Zuni Stew: A Novel (8 page)

Jack wandered past the silversmithing area. Findings, silver. Drills, polishing machines. Turquoise, coral, bone, agate, shells, and amethyst. All in bins, sold by the pound. Zunis, as well as two Navajo women in long skirts, waited at the pawn counter.

The trading post had it all: blankets, saddles, rifles, chainsaws. Jack needed only one thing—sustenance. He spotted a couple of shelves of foodstuffs in a small room. Skirting the pawn line, he almost tripped over a drunk propped up in the corner.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

The man, who was probably thirty but looked sixty, slurred, “Why did you do this to me?”

“What?” Jack leaned closer. The man’s hands were shaking and tears were running down his cheeks.

“I’m gonna go crazy. Buy me a beer...”

“What you need is a shower and some food. Get a job.”

“If I had a job, man, I’d get my wife back. Get my family...”

A woman, her face creased and leathered, said, “Come on, Earl, coffee in the truck.”

He helped lug the guy to his feet. The man kept muttering ‘Lost my place in line.’ Jack snapped up a loaf of fry bread, paid for it, and was in the VW before Stan showed up.

“I saw you met Earl,” said Stan, turning on to the highway. “Since his brother was killed in Vietnam, he’s never spent more than a week outside of jail. It’s the whiskey. Some winter he’s going to freeze to death.”

Jack and his twenty-five cent fry bread left Gallup just before two o’clock in a USPHS-labeled white Chevrolet, ready to take over as the only doctor available for the whole damn Jicarilla Apache nation.



Mario checked out a dozen trading posts in Gallup. He had to step over a half-dozen drunks in the space of an hour, and was disgusted and angry by the time he finally hit on something at a spot in the road called Vanderwagen. A hung-over Zuni remembered being in line, trying to pawn a necklace. Mario dropped a five in his lap. It disappeared. An Anglo, “Blue Eyes,” the man called him, bought fry bread. Mario pressed for more—what was he driving, which way did he head. All he got was a blank look. Indians were good at that.

A platinum-blonde woman with a beehive hairdo came out of the walk-in vault. Seeing Mario, she asked if he needed help.

“No, I got what I needed. Tell me, do the Indians around here get drunk every weekend?”

“Around here every day is a weekend,” she responded.

Mario slammed the screen door of the trading post behind him, stubbing his toe on the iron bars. The wheels of his car spewed gravel as he headed toward Zuni.



Jack drove north on Route 666 to Shiprock, toward Farmington. He was in Navajo country. A hexagonal hogan beside every house. His mind drifted. The lake house. Silver Bay. Lake Superior, more like the Atlantic Ocean than a lake. The opposite of the parched expanse in front of him. Desolate, windblown.

The road was bad; he was detoured repeatedly to the side of the pockmarked pavement. He passed a solitary Indian. Where was he headed? There wasn’t a dwelling in sight. What do they do out here? Herd sheep, craft jewelry. Make babies for the white doctors to deliver.

Crownpoint and Kayente to the west. Monument Valley in the distance. No trees, no gardens. An occasional trailer, truck. Ramshackle fencing, a hogan. The light crystalized, a mirage appeared out of nowhere. He was in it. The light was mind-boggling, reaching his eyes with a fluttering effect. A shimmer. Scintillation and shimmer. He had never experienced
such a clear head.

East at Shiprock, rumbling onto a steel-structured bridge over the San Juan River. Irrigated fields of alfalfa and corn. He left the Navajo Reservation and began climbing in altitude. Zigzag turns, steep drop-offs. A twisted guardrail left a precipitous gap. An unnecessary sign warned of ‘Dangerous Driving Conditions During Inclement Weather.’ More signs warned of 6% (sharp) downgrades, (sharp) curves, rock slides.

The land broadened into vast meadows. He was on the Jicarilla Apache reservation. The clinic, surrounded by pine trees, was easy to spot. A woman wearing a plaid shirt with snap buttons and faded Levis was sitting on the steps. Black hair bound in a knot. Coral earrings matched the blouse. As he approached, she pulled on a white lab coat.

