Blasphemy wf-2 Read online

  “Would you ever consider doing a ceremony for a non-Navajo?”

  “Why, you need one?”

  Kate laughed. “I could use a good Blessing Way.”

  Begay looked offended. “This is not something you do lightly. There’s a lot of preparation involved and you have to believe in it for it to work. A lot of Bilagaana have trouble believing things they can’t see with their own eyes. Or they’re New Agers who don’t like the hard preparation—the sweat lodge, fasting, sexual abstinence. But I wouldn’t deny the ceremony to a Bilagaana just because they’re white.”

  “I didn’t mean to sound flippant,” she said. “It’s just . . . For a long time, I’ve been wondering what the point of it all is. What we’re doing here.”

  He nodded. “Join the club.”

  After a long silence Kate said, “Thank you for sharing that with us.”

  At this Begay leaned back and rested his hands on his jeans. “In Diné culture, we believe in exchanging information. I’ve told you something about my work. Now I’d like to hear something of yours. Mr. Ford here tells me that over there at the Isabella project, you’re investigating something called the Big Bang.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I been thinking about that. If the universe was created in a Big Bang, what came before?”

  “Nobody knows. Many physicists believe there was nothing. In fact, there wasn’t even a ‘before.’ Existence itself began with the Big Bang.”

  Begay whistled. “So what caused the Bang?”

  “That’s a difficult question to explain to a nonphysicist.”

  “Try me.”

  “The theory of quantum mechanics says things can just happen, without a cause.”

  “You mean you don’t know the cause.”

  “No, I mean there is no cause. The sudden creation of the universe from nothing may not violate any laws or be unnatural or unscientific in any way. Before, there was absolutely nothing. No space, no time, no existence. And then, it just happened—and existence came into being.”

  Begay stared at her, then shook his head. “You’re talking like my nephew, Lorenzo. Smart boy, full scholarship to Columbia University, studied mathematics. It screwed him up—the whole Bilagaana world messed up his head. Dropped out, went to Iraq, came back believing in nothing. And I mean nothing. Now he sweeps out a damn church for a living. Or at least he used to, till he ran off.”

  “You blame science for that?” Kate said.

  Begay shook his head. “No, no, I’m not blaming science. It’s just that hearing you talk about how the world came into being out of nothing, it sounded like the kind of nonsense he spouts . . . . How could the Creation just happen?”

  “I’ll try to explain. Stephen Hawking proposed the idea that before the Big Bang, time didn’t exist. Without time, there can’t be any kind of definable existence. Hawking was able to show mathematically that nonexistence still has some kind of spatial potential, and that under certain weird conditions space can turn into time and vice versa. He showed that if a tiny, tiny bit of space morphed into time, the appearance of time would trigger the Big Bang—because suddenly there could be movement, there could be cause and effect, there could be real space and real energy. Time makes it all possible. To us, the Big Bang looks like an explosion of space, time, and matter from a single point. But here’s the really weird part. If you peer into that first tiny fraction of a second, you’ll see there wasn’t a beginning at all—time seems to have always existed. So here we have a theory of the Big Bang that seems to say two contradictory things: first, that time did not always exist; and second, that time has no beginning. Which means that time is eternal. Both are true. And if you really think about it, when time didn’t exist, there could be no difference between eternity and a second. So once time came into existence, it had always existed. There was never a time when it didn’t exist.”

  Begay shook his head. “That’s just plain crazy.”

  An awkward silence settled in the shabby living room.

  “Do the Navajo have a creation story?” Kate asked.

  “Yes. We call it the Diné Bahané. It’s not written down. You have to memorize it. It takes nine nights to chant it. That’s the Blessing Way I told you about—it’s a chant that tells the story of the creation of the world. You chant it in the presence of a sick person and the story heals them.”

  “You memorized it?”

  “Sure did, my uncle taught it to me. Took five years.”

  “About the same as my Ph.D.,” said Kate.

  Begay looked pleased by the comparison.

  “Will you chant a few lines?”

