“This is my joy, my baby.” Paul gave Chee a playful punch in the arm. “I want to take you guys for a ride.”
The baby had six wheels and looked like the hybrid offspring of a bus and a heavy-duty pickup. The front was a truck chassis, the back a platform with seats on both sides of a central aisle and metal siding that came halfway up. A striped awning deflected the sun. The cover and the vehicle itself were yellow, the color of fertility, a sign, Chee thought, that Paul intended not only for his vehicle to stand out but also for his business to grow. Someone had carefully painted “Hozhoni Photo Tours” on the hood.
Bernie climbed up inside. “Nice Jeep. You can haul a lot of people with this.”
“It looks like a Jeep, but it’s an old military vehicle. It has a speaker system so the driver can talk to visitors. I call it a People Mover. The folks who ran the tours at Canyon de Chelly used it and I bought it from the old Thunderbird Lodge. Chee and I had some fun back in the canyon. You remember that, bro?”
Chee nodded.
“We’ll make a trial run in it later. Let me show you the rest of this place.”
They admired the solar shower he’d constructed, walked past an aged corral with a pair of horses, saw his single-wide and the hard-packed dirt basketball court next to it. Then came the new hogan. As Chee had suspected, but not mentioned to Bernie, it was far from finished.
Paul didn’t ask for help, but they offered to work inside it, sweeping the dirt floor, smoothing down the rugs Paul had brought, adding dowels where visitors could hang their clothes. Although traditional Navajo families slept on the floor on cozy sheepskins, Paul had wisely decided non-natives would be more comfortable with the option of a cot, and Chee and Bernie put them up and added the new bedding.
Paul had followed the traditional plan for building, so the octagonal structure had no windows. The single door faced east, as the Holy People advised. Ventilation was through the door and the smoke hole in the roof. Hogans provided a cozy living space for families in the winter. In the summer, traditional Diné herders went with their sheep to the fields, camping and using ramadas for shade and cooking. Tourists could sleep inside on a summer night if they wanted, Chee thought, but he preferred the open air, his sleeping bag, and moonlight.
After they worked in the hogan, Bernie made the mistake—at least that was how it looked to Chee—of asking if there was anything else they could do to help. There was, and when they finished, tourists from New Zealand, Japan, Michigan, and elsewhere wouldn’t worry about tripping over anything on their way to the outhouse. The wind came up, contributing fine red dust to the process of building the path.
Chee had failed to mention to Bernie that Paul liked to talk. Really liked to talk. That quality could make him a perfect tour guide, but the constant chatter combined with working in the heat usually gave Bernie what she called “the start of a headache.” She looked hot and sweaty, but his Laughing Girl didn’t complain about cleaning up someone else’s debris. “It’s beautiful here,” she said. She was right, Chee thought, as always.
When Chee found her alone, he suggested that they go see a movie. He liked the idea of sitting in a cool dark room after a dusty warm day working outside.
“A movie? There’s a theater in little Kayenta?”
“Not in Kayenta. At Goulding’s.”
“Goulding’s? Is that a town near here? I haven’t heard of it.”
Chee shook his head. “You haven’t lived, girl.” He explained that Goulding’s was an historic lodge named for the couple who put Monument Valley on the map, thanks to their appreciation of both the massive red buttes rising from the valley floor and the potential Navajo workforce. They enticed Hollywood director John Ford into using the scenery in classic films such as Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers. Monument Valley’s sandstone buttes became the landscape synonymous with the word western.
“Some of my kinfolks made movies out here in their spare time. You ever heard of a guy named John Wayne? Well, my relatives helped him get famous.”
Bernie laughed. “Gosh, I can’t believe you never told me all this before. So, does this mean they have a movie theater at the lodge?”
“Well, it’s not a theater like in Farmington. It’s a room with chairs, where they show those old films starring the Duke. You can’t buy popcorn, but it’s cool in there.”
“Indians always end up the losers in those old Westerns. Do you really like those movies?”
“Sure. You know, when Paul and I played cowboys and Indians with our friends, I always wanted to be a cowboy. I was in junior high when I realized a guy could be a cowboy and an Indian at the same time.”
“And a comedian, too.”
He grinned. “It’s five o’clock. Quitting time. I’ll buy you dinner at the lodge to go with the movie. A real date.”
“What about Paul? I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him.”
She headed off to take a shower with the sun-warmed water and put on clean jeans and a T-shirt.
“You two lovebirds go on,” Paul said. “When you get back we can hit the highlights of the sunset tour. I’m going to take you up to Enchanted Mesa first, and then—”
Chee let him explain the route for another five minutes. “Cousin, why don’t you tell us all about that when we are on the tour, so we can critique you as a guide?”
Paul nodded. “You get going. They get busy at this time of year.”
Before dinner, they headed into the cluster of buildings that formed Goulding’s Lodge, first to the quaint old museum with upstairs rooms where the Goulding family lived, and then to the exhibits about the geology and the world of movies downstairs.
Bernie stopped in front of a photograph, a still from one of the films. “Hey, look at this.” She drew Chee’s attention to a group of Anglo cowboys and others who looked like Navajos but wore costumes designed to resemble Indians of the Great Plains. She indicated a man who sat with a single cowboy on a bench. “That guy reminds me of somebody.”
“You know what they say. All Indians look alike.”
“He looks like your friend Robert. The one who made that bracelet for me.”
Chee studied the picture more closely. “You’re right. He does.”