“Hi Doc. I’m Gloria. Lots of sick kids,” she said with no inflection, and led him to three young patients, aged six to ten.

High fever, red throats, whitish-yellow exudates on the tonsils and back of the throat. Difficulty swallowing, swollen lymph glands in the neck. He told Gloria to swab for cultures. The kids were quiet, even when he coated their throats with gentian violet.

It was late when they locked up. Gloria gave him the key for the doctor’s residence across the street. He tossed the few belongings he had in an unused bedroom, then discovered a T-bone steak and some tater tots in the freezer. Things were looking up. He heard a knock on the door.

He was met with the stare of a large man, hair braided, a red band tied around his head. “You new doctor?”

“Yes, Doctor D’Amico. I’ll...”

“I’m chief of Jicarilla tribe. Cousin to Toklanni, big shot at Mescalero Apache Reservation.”

In a voice devoid of expression, the man proceeded to tell Jack what would be expected of him. The gist of which was not to interfere with the traditions of the Jicarillas. The chief simply turned and left on foot.

Door closed, Jack said out loud, “Hum. What was that all about?”

He fired up a grill on the concrete patio in the back, ‘borrowed’ a can of Coors, turned on the radio. He twisted the dial. Only Radio Free Europe.

A twenty-minute wait for the charcoal to burn down. He called the lake house. No answer. Next, Winnetka. No luck. He could call the restaurant, but hesitated. Too late, plus he didn’t really know any of his father’s employees. Pasquale kept the business side of his life separate from his family. He and Nic should have worked as dishwashers or bus boys, or waited tables. No. Pasquale had other ideas, and not soft ones.

He sent them Outward Bound, to learn survival skills. The only thing they knew about the restaurant business was to tip at least twenty percent.

The steak was over the coals. He ripped off a chunk of fry bread, opened another beer and tried out a rickety director’s chair. The canvas sagged, but held. The bread was sour, but not bad.

Two ‘stars’ near the horizon, rather than the zenith, glowed steadily. Planets, he knew, they don’t flicker. The clarity of the night sky was as exquisite as being in the mirage. A sense of peace swept over him. For the second time today.



Lori awakened to the sound of a vacuum cleaner in the hall, a long hall, a vacuum cleaner not exactly working right. She never slept so hard—was it the bourbon or the Navajo tea?

A fitted white shirt, tied above low-waisted jeans. Sandals. No time for breakfast. The Zuni hospital was her first stop.

Dr. Bill Newman was immediately taken. She was flat-out beautiful. He found it hard to pay attention to what she was saying. “What was that you said?”

“Jack and I are going to get married,” Lori repeated.

“What?” Bill said abruptly. “He didn’t tell me.”

“As soon as he finishes his tour of duty and is accepted into a residency.” He was mentally undressing her. “I’m here to surprise him. I just can’t be away from him for any length of time—do you understand?”

Bill certainly understood, and told her she was a bit late. Head of Area Office had sent Jack on a temp assignment.

Lori stepped close to Bill, who was now transfixed by her appearance. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Come on, where is Jack?”

“Lady, this is the military. Do you understand?” He paused, watching her fixed expression. “Need-to-know basis.”

Lori leaned forward, placed both hands on his desk. Knew his eyes were on her cleavage. She didn’t dare tell him she was FBI. Not yet. She stepped back, looking at his face, not eyes, and said, “I’m pregnant.”

“Pregnant?”

“Yes. He doesn’t know.”

Suddenly, they both felt a tremor. A pencil rolled across Bill’s desk. He caught it.

“What was that?” asked Lori.

“Lots of seismic activity around here.” And slipping plates, he thought, especially along the Continental Divide. He tapped the pencil on the desk, picturing flight maps in his head. A fault—north/south fracture just east of Dulce. Christ, Jack needs to know. He felt her gaze shift from his face to his eyes. And from his eyes to a place inside him that she understood. “Okay. He’s in Apache country, PHS clinic in Dulce. Up north, right on...”

“The Colorado border,” said Lori.

She left the hospital thankful Dr. Bill was a sensitive guy. On a hunch, she drove toward the pueblo.



