A Town Without Pity

Gene Pitney got it right: "It isn't very pretty what a town without pity can do." Meg Taylor suffered through her high school years in a town without pity. Now, a decade later, she is returning only to help a friend. From the opening pages of RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, here's a glimpse of her love/hate relationship with Rainbow Rock, Arizona.

Meg left the rain behind as she turned north from Holbrook toward Rainbow Rock, nervously drumming the dash. Would people even know her? The slim, poised businesswoman she saw in her mirror every morning was a far cry from the chubby, awkward teen known as Peggy Taylor, or behind her back, as Piggy. Her ivory skin was clear now, her figure trim, her glasses replaced by contacts that intensified the blue of her eyes, and her weight down by thirty pounds. She'd changed her long, limp hair to short, chic curls that had darkened almost to black, but none of that had quieted her insecurity.

Brooding thoughts evaporated like the summer rain as she crested the ridge. Rainbow Rock lay before her, nestled in the bowl of a desert valley. Thunderclouds still rolled along the layered sandstone bluffs that had given the town its name, freckling their vivid colors in light and shadow, but the sky above the valley floor was clearing. Meg pulled onto the overlook and sat staring down on the town. For years she'd struggled to forget everything about Rainbow Rock, fighting so hard she had even forgotten the good things, like the rugged spectacle of the painted hills and the peace that followed a summer storm.

Peggy Taylor, Sally Williams, and Little Jimmy McAllister had been "the three musketeers," indivisible against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or the barbed insults of the high school in-crowd. Meg's loyalty to those friendships had finally brought her back; it caused her to move forward now, nudging her car onto the highway. As she dropped into the valley, the clouds along the far ridge dropped a veil of shimmering rain. A shaft of sunlight struck it and burst into color, streaking the sky with a brilliant double rainbow that stretched above the distant hills like a welcome banner.

Meg shook herself to ward off a growing sense of awe. She prided herself on being sensible, not given to seeing signs and omens. It was merely a coincidence that she had returned during one of the summer's loveliest moments, and that was all it was.

Want to read more about Meg Taylor and Rainbow Rock. RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME is now available as a FREE download for Kindle, Nook, and most other platforms. You can even read it on your computer; just download at Smashwords or scribd.com. Enjoy!

"The Beautiful One"

For a couple of decades I taught the American Indian Literature course at California State University, Chico. One of the archetypes that frequently occurs in native tales is "the beautiful one," the exquisitely perfect person whose beauty allows him or her to achieve what ordinary souls cannot. When I decided to write a book set near the Navajo and Hopi Nations, I created a "beautiful one" of my own.

From the opening pages of RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, here is the first time our heroine, Meg Taylor, sees "the beautiful one." She has just arrived in the town of Rainbow Rock, Arizona, and has stopped for gas.

Before her lay a stretch of red earth that reminded her just how lovely the desert could be. Dotted with sagebrush and greasewood, it lay perfect and timeless in the pure golden light of the afternoon, its plane broken only by the small, flat hill that stood a lone sentinel on the valley floor.

And that was when she saw him, the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He was climbing Valley Hill some forty yards away. His muscular upper body, bare and bronzed, was dappled by the spotty light as he worked his way up the bluff. He wore old, well-fitted jeans and climbing boots, and the light breeze riffled his leonine mane of thick blond hair. He seemed perfect, essential and ageless, at one with the bluff, the desert, and the endless sky.

Meg let out her breath, unaware she had been holding it, then stared in fascination. A shaft of light fell over the climber, making his tanned skin gleam like polished gold. "Who is he?" she whispered, not realizing she had spoken aloud until Kyle answered.

"He's a local guy. Name's Jim. Some kids spotted Indian relics and he's checking to see if there might be an old burial site."

Disappointment cut through Meg like summer lightning, leaving a flat taste. "A grave robber."

"No, ma'am, not Jim. He's not in it for the money. He locates burial sites and gets ‘em recognized by the state so nobody can mess with 'em."

"Oh." Meg turned her concentration to the man on the hill. He was beautiful, to be sure, but there was also something mystical about him--ageless and elemental, something that called out to her, drawing her to him. As she watched, he rounded the curve of the bluff and disappeared. Disappointment cut through her as she realized she had never seen his face.

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The Hopi Snake Dances

When I was 11 years old, my dad arranged for our family to travel to Second Mesa on the lands of the Hopi Nation to see the annual Snake Dances. For a little girl with a snake phobia, this was a mixed blessing: the opportunity to witness a rare cultural event combined with a waking nightmare. Yet I'm so grateful I went and had the opportunity while this ceremony was relatively open.

In RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, Jim takes Meg to see the annual ceremony. She is like I was: uneasy (read, terrified) in the presence of snakes. Here is a little of what happens, just as the ceremony is about to begin.

