“Are we allowed in here?” I asked.
“Stick with me. I can get you into all the best places.”
Down in the canyon we bumped over rough road for an hour, following the course of a shallow river. There was no moon that I could see, and I lost any sense of direction I might have had while we still had sun. I was exhausted but also for the first time in weeks I felt sleepiness, that rare, delicious liqueur, soaking into my body like blotter paper. I almost fell asleep sitting up. My head bobbed as we crossed and recrossed the frozen river and climbed its uneven banks. Finally we stopped, and slept in the truckbed, cuddled like twin mummies inside a thick wrapping of blankets. We turned our bodies carefully and held each other to keep warm. Outside the blankets, our lips and noses were like chipped flint striking sparks in the frozen air.
“No fair, you’ve got Jack on your side,” I murmured.
“Jack, other side, boy,” Loyd commanded. Jack stood up and walked over the cocoon that contained us, stepping carefully on our chests. He turned around a few times in the wedge of space behind me, then dropped down with a groan and snuggled against my back. Within minutes I could feel the extra heat and I fell into heavensent unconsciousness.
In the morning, a sugar coating of snow had fallen, lightly covering the rocks. Ahead of us the canyon forked into two; from the riverbed a red rock spire rose a thousand feet into the air. Low clouds, or high fog, brushed its top. I held my breath. Looking up at a rock like that gave me the heady sensation of heights. He’d parked so this would be the first thing I saw: Spider Rock.
The canyon walls rose straight up on either side of us, ranging from sunset orange to deep rust, mottled with purple. The sandstone had been carved by ice ages and polished by desert eons of sandpaper winds. The place did not so much inspire religion as it seemed to be religion itself.
I was dressed in an instant and walking around awestruck like a kid, my head bent all the way back. “It doesn’t look like a spider,” I said, of the rock. “It looks like a steeple.”
“It’s named for Spider Woman. She lived up there a long time ago. One day she lassoed two Navajo ladies with her web and pulled them up there and taught them how to weave rugs.”
The thought of standing on top of that rock, let alone trying to learn anything up there, made me shiver. “Is that the same Spider Grandmother who raised the twins?”
I expected Loyd to be impressed by my memory, but he just nodded. “That’s a Pueblo story and this is a Navajo story, but it’s the same Spider Woman. Everybody kind of agrees on the important stuff.”
I shaded my eyes and looked up the canyon. Its narrows gave window views into its wider places. Giant buttresses of rock extended from the canyon walls, like ships, complete with knobbly figureheads standing on their prows. Some of the figureheads had been stranded, eroded away from the mother rock, and stood alone as sculptured spires. Where the canyon grew narrower the rock buttresses alternated like baffles, so the river had to run a slalom course around them. So did we. The truck crunched over icy shoals and passed through crystal tunnels of icy cottonwood branches. We passed a round hogan with a shingled roof and a line of smoke rising from its chimney pipe. A horse wandered nearby, nosing among the frozen leaves.
Several times Loyd stopped to point out ancient pictures cut in the rock. They tended to be in clusters, as if seeking refuge from loneliness in that great mineral expanse. There were antelope, snakes, and ducks in a line like a carnival shooting gallery. And humans: oddly turtle-shaped, with their arms out and fingers splayed as if in surrender or utter surprise. The petroglyphs added in recent centuries showed more svelte, self-assured men riding horses. The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
Eventually we stopped in a protected alcove of rock, where no snow had fallen. The walls sloped inward over our heads, and long dark marks like rust stains ran parallel down the cliff face at crazy angles. When I looked straight up I lost my sense of gravity. The ground under my boots was dry red sand, soft and fine, weathered down from the stone. If the river rose to here, the mud would be red. Loyd held my shoulders and directed my eyes to the opposite wall, a third of the way up. Facing the morning sun was a village built into the cliff. It was like Kinishba, the same multistory apartments and unbelievably careful masonry. The walls were shaped to fit the curved hole in the cliff, and the building blocks were cut from the same red rock that served as their foundation. I thought of what Loyd had told me about Pueblo architecture, whose object was to build a structure the earth could embrace. This looked more than embraced. It reminded me of cliff-swallow nests, or mud-dauber nests, or crystal gardens sprung from their own matrix: the perfect constructions of nature.
“Prehistoric condos,” I said.
Loyd nodded. “Same people, but a lot older. They were here when Columbus’s folks were still rubbing two sticks together.”
“How in the world did they get up there?”
Loyd pointed out a crack that zigzagged up from the talus slope to the ledge where the village perched. In places the crevice wasn’t more than two inches deep. “They were pretty good rock climbers,” he said. Loyd’s forte was understatement.
There wasn’t a sound except for the occasional, echoing pop of a small falling rock. “What were they scared of?” I asked quietly.
“I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t scared. Maybe they liked the view.”
The doors were built so you’d have to step high to get out. Obviously, for the sake of the children. “Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?”
“No worse than raising up kids where the frontyard ends in a freeway.”
“You’re right,” I said. “No worse than that. And quieter. Less carbon monoxide.”
“So you do think about that sometimes,” Loyd said.
“About what?”
“Being a mother.”
I glanced at him and considered several possible answers. “All the time,” and “never” seemed equally true. Sometimes I wanted to say, “You had your chance, Loyd, we had our baby and it’s dead.” But I didn’t. That was my past, not his.
“Sure, I think about it,” I said, needing to relieve the pressure in my chest. “I think about hotwiring a Porsche and driving to Mexico, too.”
He laughed. “Only one of the two is legal, I’m told.”
I wanted to try and climb up into the cliff village, but Loyd explained that we’d crack our skulls, plus you weren’t supposed to mess with the antiquities.
“I thought you broke all the rules,” I said, as we climbed back into the truck and headed farther up the canyon.
He looked surprised. “What rules have I broken?”
“Authorized Navajo personnel only, for starters. We’re not even supposed to be down here.”
“We’re authorized guests of Maxine Shorty of the Streams Come Together clan.”
“Does she live here?”
“Not now. Almost everybody drives their sheep out and spends the winter up top, but the farms are down here. Leander and I spent almost every summer here till we were thirteen.”
“You did? Doing what?”
“Working. I’ll show you.”
“Who’s Maxine Shorty?”
“My aunt. I’d like you to meet her but she’s down visiting at Window Rock for the holiday.”
Loyd was full of surprises. “I’ll never get your family straight. How’d you get a Navajo aunt? Are Navajos and Pueblos all one big tribe or something?”