Jack was met with a traffic jam. Trucks, mainly Ford pick-ups, parked all around the clinic. “What the hell?” Patients were standing in line, trailing out the door. “What’s going on?”

“High fevers, red throats. Like yesterday, white-ish yellow puss on the back of the throat,” answered Gloria.

“Sounds like strep throat,” he said, shrugging on a lab coat. His first patient was a five-year-old boy. “I’m going to swab some of the exudate on the tonsillar pillars. Make a smear with one, and plate the other on blood agar.” Gloria nodded.

He took one look at the slide. Myriads of strands and couplets of spherical organisms—all stained gram positive. “His temp?”

“One-hundred-and-three.”

“It’ll take twenty-four hours for the agar culture, but this is strep, no doubt. I’ll use penicillin, unless the antibiotic sensitivities say otherwise when we get them in a couple of days.”

It didn’t take long for him to find out what the clinic had in stock. Five vials of procaine penicillin. Enough to treat a third of the patients already at the clinic. God knows how many more to come.

He called the PHS hospital in Albuquerque. The consequences of inadequate or non-treatment of Type-2 strep could be disastrous. The next epidemic would be rheumatic fever. Associated heart problems. Renal disease. He could expect deaths in the very young and very old. Albuquerque promised to fly in supplies by the next morning.

By the end of the day, he had seen more than a hundred patients. He had antibiotics for twenty-five or thirty. They sterilized the clinic as best they could. He didn’t think some would return.

Dinner. Exhaustion. He plied open a can of tomato soup with a bottle opener, heated it in a cast-iron skillet, and retreated to the porch. A black night.

Suddenly the night sound of living things stopped—no crickets, no barking dogs. Only silence.

He stood dead still. When he stepped inside the house, the power went off. A monstrous cracking sound ricocheted. He was lifted off his feet and sent crashing to the floor. The walls of the living room separated at one corner. Walls shuddered, the floor reverberated. With a deafening bang, the walls slammed together again.

He crawled for the dining table and spread himself flat. Shaking continued for more than a minute. Then came stability, and with it, silence.

“Earthquake,” Jack said aloud. “What a godforsaken dump. Filled with goddamn superstitious, stone-faced, burro-headed Indians. And now this.”

A knock at the door stopped his tirade. The door was jammed and he had to give it several kicks and a violent jerk to get it open. Gloria was standing there, composed as though nothing had happened.

All she said was, “Happened before, mountain gods very unhappy.” She handed him a battery-powered lantern.

Jack brushed past her. The clinic door was broken off the hinges. In the darkness, he worked his way to the pharmacy. He slipped, reached out to regain his balance, and sent a stainless steel tray flying. The white metal cabinets had crashed to the floor. Pills and broken glass covered the linoleum tiles. The X-ray machine had been tossed across the room and bent in the middle by the 7-point-magnitude quake.

Without thinking, he picked up a phone. No dial tone.



Admiral Zeller was awakened by a phone call from the state police. Dulce had sustained a Richter 6.9 earthquake, larger than the one five years earlier.

“Any information on the clinic? Any fatalities?”

“Nothing confirmed. It’s too remote.”

After hanging up, he sat on the side of the bed, groping for a pack of cigarettes. His wife asked him what was wrong.

“That poor guy,” was all Zeller could say.



Farmington, nearly ninety miles away, had experienced the tremor. Mario bolted from bed, cursing New Mexico. His inclination was to get in the car and get the hell out of the damned state and back to civilization.

Down the street in another motel, Lori sat up in bed, feeling the rumbles. Distant, and fading. She would ask about it in the morning.



Tito roused, his body absorbing the earth’s rumbling, though it was occurring some one-hundred-and-thirty miles away. Opening his eyes, he saw his father standing at his bedside, silhouetted against the light in the hospital hall.

Louis Paul held the flat palm of one hand over him. “Still, my son, the gods are anxious about something. Listen.”

13

M
ario shaved, occasionally glancing at the small bathroom window, hoping to see some daylight. He told the desk clerk he would be staying another night.