Into Thick Air (40 page)

Josephine sucks on ice cubes. Enos cleans his thick glasses with a paper napkin. Men in uniform swagger in, freighted with handguns, GPS locators, and walkie-talkies. “Here comes Leonard and the trackers,” says Enos.

The reservation's southern frontier is Mexico. The Mexicans frequently do not ask if they can visit the United States for a day or a lifetime. It's an old problem, but only recently a Mexican problem. In the 1880s it was the Chinese sneaking in to work on the railroads. In 1915, Congress created the “Mounted Guards,” but they were overwhelmed by the first real border rush in 1920, when Congress passed the National Prohibition Act. By making alcohol a crime, prohibition spawned an enormous smuggling racket, run by thugs with machine guns. Congress responded in 1924 with the first 450 official Border Patrol agents. It was nice work for the adventurous: you supplied the horse and the saddle, and the government supplied the oats, a revolver, and a badge.

Nowadays the smugglers with machine guns carry marijuana and cocaine. Leonard and his all–Native American team of trackers find them,
gauging the smuggler's load by the depth of the footprint. Along this piece of the Arizona/Mexico border, the “Tucson Sector,” another 1,700 agents keep an eye out for the more numerous job-seekers. Last year they caught over 600,000 people heading north. This is too much action for the locals. Rosita says with a scowl, “We've got the Border Patrol tearing up the land down by our place in New Fields. They're arrogant, insulting, intrusive—I can't find enough adjectives to describe how poorly they treat us.”

I tell them that I've been working on the border, with no problems from the patrol.

“That's because you're not a minority. You've got brown skin and you've got problems,” says Rosita.

Little brown Josephine warms to me and climbs onto my lap. I let her hunt through my handlebar bag and play with my flat tire kit. “Now,” says Enos, “you won't be able to get rid of her.” He checks out my bike outside the window. “Looks to me like there's room for Josephine.”

There is, but I leave by myself. A mile west I stop at the Career Center to take a picture of its mural that faces the highway, a mural that marvelously incorporates everything from bulldozers to the holy mountain called Baboquivari. Then a door opens and a young woman asks, “Can I help you?”

Just taking a photo of this very nice mural.

“You need tribal authorization to take a picture on the reservation.”

Including this building? I need a permit?

“It's sacred.”

She doesn't mean the cinder block, but the mural. It depicts the O'Odam symbol of life's journey, the man in the maze.

A car pulls up—did she call for backup?—and a man in a knit polo shirt asks, “Can I help you?”

I explain—just a photo—but he says, “No, you need to ask the artist.”

Who is, of course, not available. The mural is public art, but I'm not the public they had in mind.

I'm nine miles west, riding past thirty-foot-tall saguaros and squashed road-toads, before I understand: it's not the photo, but the asking.

For the longest time the O'Odam lived thinly, in a place where few others
could survive. Harvesting cactus fruit, hunting rabbit and deer, and farming melons, beans, and squash, they were married to the seasons and the quick-moving summer storms they counted on to flood their fields. This kinship with the land is now an eco-fantasy of sustainable living that nobody is willing to live.

Such is the O'Odam's dilemma: to be the color of the land, but no longer of the land. They favor the Ford Taurus or the pickup truck, some of which sport a custom front plate of an air-brushed warrior on horseback against a gory sunset. They drive considerately, giving me wide berth. Still, I keep an untrusting eye on my rearview mirror. Every few miles is a roadside shrine, a wooden cross with paper flowers, to those who crashed, generally drunk. It's an unsavory consequence of the local prohibition: you've got to drive off the reservation for a drink.

The sky is black as mold, but it's not raining. A tip-toe tarantula chooses the right moment to cross the highway. The wind carries me up a long grade, the sloping
bajada
of the Quijotoa Mountains. An enormous sloppy nest of twigs is tucked between the arms of a saguaro so perfectly suited for this purpose that it's been a hawk's nest since I was a teen, peering out the window of my parent's Impala station wagon at this very cactus. A few miles beyond is the Gu-Achi Trading Post. I could buy a man-in-the-maze wristwatch, but instead I pick up a free copy of
Diabetes Forecast
magazine and learn what happens when people eat too much fried food.

America is swimming with temptations. I'd planned on another night on the reservation, in the pass where a spinning windmill promises water, but the wind is irresistible. I' ll make seventy miles today, all the way to the off-reservation town of Why. The promise of a beer lands me in the XY Bar. On the tube is
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
It's set in the Old West of cowboys and Indians. Dr. Quinn is a knockout, and I join the O'Odam at the bar to watch the show.