  Begay said, “The Blessing Way shouldn’t be chanted casually.”

  “I’m not sure we’re having a casual conversation.”

  He looked at her intently. “Yes, maybe so.”

  Begay closed his eyes. When he opened his mouth, his voice quavered and was pitched high, as he chanted in a strange five-tone scale. The non-Western harmonics and the sounds of the Navajo words—a few still familiar, but most not—filled Ford with a longing for something he had no name for.

  After about five minutes, Begay stopped. His eyes were damp. “That’s how it begins,” he said quietly. “It’s the most beautiful poetry ever written, at least in my opinion.”

  “Can you translate it for us?” asked Kate.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that. Well, here goes.” He took a deep breath.

  Of it he is thinking, he is thinking. Long ago of it, he is thinking. Of how darkness will come into being, he is thinking. Of how Earth will come into being, he is thinking. Of how blue sky will come into being, he is thinking. Of how yellow dawn will come into being, he is thinking. Of how evening twilight will come into being, he is thinking. Of dark moss dew he is thinking, of horses he is thinking. Of order he is thinking, of beauty he is thinking. Of how everything will increase without decreasing, he is thinking .

  He stopped. “It doesn’t sound good in English, but that’s sort of how it goes.”

  “Who is this ‘he’?” Kate asked.

  “The Creator.”

  Kate smiled. “Tell me, Mr. Begay: Who created the Creator?”

  Begay shrugged. “The stories don’t tell us that.”

  “What came before Him?”

  “Who knows?”

  Kate said, “It seems that both of our creation stories have origin problems.”

  From the kitchen sink, a drip of water splatted into the silence, then another, and another. Finally Begay rose and limped over to turn it off. “This was an interesting conversation,” he said, returning. “But there’s a real world out there, and in it is a horse who needs new shoes.”

  They stepped out into the brilliant sun. As they walked back to the corrals, Ford said, “One of the things we wanted to tell you, Mr. Begay, is that tomorrow we’re doing a run of Isabella. Everyone will be underground. When you and your riders arrive, I’ll be the only one there to meet you.”

  “We aren’t doing a ‘meet and greet.’”

  “I didn’t want you to think we were being disrespectful.”

  Begay patted his horse and stroked his flank. “Look, Mr. Ford, we got our own plans. We’re going to set up a sweat lodge, do some ceremonies, talk to the ground. We’ll be peaceful. When the police come to arrest us, we’ll go quietly.”

  “The police aren’t going to come,” said Ford.

  Begay looked disappointed. “No police?”

  “Should we call them?” Ford asked dryly.

  Begay smiled. “I suppose I had a fantasy of being arrested for the cause.” He turned his back and plucked up the horse’s leg with one hand, the paring knife with the other. “Easy, boy,” he murmured, as he began to pare and trim.

  Ford glanced at Kate. On the ride back, he would come clean.

  35

  BY THE TIME FORD AND KATE reached the top of the mesa, the sun was so low, it seemed to wobble at the horizon. As they rode quietly through t
he blooming snakeweed, Ford tried for the hundredth time to frame what he wanted to say. If he didn’t start talking, they’d be back at Isabella—and he’d have missed his chance.

  “Kate?” he began, riding up alongside her.

  She turned.

  “I asked you on this ride for another reason besides visiting Begay.”

  She gazed at him, her hair like black gold in the sunlight, her eyes already narrowing in suspicion. “Why do I have a feeling this is something I’m not going to like?”

  “I’m here partly as an anthropologist, and partly for another reason.”

  “I should’ve guessed. So what’s the mission, Secret Agent Man?”

  “I . . . was sent here to investigate the Isabella project.”

  “In other words, you’re a spy.”

  He took a deep breath. “Yes.”

  “Does Hazelius know?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “I see . . . And you befriended me because I was a quick route to the information you needed.”

  “Kate—”

  “No, wait—it’s worse: they hired you knowing of our past relationship, in the hopes that you could blow on those old coals and coax the information out of me.”