It had been nearly two hours since their arrival at the pueblo. They'd walked down from the place designated for the off-mesa visitors to park through narrow alleyways between the walls of the first American apartment buildings, some of them nearly a millennium old. The pueblos rose two and three stories high, built of stone and adobe. People reached the upper levels by climbing handmade ladders, and even the oldest Hopis seemed comfortable scaling their way up and down.

Many doors had been open as they came through and Meg had seen into the Hopi homes, their floors hard- packed red earth, some flagged in stone; their walls whitewashed and sometimes painted in dark geometric shapes. Lines were strung across the walkways, some draped in drying laundry, others hung with strips of raw meat that would soon become jerky.

They had finally come to the flat surface near the pueblo where Hopi men—some in ceremonial dress, others in jeans and flannel shirts—had designated the area for the dances and had carefully warned each watcher that cameras or recorders would be confiscated. Jim explained that the snake dances had not been photographed since 1911 and surviving photographs were few.

“I wish I’d seen them,” Meg said. “That might have helped to prepare me for this.”

“You’ll be fine,” Jim assured again as he took her hand. “You’re stronger than you think, and besides, I’m here too—if you need me.”

“Thank you,” Meg whispered. She found a tender sweetness in both his confidence and his support.

Now they sat in the proscribed circle, waiting, Meg's stomach tensing more with each passing moment.

“You know you’re lucky to be able to see this,” Jim said, gently stroking her fingers.

“Lucky? How’s that?”

“Look around you. How many white faces do you see?”

She looked and counted. “Not many.”

“These dances used to be open to tourists, if they behaved themselves,” Jim explained. “Now they’re only open to outsiders who have been specifically invited. It’s a long, sad story why, but let’s just say that some visitors didn’t behave themselves very well. The Hopi take these ceremonies very seriously. Even those tribal members who don’t generally practice the Hopi religion see this as a primary way of holding onto their ancient culture—well, this and using the Hopi language.”

Then he added, “And before you ask, no. I don’t even dream of speaking Hopi. Navajo is an Athabascan language, Hopi a Shoshonean tongue.”

Meg smiled. “Not at all the same, I gather?”

Jim shook his head. “I’m glad you get that. Lots of people think that just because I can speak the one, I should automatically be fluent in the other. That’s a lot like saying that someone who can speak Korean should be fluent in Mongolian just because they’re both Asian languages.”

Meg laughed. “I’m glad I knew better than that. It sounds like you’ve been around that block before.”

“A few times,” Jim said, but his voice was calmer as he went on to tell her that the snake dances had been closed to most outsiders since a popular comic book had characterized their deities as “evil kachinas,” or avenging spirits back in 1992.

For a limited time, RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME is available as a FREE download for Nook, Apple and, soon, for Kindle. Also available at Smashwords, OverDrive and scribd.com.

"Indian Burial Grounds" in Rainbow Rock books

Last week's entry introduced readers to a bit of the Navajo culture included in RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, a sweet contemporary romance now appearing as a FREE download. This week does a more realistic take on the old Hollywood concept of Indian burial grounds. Meg and Jim have taken a picnic to a nearby canyon filled with native petroglyphs. Burials like the one mentioned here are probably Anasazi.

For a time, they merely wandered along the creek, hand in hand, one and then the other pointing out sights worth noticing. After a time, they stopped beside another sheer wall of red, its last two feet mortared closed with gray cinder blocks.

"What's this?" Meg asked, leaning against the red as she examined the block wall.

"A burial."

Meg's hand came away as if she'd touched a hot iron.

"Some local kids crawled in there to check it out, found remains, and notified me. I called friends in the anthropology department at Northern Arizona University and they had a team out here from Flagstaff by the next weekend."

"I guess they must have authenticated the find," Meg said, inclining her head toward the wall.

"They authenticated it, examined and cataloged it, then reburied everything exactly as they believe it was in the beginning. After that, some Boy Scouts came in here and bricked it up as a service project, so nobody else would disturb the site."

Meg nodded understanding. Then she touched the rock again, this time almost reverently. "Who's in there?" she asked.

"They were children, three of them, apparently all from the same family."

"Oh." Meg felt the wind go out of her. "Three children in the same family. How old were they?"

"The eldest was about three, the youngest just an infant. The middle one was somewhere in between."

Meg thought instantly of Sally's beautiful children and felt a stab of pain for the unknown mother who had buried three children at once. If Jim had noticed the correspondence in ages, he was tactful enough not to mention it.

"My anthropologist friend dated the burial back to around the time Europeans first settled in this area. It's his guess that the whole family contracted one of the many diseases white men brought—smallpox, perhaps. Maybe typhoid or diphtheria. Apparently the adults survived, at least long enough to bury their children. There may have been older children who made it too."

"How sad." Meg's breath caught in her throat. "How very sad."

"Yes, it is." Jim paused. "Now let's find a way to get happy again." He grabbed her hand and ran, dragging her, splashing and protesting, into the creek.

RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME is now available as a download.

Cultural Context in RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME

This week's sweet sample is from RIDE THE RAINBOW HOME, which is now available as a FREE download (for a limited time) from Smashwords and scribd.com, and which will soon be available FREE from Kindle, Nook, and Apple as well. One reviewer said the overall quality of the book was "elevated by its cultural context." The book is set in northeastern Arizona and shares glimpses into Navajo and Hopi cultures, like this one.

Dawn crept over the eastern horizon as they made their way out of town toward the Navajo nation. The eastern sky was a rainbow of soft pastels, ribbons of pink, peach, and mauve mimicking the brighter layers of sandstone beneath them.

Meg quickly understood why Jim drove a pickup. By the time they crossed the borders onto the reservation, the roads had turned to barely paved trails. Later they became paths made by horses' hooves and wagon wheels, little more than ruts on the desert floor.

Their first stop was at a summer hogan some thirty miles inside the reservation. There Jim dickered for a magnificent squash-blossom necklace, got the price down so it sounded like a steal, then nonchalantly mentioned that he might consider the earrings too, and ended up paying as much as the artist had asked in the first place. All of it Meg followed through the men's body language, the items they picked up, and the dollar amounts they quoted.

"I didn't realize you speak Navajo," Meg observed with admiration as they started down the rutted path.

"Like a native, or so I'm told." He shrugged. "It makes sense. I learned it as a native language, right along with my English."

"How? Navajo is one of those languages nobody learns—except Navajos."

"Remember Franklin Nakai?"

She couldn't have forgotten. Nakai had been at the hub of too many jokes and pranks during her school years. "Didn't he work for your father?"

"That's right. He and his wife Ruth worked on our place from my earliest memory. Ruth helped Mom in the house. She understood English, but she never spoke anything but Navajo. I grew up speaking Navajo to Ruth and English to my mother. I learned both at the same time and never thought a thing about it."

"I've heard of that," Meg said. "We studied the concept in a language class in college. They say a child can learn any number of languages at once, so long as he always speaks the same language to the same person and never mixes them up. It's only when the same person speaks to the child in different languages that the kid gets confused, or worse yet, stammers."

"It worked that way for me," Jim answered. "When I got older, the Nakai boys were always around and we spoke only Navajo. When I'm with them, I think in Navajo. It's automatic."

"The only Navajo I ever learned was Yah-ta-hey."

"And that's only sort of Navajo," Jim said. When Meg looked confused, he told her of how a former tribal chairman had started a radio program for Navajo listeners and had created a greeting out of the Navajo words for "good" and "morning."

"So it's a translation?" Meg asked.

Jim nodded. “Sort of.”

"Then I promise I won't use it for the next two days."

“That’s a good idea,” he said, smiling wryly.

Their itinerary took them through Indian Wells and Ganado, as well as down a couple of rutted cow paths with the hogans or small homes of talented artisans at their end.
“I’ve noticed most of these little compounds have both a home and a Hogan,” Meg observed. “So where do they live?”

“Some of the Dineh still live year-round in hogans,” Jim answered, “but most have a more or less European style home they live in. Still they keep a Hogan for ceremonial purposes.” He grinned. “It can double as a guest house, too.”

Meg noticed how the hogans were all built in the same general pattern, mostly in hexagonal or octagonal shapes with an earthen ceiling. At each stop, Jim pulled into the door yard and waited patiently in his truck until the occupants came out to speak to him, explaining to Meg that Navajos considered it a sign of rudeness if a stranger walked up to their door. Whenever the people spoke English, Jim used it, trying to include Meg in their conversations, but many reservation-born artists spoke only their native tongue. Jim led those negotiations in rapid, easy Navajo, quickly concluding deals worth hundreds or many thousands of dollars and always paying in cash.
"Don't you worry about carrying so much money?" Meg asked as they loaded a beautiful hand-tooled saddle into the truck.

"Only when I'm off-rez," Jim said. "Things I take onto the reservation sometimes walk away by themselves, but I've never had anything stolen."

"What's the difference? Between walking away and thievery, I mean."

Jim frowned in concentration. "It's a little tricky to explain to someone who doesn't already understand the concepts, but the Indians have a communal sense of ownership unlike anything we know. If you leave a half-eaten plate of beans lying around, or a pair of still-serviceable work boots sitting outside your house trailer, they likely won't be there when you come back. They’re being used by someone else who has a need of them.”

“And people just accept that?” Meg felt her cultural norms doing a one-eighty.

“It’s what people grow up expecting,” he answered. “On the other hand, everyone here recognizes that money, being a European concept, is treated with a white or European kind of approach. It belongs to an individual. If it's mine, no one else will touch it."

"You sound like you have a real respect for these people."

"Where else in America could you drive around in a new truck with nearly thirty thousand dollars in your jeans and expect to come home alive?"

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