousand times. It is on the way to town. You take the paved road through what we call the Checkerboard. The Checkerboard exists at the edges of the Navajo Nation, and it is mainly lost sheep, scrub, rock, snake, coyote, cactus, goats, and drifting sand. It is where my people come from. Migrating sheep camps. Cow range. Anasazi ruins everywhere. Uranium mines. The Checkerboard and the surrounding terrain is populated with a vast moving mixture of Hispanic people, Navajo people, Pueblo people such as the Acoma, and the Zuni. To the east, there is the enormous Jicarilla Apache Reservation. It is a place of canyons, horses, reservations, cultures that cling precariously to existence, voices from the past, and, above all, languages. Tongues. Songs. Drums and flutes. Old men who still play their classical Spanish guitars with the seductive, dark arrogance of the conquistador. The Checkerboard is the enigma of the living desert, above which sits a sky as blue as my first lover's eyes. In New Mexico you can reach up, pull the sky down, and taste it. We are only creatures who walk the surface of the earth (which is how the Navajo refer to themselves in their mythology). There it is on the right. That tarpaper place with the beer cans everywhere. Whenever I went by I bit down on my teeth and tried my best not to look at it. The poverty was the poverty of the people who had brought me into the world. The people who live at the edges of existence. It is a defeated place. It was like slowing down when you come upon an accident. Some horrible thing has occurred here, and people are hurt forever. When I didn't want to see it, I would take the long way into town. It was painful to look at. All the dog shit in the mud. We call this kind of mud the Big Mud. It was a sea of mud. The mud and bright orange, plastic tricycles stuck in thickness. The remnants of disposable diapers torn and littered here and there. Can't you just please pick up the fucking diapers? The windows broken. The clothesline heavy with clothes left in the rain. The rusted hulks of cars. That chicken-scratch shack. I hated it. The coyote eyes looking out like prisoners. I looked into the rearview mirror. Yaaaaa. His eyes. They would haunt me in my dreams. I said no. They left. I hoped forever. But the sun gods were not done with me. I had moved back to the reservation one more time. I had left a woman I loved. I loved her more than anything, but I could not live with Tina. Not now. For the moment. We are so different. She was an urban person and functioned well in cities. Tina was happy there. She did good work there, and taught children no one wanted. The disposable ones. Children almost everyone had washed their hands of. I had been a kid like that. Children always balanced on the razor's edge that divides this world from the world of the institution. Tina is often their only hope. She was mine, too; I was just too self-involved to see it. I am in awe of her. I do not have half the brains this woman has. I am not urban, and I don't function well in cities. They leave me confused and anxious. They overwhelm me especially with noise. I had every learning-disabled diagnosis in the book. I was alone again, and sliding into some vacuum of suicidal blackness. There was a vacuum in my guts and it was eating me alive. I was without Tina and she is my rock. I had asked her so many times to move with me back to the reservation. But the reservation scares her. I do understand. It is so remote. From my front porch I can see three hundred miles north and not a single solitary house or soul. All of it mountains, desert, and jackrabbit. The nearest store is hours and hours away. Going to town is an expedition. There are no jobs on the reservation. Not one. What woman is going to live here with me? I drove my dog home and went to bed. Those eyes. That boy. The thunder and the rain. I was in a bookstore in White People Town. I was there to read my book. I am told that when writers do this reading and speaking it sells books, but I am not sure I believe it. When you're finished reading, bookstore owners expect you to play questions-and-answers with white people who want to know things like what do you really think of Tony Hillerman? I can only shrug. Tony Hillerman writes Navajo mysteries. The Navajo are the real mystery. I do not claim to know them. Does anyone know the Navajo? Is it possible? I exist outside the context of any group or clan. I was a migrant worker. Just another brat born into a sheep camp. I do not belong to any tribe. I can only speak for myself. It is only within the context of recent history that the Navajo defined themselves within tribal perimeters. They had always been a loosely knit band of roving clans. For centuries, the warriors were beholden to no one specific leader, no chief, and warriors could join the ranks of any guiding star they wanted their family to follow. When the grazing was good at the upper levels, they moved their sheep there. When the mountain weather turned ugly, they moved their sheep down into the valleys. The fundamental notion of the sheep camp is one of movement. People are always moving to and from the sheep camp. This included my mother, who met a white man (we call them Anglos) who (no accident) was