Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2007 The Arc and the Sediment Christine Allen-Yazzie Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the Indigenous Studies Commons Recommended Citation Allen-Yazzie, C. D. (2007). The arc and the sediment. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Th e Arc and the Sediment Th e Arc and the Sediment Christine Allen-Yazzie Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Copyright © 2007 Utah State University Press All rights reserved. Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 www.usu.edu/usupress/ Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper *** Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Allen-Yazzie, Christine Diane. Th e arc and the sediment / Christine Allen-Yazzie. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-87421-654-7 (acid-free paper) 1. Women alcoholics--Fiction. 2. Women authors--Fiction. 3. Interracial marriage--Fiction. 4. Separated people--Fiction. 5. Navajo Indians-- Fiction 6. Voyages and travels--Fiction. 7. Deserts--Fiction. I. Title. PS3601.L439A73 2007 813’.54--dc22 2007004631 “Nature abhors a vacuum.” —Empedocles “Nothing exists but atoms and the void.” —Democritus “…just as heavy bodies, when rising, move more rapidly in the lower region where the propelling force is, and more slowly in the higher; and when the force which originally propelled them no longer acts upon them, they return to their natural position, that is, to the surface of the earth.” —Hero of Alexandria, “Treatise of Pneumatics,” 100 A.D. Table of Contents Th e Plan 1 Th e Plan, Amended 2 New Breasts = New Bras 9 To Food 11 Dear James 15 You Got to Cut Its Th roat 19 Hello, Please Help Me 27 How to Make the World a Better Place 29 Just So You’re All Right Now 35 All Th at Matters 38 Th e Arc and the Sediment 43 A Sore Cursing 48 Hello, Kitty 55 Fruit Sauce Should Always Be Served on the Side 68 Th e Curiously Multifaceted Nature of Victimization 75 Th e Wavering Red Light 81 An Unspeakable Shine 84 Entering the Th ird Dimension 87 Forward, Anywhere 98 What Becomes of Virginia Dare 102 In the Vat Lies the Fruit 103 Second Place Is Pretty Good, Considering 113 A Little Reluctance Goes a Long Way 115 I Want Some Cookies 121 Who’s Your Butterfl y? 123 In Drills and Bursts 128 Rubber Hatchets 134 I’m Saying If 136 I’m Saying When 138 Do You Want to Save Changes? 142 As a Matter of Spite 153 Keeping It Out 156 Words for Later 162 And Also It Goes Back to Th at Whistle 171 Th ey’ll Eat My Irises 178 Or What 185 Th e Image Lasts All the Way Across 189 Afterword: Gretta’s Alternative Twelve Steps to Sobriety 194 Acknowledgments 196 Th e Plan Tonight Gretta will arrive sometime about midnight in Fort Defi ance, Arizona, to retrieve her husband in time for their ninth anniversary. Failing that, she’ll deliver to him his eagle-bone whistle. A three-legged Chihuahua will announce her arrival. Her little feet and broad shoulders will be admitted into a tidy if dilapidated single-wide where she is not especially welcome. If all goes as planned, Lance will follow her out of the trailer house and down the splintering stairs, and step into their pickup. Th e two of them will stop at a motel just outside the reservation, look at each other like shame-faced dogs from either side of a well-worn queen-sized bed. It’s possible they’ll have makeup sex. Gretta has shaved her legs, just in case. In the morning, they will go home to their two children, who might or might not be sitting up in their beds. Together, they will deliver news of either a reunion or a divorce. Together, they will work out the details. Or that was Gretta’s thinking at about seven o’clock this morning. 