Wheels!

  
Inside, Aunt Julia was tucked into her usual chair with that Navajo blanket with the red, black and white stripes on her lap. Billy was in his usual place there too. Both items would help with the chill. She had a small woodstove, but no fire was lit yet.

“You’re a good-looking woman Beth, but you’ll need a dentist one of these days,” she said suddenly.

“If those thugs have any reach nationally, they will be looking for a woman with missing teeth. This is a good place to disappear. And it’s not like there aren’t others but still something to think about. I know an old lady dentist who works out here on the res a few days a month. She also has an office in Joe. We could drop in on her one of these days if you want.”

There was a mirror on the wall over the sofa. It was one of those horizontal ones, like a landscape. Standing there I looked at myself. There was just a trace of yellow where the bruising around my eyes had been. I have dark blue eyes. I hadn’t been wearing my usual makeup since coming to Arizona. What I saw in the mirror was a woman who was no longer twenty years old but still rather nice looking. My streaky brown and sun-bleached hair was braided in one long plait that hung over my left shoulder. I am tallish for a woman and not thin.

The broken left hand had not been bothering me much. I hadn’t been using it and it seemed to be healing fine. That beating seemed to have been a long time ago to me now. The memory of my whole old life had a dreamlike feel to it in fact.

If I kept my mouth shut you wouldn’t notice the missing teeth, but as soon as I smiled or spoke you would. Aunt Julia was right. Something needed to be done.

“OK,” I said. “I can see that you are right. I just couldn’t imagine what we were going to do about it.”

“When you get your bedroom put together, we should get my grandson to drive us into town to see her,” she said. “I’ll call her.”

She patted Billy and closed her eyes. I went out to the kitchen thinking about some lunch. I thought about grocery shopping too. It seemed obvious to me that we were going to need some kind of vehicle to live out here. Ben couldn’t continue driving us all the time.

This was a problem for the near future, as was some way of making money.

I called out “Aunt Julia, would you like a sandwich?” She said yes, so I made tuna salad sandwiches, and we had them sitting together in the living room with Billy. I also made us some tea.

The afternoon drifted on pleasantly with talk of family and history and projects for the next few days. She seemed to be pleased by it all. I had never met anyone like her before. She was still. There was an air of quiet finality around her. Maybe it was a sense of knowing that I was noticing. Though she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds she seemed powerful. A tiny crinkled black-eyed matriarch. Jessie said she was 85 years old.

Finally, Ben’s old pickup rolled slowly up the driveway. It had a big load in the back. He parked it in the usual spot at the end of the mobile as there was no way to get closer to the hogan with it. Because of my hand being broken, Jessie and Ben did all the lifting and carrying. It didn’t take long. They set up the bed and carried in the bedding and made the bed too.

In a local thrift store in Winslow, they had found a little dresser, a small wooden table with two matching chairs. Those went in too.

I walked out there and watched. It was beginning to look habitable. I sat on the bed. This was going to be our home. I tried not to worry about how the lion had gotten in there earlier. For some reason, I still didn’t feel like discussing her yet with any of them, not even Jessie.

Ben was shorter than Jessie. He had a sweet round face and the usual black hair and eyes. I noticed that they looked related but not just alike. He still looked like a young kid. Jessie was thin and severe in general type. Back up in Washington I hadn’t really been aware of how “Indian” Jessie looked. It didn’t really come to mind. He was just Jessie to me.

Ben said he needed to get home, but agreed to help us with the dentist trip whenever it was arranged. He got out of his chair, kissed his grandma, and got ready to walk out of the door.

“Wait a minute Jessie, my dad has Grampa’s old Chevy pickup. It’s super old, like a ’57, but I bet you could drive it around. It runs, but my dad hardly ever uses it,” said Ben thoughtfully. “I’ll hype him on the idea when I get home.”

“Let’s call him now,” said Aunt Julia. “Maybe you guys can drive over there now and pick it up today. Why not?

“It’s still licensed to your grampa,” she said, “so, it’s really mine, isn’t it?”

The call was made. Ben senior agreed. He said he would be glad to have it out of his back yard. So, Ben and Jessie got back into the pickup and took off down the driveway again.

While Jessie was gone, I fed and watered the six hens. I brought them a wooden box, just in case they wanted a place to put an egg or two. They still needed a way to get up off the ground during the night. I promised them again that we would see to that. Even just a section of log to sit on would be an improvement I thought. I chatted them up a bit, hoping they would see me as friendly after the undignified way that I had carried them by their feet the night we moved them.

Then I thought about what to make for dinner. It was just like being home.

Just as it was getting dark Jessie rattled up the driveway in a rusty old Chevy pickup. Rusty with pale blue paint remaining in some areas of the body. It looked good to me. It sounded OK too. One by one our needs were being met.

After spaghetti and a little chop salad Jessie made a fire in Aunt Julia’s stove and we said goodnight to Aunt Julia. Jessie and I made our way out to our new bedroom in the hogan. He locked the door with the simple hook mechanism. He built a fire in the stove, and it began to be quite cozy.

“Beth, I saw the Phoenix paper while we were in Winslow. The headline was Cult Leader Vanishes. They published a smudgy photo that looked somewhat like you.

“Ben didn’t seem to notice it.

“I wouldn’t have thought people down here gave a hoot about high strangeness up in Washington,” said Jessie.

Link to the whole story so far; They haven't taken my phone yet.docx