  As usual, Kate had figured it all out even before he could finish.

  “Kate, when I agreed to this assignment, I didn’t realize . . .”

  “Didn’t realize what? That I’d be such a sucker?”

  “I didn’t realize . . . that there’d be a complication.”

  She tugged her horse to a halt and stared at him. “Complication? What do you mean?”

  Ford’s face burned. Why was life suddenly so incomprehensible? How could he answer her?

  She tossed her hair and brushed her cheek roughly with a gloved hand. “You’re still in the CIA, aren’t you?”

  “No. I quit three years ago when my wife . . . My wife . . .” He couldn’t say it.

  “Yeah, sure you quit. So—did you tell them our secret?”

  “No.”

  “Bullshit. Of course you told them. I trusted you, opened up to you—and now we’re all screwed.”

  “I didn’t tell them.”

  “I wish I could believe you.” She gave her horse a jab and trotted away.

  “Kate, please listen—” Ballew broke into a trot, too. Ford bounced up and down, one hand gripping the saddlehorn.

  Kate gave her horse another nudge and it began to canter. “Get away from me.”

  Ballew broke into a canter, unasked. Ford clutched the saddlehorn, his body joggling around like a rag doll’s. “Kate, please—slow down, we need to talk—”

  She kicked her horse into a gallop, and again Ballew thundered after her. The two horses whipped along the mesa top, hooves pounding the ground. Ford held on for dear life, terrified.

  “Kate!” he shouted. A rein slipped from his hand. He lunged forward to snag it, but Ballew stepped on the dragging rein and jerked up short. Ford cartwheeled off the back of the horse and landed on a carpet of snakeweed.

  When he came to, he was staring at the sky, wondering where the hell he was.

  Kate’s face loomed into his field of view. Her hat was gone and her hair was wild, her face in an agony of concern.

  “Wyman? My God, are you all right?”

  He gasped and coughed as air returned to his lungs. He tried to sit up.

  “No, no. Lie down.” When he sank back, he felt his head settling into her hat and realized she must have folded it up for a pillow. He waited for the stars to clear from his eyes and memory to return.

  “Oh my God, Wyman, for a moment there I thought you were dead.”

  He couldn’t gather his thoughts. He breathed in, out, in again, sucking in air.

  She had taken off her glove, and her cool hand patted his face. “Did you break anything? Do you hurt? Oh, you’re bleeding!” She slipped off her bandanna and dabbed at his forehead.

  His head began to clear. “Let me sit up.”

  “No, no. Stay still.” She pressed the bandanna firmly against his skin. “You hit your head. You might have a concussion.”

  “I don’t think so.” He groaned. “What an idiot I must seem. Falling off a horse like a sack of potatoes.”

  “You don’t know how to ride, that’s all. It was my fault. I never should have run off like that. You just make me so mad sometimes.”

  The throbbing in his head began to subside. “I didn’t betray your secret. And I’m not going to.”

  She looked at him. “Why? Isn’t that what you were hired to do?”

  “Screw what I was hired to do.”

  She dabbed at his cut. “You need to rest a little more.”

  He lay still. “Aren’t I supposed to get back on the horse?”

  “Ballew took off for the barn. Don’t be embarrassed—everyone falls off eventually.”

  Her hand rested on his cheek. He lay still for a moment longer, and then slowly sat up. “I’m sorry.”

  After a moment, she said, “You mentioned something about a wife. I . . . didn’t know you were married.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Must be hard to be married to the CIA.”

  He said quickly, “It wasn’t that. She died.”

  Kate covered her mouth. “Oh—I’m sorry. What a stupid thing for me to say.”

  “It’s all right. We were partners in the CIA. She got killed in Cambodia. Car bomb.”

  “Oh my God, Wyman. I’m so sorry.”

  He hadn’t thought he’d be able to tell her. But it came out so easily. “So I left the CIA and went into a monastery. I was looking for something; I thought it was God. But I didn’t find Him. I wasn’t cut out to be a monk. I left and had to earn a living, so I hung out my shingle as a PI, got hired for this job. Which I never should have taken. End of story.”