1 Th e Plan, Amended There is something beautiful about a golden naked woman lying in the sand, which is why Gretta is stretched out here in the not-ter- ribly-hot late-afternoon sun. But she is not a golden naked woman looking beautiful in the sand. Her face is swollen from drinking gin and is blazing vermilion like the redrock around her. Her sunglasses pressure her temples and the pajamas wadded up beside her smell like the janitorial closet of an old, canasta-addicted smoker. Her hair is tangled and salty, her doughy belly an aurora borealis of two long, nearly unendurable pregnancies. Peering through the window between lens and cheekbone, she sees that she is shaped like a crevice, like a V, and at the bottom of the V is hatred lying fallow, which is not, by defi nition, beautiful. In the front pocket of her army-surplus pack is the whistle, wrapped in an orange-and-white bandana. She takes it out, uncovers it to see that it’s still real, and looks at it without touching. She removes her sunglasses. Not a glimmer. Th e whistle, broken in two pieces, is dry and inanimate. What once braced the weightless wing of an enormous bird of prey now clacks top end against bottom, protected only by a bandana from her trembling hand. She doesn’t know why Lance trusted her with the thing. It was given to him in an event that involved days of praying, fasting, and sweating for reasons presumably too great, too indescribable, too Indian to share with her. Maybe this oddly placed trust is why she hopes to make amends with her husband. Maybe it’s why she doesn’t trust him. 2 Th e Plan, Amended 3 Pneumatic. Is it a word? She’ll be glad to be rid of the thing, of the responsibility of it, but as yet, she still hasn’t thought of something appropriate to say to Lance, and the detour she hoped would inspire the words is, rather, making her sleepy. She wraps the whistle back up and tucks it into the front pocket of her pack. She fumbles around the main cavity—four books, a few tampons, a stack of credit cards (both good and bust), a driver’s license (technically invalid, given that her neurologist refuses to declare her seizure-free at this time), receipts, more receipts, a bra, cigarette butts (stinking up everything—she smells her fi ngers—Jesus), a dictionary, a beat-up fl ip phone. No reception. She climbs an outcropping of rock. She slips, scrapes a knee and an elbow, bleeds, but fi nds herself oddly in range. A lizard skitters close, assesses her with pushups. She takes a photo of it with the phone. Her daughter might forgive her if she brought home such a thing, worthy of any second-grade show-and-tell—such delicate hands, a blush of blue spreading from underbelly to soft puls- ing throat, curious half-closed eyelids. She could keep it in something for now—the console? the glove box?—then buy a cage in Moab. Gretta lunges. She is rewarded with a discarded tail. Ice cream it is, she thinks. It’s just as well—the Navajo in her daugh- ter isn’t supposed to handle reptiles. Of course, now that Lance has left her, Gretta may have to reconsider the zodiac of cultural prohibitions they sutured together between the two of them and settle on which ones remain pertinent. If he doesn’t return, he will be responsible for seeing through his own. “Th ank you for calling Moab’s own Golden Granary Pharmacy, where customers always come fi rst. Para Español, marqué uno. To order refi lls by phone, press two now…” It’s not like her meds will work with as much as she’s been drinking anyway. A voracious bender presented itself some fi ve days ago and will end, in all likelihood, this afternoon—hopefully at a Laundromat. Once Lance is in-hand, or clearly not, she’ll get her Dilantin. At least she has Zoloft. Just breathe. Just breathe now. 4 Th e Arc and the Sediment Pneumatic. Th is is how it is: A word drifts from the ether into her nostrils, her ears, permeates the membranes of her eyes, and she must look it up, given the limited pool of language a Utah railroader upbring- ing and four and a half years of state college have aff orded her. Pneumatic—pneumonia? “Moved or worked by…” She sets her dictionary down and weaves across and around patches of cryptobiotic soil to the truck, heckling herself—she drove a couple of miles off the off -road, after all, probably over yards and yards of the fragile stuff , and now she tiptoes. One day, she will be an environ- mentalist in more than just theory. Maybe she’ll even be a vegetarian, except that she will eat fi sh, because fi sh, she is willing to believe, are too stupid to contemplate their own demise. She will be a woman whose socks match. When they get holes in the heels, she will throw them away and buy new socks—thick, soft knee-highs, not the junk socks she buys at Wal-Mart.