see a thing.”
Anne had come to the reservation two years before, using volunteer paramedical service as her escape from Phoenix and a family fortune that was based on buying desert cheap and selling it dear as test range acreage to the Air Force. Life for the Dillons was the Southwestern dream: Arabian horse shows, golf in Scottsdale, a box at the Sombrero Playhouse, and monogrammed tennis balls from Neiman-Marcus. In Anne’s eyes, the dream was a kind of sleeping sickness that infected everyone she knew. This whole class of sleepwalkers lived out their lives seemingly unconscious of Chicano barrios, black slums, and Indian poverty. By the time she was in college she’d diagnosed one peculiar syndrome of this “sleep,” the idea prevalent in this privileged class that somehow they were the true natives and that everyone else, particularly the poor of different colors, was an interloper. Hence, Chicanos were more likely to be called Mexicans. Blacks were Nigras. A dead Indian was an interesting item of Western Lore, but a live Indian was a social ill. And it was easy to live out this dream because accepting the rights of these less fortunate groups—especially the land and water rights of the Indians—led inevitably to uncomfortable sensations of guilt. Phoenix did not believe in guilt, it was not part of the life-style.
Guilt. Anne worked out of Hotevilla Pueblo on the mesa. Driving a hundred miles at a time throughout the mesa and into the desert to provide antibiotics and basic surgery to outlying pueblos, she had a great deal of time to consider social guilt as a motivation. Early on, she decided it stank. Indians stank, the pueblos stank, and the chronic running sores she dealt with day after day had a tendency to stink. After six months she thought she was ready to quit and trade in her jeans for tennis whites. From nothing less than perversity, she stayed for another six months and curious things happened. Either Indians stopped stinking, or she stopped smelling them. Increasingly she found herself surprised to be treated as a white by white tourists visiting the reservation. And she met Youngman.
Their paths had crossed a number of times before, enough to form an unspoken dislike between them. On this occasion she’d gone to the hill country around Moencopi, an area claimed by both the Hopis and Navajos, to treat a boy bitten by a rabid coyote. Navajo police and Youngman arrived to destroy the animal, which had taken refuge in a storehouse. While the Navajos waited outside the storehouse with their rifles, the Hopi deputy went in with a blanket and a pistol. At the cost of one bite through the blanket, he shot the coyote. For the next four days, Anne treated the boy and the deputy with a series of painful injections in the abdomen. On the very first day she told Youngman he deserved the pain for going into the storehouse instead of waiting. He answered that the family’s chickens and rabbit pens were at the top of the storehouse and if the coyote had broken into them half the family’s yearly food supply would have been wiped out. She was on hand with medicine, so what did he have to lose? Except pain.
Within a month, she was meeting Youngman regularly at different places on the mesa and in the desert. They reversed the usual order of a relationship, starting with the physical release of sex, and then talking and releasing loneliness. Love, each felt, came in spite of them. Now, with her leaving the Health Service and the reservation, love was nothing less than a burden, the embarrassing souvenir.
She clung to him, holding him inside her. But the storm was fading into squalls. Cold, liquid shadows ran over her arms.
“I’ve got to go. You can wait another four days, can’t you?”
“Selwyn’s girls haven’t seduced me yet.”
“Not for lack of trying. They’d kill me if they had a chance.”
“Well, watch out for falling pots.”
“I really have to go.” Anne kissed him and pushed him
Anne had come to the reservation two years before, using volunteer paramedical service as her escape from Phoenix and a family fortune that was based on buying desert cheap and selling it dear as test range acreage to the Air Force. Life for the Dillons was the Southwestern dream: Arabian horse shows, golf in Scottsdale, a box at the Sombrero Playhouse, and monogrammed tennis balls from Neiman-Marcus. In Anne’s eyes, the dream was a kind of sleeping sickness that infected everyone she knew. This whole class of sleepwalkers lived out their lives seemingly unconscious of Chicano barrios, black slums, and Indian poverty. By the time she was in college she’d diagnosed one peculiar syndrome of this “sleep,” the idea prevalent in this privileged class that somehow they were the true natives and that everyone else, particularly the poor of different colors, was an interloper. Hence, Chicanos were more likely to be called Mexicans. Blacks were Nigras. A dead Indian was an interesting item of Western Lore, but a live Indian was a social ill. And it was easy to live out this dream because accepting the rights of these less fortunate groups—especially the land and water rights of the Indians—led inevitably to uncomfortable sensations of guilt. Phoenix did not believe in guilt, it was not part of the life-style.
Guilt. Anne worked out of Hotevilla Pueblo on the mesa. Driving a hundred miles at a time throughout the mesa and into the desert to provide antibiotics and basic surgery to outlying pueblos, she had a great deal of time to consider social guilt as a motivation. Early on, she decided it stank. Indians stank, the pueblos stank, and the chronic running sores she dealt with day after day had a tendency to stink. After six months she thought she was ready to quit and trade in her jeans for tennis whites. From nothing less than perversity, she stayed for another six months and curious things happened. Either Indians stopped stinking, or she stopped smelling them. Increasingly she found herself surprised to be treated as a white by white tourists visiting the reservation. And she met Youngman.
Their paths had crossed a number of times before, enough to form an unspoken dislike between them. On this occasion she’d gone to the hill country around Moencopi, an area claimed by both the Hopis and Navajos, to treat a boy bitten by a rabid coyote. Navajo police and Youngman arrived to destroy the animal, which had taken refuge in a storehouse. While the Navajos waited outside the storehouse with their rifles, the Hopi deputy went in with a blanket and a pistol. At the cost of one bite through the blanket, he shot the coyote. For the next four days, Anne treated the boy and the deputy with a series of painful injections in the abdomen. On the very first day she told Youngman he deserved the pain for going into the storehouse instead of waiting. He answered that the family’s chickens and rabbit pens were at the top of the storehouse and if the coyote had broken into them half the family’s yearly food supply would have been wiped out. She was on hand with medicine, so what did he have to lose? Except pain.
Within a month, she was meeting Youngman regularly at different places on the mesa and in the desert. They reversed the usual order of a relationship, starting with the physical release of sex, and then talking and releasing loneliness. Love, each felt, came in spite of them. Now, with her leaving the Health Service and the reservation, love was nothing less than a burden, the embarrassing souvenir.
She clung to him, holding him inside her. But the storm was fading into squalls. Cold, liquid shadows ran over her arms.
“I’ve got to go. You can wait another four days, can’t you?”
“Selwyn’s girls haven’t seduced me yet.”
“Not for lack of trying. They’d kill me if they had a chance.”
“Well, watch out for falling pots.”
“I really have to go.” Anne kissed him and pushed him
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