  “Who are you working for? Lockwood?”

  He nodded. “He knows you’re hiding something and he wanted me to find out what it is. He says he’s going to pull the plug on Isabella in two days.”

  “Jesus.” She laid that cool hand again on his face.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you. If I’d known what I was getting into, I never would have taken this assignment. I didn’t count on . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You didn’t count on what?” She leaned over him, her shadow crossing his face, her faint scent drifting in.

  Ford said, “On falling in love with you again.”

  In the distance, an owl hooted in the dimming light.

  “You’re serious?” she said finally.

  Ford nodded.

  Slowly, Kate brought her face closer to his. She didn’t kiss him—she just looked. Astonished. “You never said that to me when we were going out.”

  “I didn’t?”

  She shook her head. “The word ‘love’ wasn’t in your vocabulary. Why do you think we broke up?”

  He blinked. That was the reason? “What about me going into the CIA?”

  “I could’ve lived with that.”

  “You want . . . to try again?” Ford asked.

  She looked at him, the golden light all around her. She had never looked so beautiful. “Yes.”

  Then she kissed him, slowly, lightly, deliciously. He leaned forward to kiss her but she stopped him with a gentle hand on his chest. “It’s almost dark. We’ve got a ways to walk. And . . .”

  “And what?”

  She continued looking down at him, smiling. “Never mind,” she said, leaning down to kiss him again, and then again, her soft breasts settling against him. Her hand strayed to his shirt, and she began unbuttoning it, one button at a time. She slid the shirt open and began unbuckling his belt, her kisses becoming deeper and softer, as if her mouth was melting into his, while the shadows of evening grew ever longer on the desert floor.

  36

  PASTOR RUSS EDDY COAXED HIS TRUCK off the mesa road and drove toward a fin of sandstone, behin
d which he could hide the vehicle. It was a clear night, with a gibbous moon and a scattering of stars speckling the night sky. The truck lurched and rattled across the barren rock, a loose fender banging with each heave. If he didn’t borrow the arc welder at the service station in Blue Gap one of these days, the fender would fall off, but it made him feel so ashamed, always borrowing the Navajos’ tools and wheedling gas out of them. He kept having to remind himself that he was bringing these people the greatest gift of all, salvation—if only they would accept it.

  All day he’d been thinking about Hazelius. The more he listened to the man’s words playing over and over in his head, the more verses from the First Epistle of John seemed to apply: “Ye have heard that antichrist shall come . . . . He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son . . . . This is that spirit of antichrist . . . .”

  The memory of Lorenzo, sprawled on the ground, flashed into his head, the clots of living blood that wouldn’t sink into the sand . . . He winced—why did that hideous image keep popping up? He forced it out with an audible groan.

  He eased the truck behind the fin of sandstone until it was well hidden from the road. The engine died with a cough. He yanked on the emergency brake and blocked the wheels with loose rocks. Then he pocketed the keys, took a deep breath, and set off walking down the road. The moon was bright enough that he could see where he was going without the flashlight.

  He felt a stronger sense of purpose than ever before. God had called him and he had said yes. Everything until now, all the troubles in his life, had been mere prelude. God had been testing him and he had passed. The final test had been Lorenzo. It had been God’s sign to him that he was readying him for something big. Very big.

  The Lord had guided him in Piñon that afternoon. First a full tank of gas—free. Next, a turned-around tourist trying to find Flagstaff thanked him with a ten-dollar bill. Then he learned from the gas station clerk that Bia was investigating the death at the Isabella project as a murder—not a suicide. Murder!

  A coyote howled in the distance, answered by another even farther away. They sounded like the lonely, lost cries of the damned. Eddy reached the edge of the bluffs and scrambled down the trail into Nakai Valley. The dark hump of Nakai Rock rose on his right like a hunchbacked demon. Below, a scattering of lights marked the village; the windows of the old trading post cast boxes of light into the darkness.