a migrant worker but saw himself as a cowboy. My parents could work just about any job on any ranch. But they also picked cash crops, because at the end of the day, they could and did count their money. And then they moved on. I look just like my Anglo dad. I have lived on many reservations. I have lived among the Navajo, the Tewa, the Chippewa, and the Mescalero Apache. I have worked with the children of these tribes. The reservation with its poverty and its rich sunsets and its coyotes who laugh, howl, and disappear. I am never asked in bookstores about poverty on the reservation. I am never asked by Anglos about the death that comes from the uranium mines imposed upon us. I am never asked why the Navajo do not have water. Yet the coal mines and the gold mines and the silver mines and the uranium mines and the copper mines have all the water they need. All over the West. All over the West the water goes to them. I am never asked by Anglos about health care on the reservation. I am never asked about the schools on the reservation where if you dared to speak in Navajo you got your mouth washed out with soap. I am never asked about tuberculosis on the reservation. I am never asked about starvation on the reservation. Those people who have the reservation in their blood just know. We know about these things. These events in bookstores seem to be about as relevant as a tea and crumpets party given by the Methodist Ladies Society. I am asked about Tony Hillerman. I do not understand these events. I do not know Tony Hillerman. Why would I read him? To study the Navajo? It's like you've made some jewelry, and you've taken it to the flea market. You sit there at some card table, and white people come along, and want to know if you know Tony Hillerman. I try not to look at white people. I saw him then. I saw him walk into the bookstore. The bell above the door rang. The boy at the lake. It's late at night. It's dark, and I am wondering how he got here. We are miles from the reservation, and he's dressed in a thin T-shirt. I saw him steal a book. He stood in line. I signed it. "Who am I signing this for?" I asked. I knew his name. His dad had told me. Up at the lake. In the rain. In the jeep. Purple veins up and down his neck like a road map into hell. With the gods above us and the dragons screaming blood. "Awee," he said. "A W E E." For Awee. What are you doing here, and how did you get here, and why do I smell cigarettes on you, and where is your coat? He does not like what I have written in the book he stole. He frowns. "I'm here to ask you one more time--pleeeeeeze--and I don't gotta coat. I know boys you worked with." Yaaaaa. So what? This is not unusual. There is a pipeline among these kids. The mad ones. Kids who live at the edges of the system. Foster kids. Kids in jail. At the edges of the desert blacktop with their thumb out. Hitchhiking into that yellow twilight at the edge of town. The ones who will not graduate from high school this year. Adults get rated. You are someone they can tolerate. Or you are someone to be avoided at all costs. Once you have made it to the to be avoided at all costs list, there is no way in hell or shit that you will ever make it back to the tolerated list again. Children are intransigent. These are children fighting for their lives. "How did you find me?" "It was in the paper. Do you gots a cigarette?" The chances of my having a cigarette were not good. He was shivering. "You're freezing, Awee." "Yes." I buy him something hot to drink. I give him my coat. "They're gonna put me in a foster home if you won't take me," he said. "I will run away. I will. I know how to hitchhike. I hitchhiked here. I don't need nobody. I can take care of myself. I am not no fucking baby." "It's really dangerous for a boy your age to be out there hitchhiking," I lectured. I have worked with boys who hitchhike in the dark in New Mexico. It's like asking to be raped. We find bodies of nude boys in ditches. No one knows who they are or where they came from. Strangled and dumped in the desert. "Please. I know you had a son once. Everyone knows that. You wrote about it. He died. It was in the paper. I read about it. We could do this. You and me. I'm alive. I won't be any trouble. I'll just stay out of your way, okay? But the foster homes are bad. Really bad. They won't let you be on no baseball team in the foster homes, and I just wanna play some baseball is all I want. Do you gots a cigarette?" Why would anyone sane adopt a child with AIDS? Because one comes to you. Because you can. Because he needs you. Because he is asking you to adopt him. Because you know about the bureaucratic strings and how to pull them. Because he is going to be one more dead Indian child and not even shit as a statistic. Because he has no coat and he's shivering. Because the two of us are all by ourselves. Because he likes baseball. Even here, sitting in a bookstore coffee shop drinking hot chocolate with a raggedy kid, I am out of place, out of context, and so alone. The reservation in the darkness sings the songs of gods to me. The reservation is my home. Excerpted from The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping by Nasdijj All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.