Coyote and I chuckled over this, and Granuaile knew Oberon had said something amusing, but she refrained from asking what it was. She was still trying to keep her amusement over the Oprah revelation from showing on her face.
Sensing this, perhaps seeing the flicker of a smile at the corners of Granuaile’s mouth, Coyote chose to move on. “Look, Mr. Druid. A long time ago, I fucked things up for people. Brought death to the world, you know, made it permanent. It’s tough to live that down. I’ve always done things to satisfy my own hungers; seems like I’m always hungry,” he said, gesturing to the stack of empty plates in front of him. He paused as the waitress arrived with his four additional orders of sausage and cleared away his dishes. Then he continued, “But I see now there are other hungers than mine to feed. An’ I want to do somethin’ about it. I want to do somethin’ that is one-hunnert percent good. People will look an’ say, where’s the downside? What trick is Coyote playin’ now? But there won’t be any. An’ that’ll be my finest trick of all.”
Coyote ate his sausage even faster than before, then got up to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back. That meant I got stuck with the bill; I should have seen that one coming. The trickster was waiting for us out in the parking lot with a grin on his face.
“Took you long enough,” he said. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah, let’s do this.”
Coyote called shotgun and was visibly surprised when I moved to the rear door. “She’s driving?”
“Yeah. It’s my car,” Granuaile said, then arched an eyebrow. “Is there a problem?”
“Hell, no.”
“Good.” She beamed at him briefly, then ducked into the driver’s seat.
<You almost died again, Coyote. Close call,> Oberon said.
At Coyote’s direction, we drove on 160 northeast toward Kayenta, but before we got there we turned off on a dirt road just on the far side of a massive sandstone wonder called Tyende Mesa. It was rough, dry country, covered in red rocks and infrequent attempts by plant life to make a go of it. The trees were scrub cedars and junipers; there wasn’t the cactus you’d find to the south in the Sonoran Desert. People tend to picture the state of Arizona as all saguaros and rattlesnakes because that’s the sort of postcards they keep seeing, but saguaros don’t grow on the Colorado Plateau. Parts of the plateau are pretty lush with pine, like the southern tip of it known as the Mogollon Rim, but on the reservation the topsoil is shallow and sandy and mostly unable to support large trees, except in the bottoms of old washes.
The road was extremely rough in places. Discarded tires bore mute testimony to the fact that the thin layer of sand covered sharp rocks. We crossed a one-lane metal bridge that spanned a narrow defile — a flash-flood canyon that eroded anew every time it rained and the water trailed off the bare rock of the mesa — and, shortly after that, Coyote directed us to pull over onto a cleared patch on the left side of the road. There, the mesa rose up steeply in a sort of terraced fashion until it flattened out again, then two magnificent buttes jutted up almost like the dorsal fins of some massive, mad creature, an avatar of erosion swimming in sand. The flash-flood wash we had crossed no doubt began between those buttes. In the other direction, the plateau was flat and covered with various bunch grasses and a few stunted trees, all the way to Kayenta and beyond. We took some canteens with us and began hiking up the mesa toward the buttes.
“First thing I need you to do,” Coyote said halfway up, “is make a nice smooth graded ramp here to speed up the construction of a road. Down there where the car’s parked,” he pointed to the flat, arid plateau, “we’re going to build the work camp that will eventually become a town. And once we build the factories for our solar and wind companies, it’ll be a proper city. A carbon-neutral one too.” He put a hand next to his mouth and whispered as if he were sharing a secret, “I learned that carbon-neutral shit from a hippie in Canyon de Chelly.”
We continued to hike until we crested the first terrace. The next layer, sort of like a wedding cake, loomed on either side. We walked west down a valley dotted with scrub cedar for about a quarter mile, until Coyote stopped and spread his arms wide to indicate the northern butte face. “Here is where you make my people rich,” he said. “Move the gold underneath this mesa. We’ll put the entrance to the mine in that little cave right there.” He pointed to a small depression at the base of the butte that qualified more as a niche than a cave.
I shook my head. “You know, Coyote, this makes no sense geologically. You can’t put gold underneath this kind of rock. Geologists will scoop out their eyes with a melon baller and ruin their shorts when you start hauling precious metals out of here, because it will put the lie to everything they know. Then you’ll have prospectors searching for gold underneath every chunk of sandstone around the world and getting pissed when they don’t find any.”
“I don’t care, Mr. Druid. This is the place.”
“It has to be here? We can’t pick a spot elsewhere on this huge reservation that makes more sense in the natural world?”
“It has to be here. I’ve gotten permission to build here from the Kayenta chapter, I’ve gotten you permission to live here while we do it, and my workforce and business connections are all in Kayenta. This here is where we change the world, Mr. Druid.”
<But no pressure or anything, Atticus.>
Chapter 4
As we were hiking back down the hill, three white work trucks rolled up behind the car. They were full of people in jeans and orange T-shirts, some wearing cowboy hats and others wearing hard hats. One man in a hard hat started giving directions, and the workers moved to get stakes and sledges out of the truck beds along with surveying equipment and one of those portable toilets. A woman and an older man stood next to the man in the hard hat. They weren’t wearing orange shirts, and thus I concluded they weren’t technically part of the work crew.
All three of them were very happy to see Coyote. They shook hands and traded smiles full of affection for one another. Their faces turned expressionless, however, when Coyote began to introduce the white people. He remembered our fake names, thankfully.
“Reilly and Caitlin Collins,” he said, “this here is my construction foreman, Darren Yazzie.” The man with the hard hat nodded at us and mumbled a “Pleased to meet you.” He was a well-muscled fellow in his mid-twenties, his eyes mere slits in a sort of perpetual squint from working outside all the time. He wore his hair long and braided in the back in a single thick queue.
Coyote pointed next at the woman, who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. She wore a thin black Windbreaker over a yellow polo shirt. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a simple ponytail, and she had a pair of eyeglasses with thick black rims resting on her nose. A hundred subtle cues of body language told me that there was a keen intelligence behind those eyes; I knew she was important to this project before Coyote said a word. “This,” he said, “is Sophie Betsuie, the head engineer.”
“Hello,” she said, shaking our hands firmly. “Nice to meet you.”