 

THE ROAD TO AJO slips between a pair of plateaus, two flat-topped mountains of gray rubble stained with sulfurous yellows and poison purples. Hundreds of feet high and dramatically gullied by erosion, they might be declared a national monument if they were not mine waste.

“Ajo: World's Largest Tailings” says a postcard at the Information Center. Another card toots, “Ajo: Where Summer Spends the Winter.” None say, “Ajo: Where July Is Unspeakable,” but it's true. The closer to Death Valley, the meaner the desert.

Copper Hills Real Estate is next door. “We've got homes from fifty to two hundred and fifty thousand,” says Edie Cargill. She's fifty-eight, speedy, in a denim dress. I ask for an overview of the town, and she shows me a wonderful aerial photo of Ajo, showing every tree and road.

“Here's the pit. They're
never
going to fill that up.” She points to a grid of houses on the brink of the open pit mine. “This was Indian Town. And this was Mexican Town. The picture is from the seventies, before the mine closed, when Ajo was a very segregated town.”

Presumably the rest of Ajo was Whitey Town. The old plaza of date palms and arched arcades with red tile roofs looks Spanish but was built by the Phelps Dodge Mining Company. They built the Curley School, too, with its domed bell tower. Phelps Dodge built Ajo. And after copper took a dive, they sold Ajo.

The
Ajo Copper News
survives. I read it at Don Juan's Café while my waitress Marta eyes my coffee cup and asks, “
Un poquito más?
” An ad from Edgy's Repair Service reads:

Small-town friendliness isn't the only reason people live in Ajo. A front-page story compares not only the lower cost of living in Ajo relative to Tucson, but the lower cost of dying. “It costs less to be buried in the Ajo Cemetery than nearly any place else in the state.” Better yet, it's a classy place, with one gravestone featuring a “400-word copper wire epitaph.”

The cemetery, like everything in Ajo, is only a few blocks away. It's big and barren. There are graves marked by polished granite benches, and graves marked by heaps of stones. Baby graves. His-and-hers graves. But no copper grave.

Leaving, I pass a woman tugging at a stupendous weed, a sprawling four-o'clock, beside the cemetery gate. I stop to help, but by her lonesome she rips it from the earth and heaves it into the back of a pea green 1973 Ford Ranchero.

“Been yanking since 1987, but it's God's blessing.”

She's old enough to be my mother, trim in brown knit pants, nylon windbreaker, white nurse shoes, and hair by Clairol.

“The copper grave? Block 1. See that shed? Right there. Protestant blocks to one side, and the rest are Catholic. Mexicans, too, because they are most always Catholic. The copper words I thought might be interesting to put in the paper one day, but then I read them and thought, Not this crap. You're welcome to look for yourself.”

I can't find it. She drives up and points it out. “People think it was his wife that made that up, but it was his secretary. My parents are over there. Husband, too. Spot for me reserved, although Phelps Dodge stopped taking reservations before I took over in 1987.
Somebody
had to take care of the place. I asked them, and they signed over the deed.

“Now I had to get someone to run it. Got one man from each church—not a woman, because I didn't want any arguing with me. Men are supposed to run it. But the president, well, he's moved off to Mexico. I'm the secretary-treasurer.”

By now I've forgotten to read the copper epitaph. I ask, Secretary-treasurer of what?

“The Ajo Cemetery Association. Incorporated!”

Is it true that it's the cheapest in the state?

“I imagine it's the cheapest. It's free. We ask for a $100 fee, to help maintain the cemetery. Got two boys working for us, and the others paying off their community service. The $100 is
not
mandatory. It's so we can keep the place up—$700 a month for water! I've made a fair bit of money with my cookbook fund-raiser—sold three thousand copies, bless the Lord. I
wanted to name it the Ajo Cemetery Association Cookbook, but the reaction was pretty quick:
The dead don't cook!
”

Secretary-treasurer Roberta Nixon came to Ajo in 1950, when she was twenty-one. “I didn't find out about Jesus until I was twenty-four. Didn't know who the Holy Trinity was, didn't know who was crawling around up there. My girlfriend told me. She told me, Roberta, you're going to hell. And I said, Oh I'm not without you, because you've done worse. We're all sinners.”

For the first time in three days, the sun is peering through a break in the clouds, low on the western horizon. The mine tailings catch the rays and ignite in mineral colors.

“Ajo is a beautiful place. Let me show you something. Before you go.”

We walk lightly among the graves. Roberta never stops talking.

“Since my husband died I've been praying for a good man I could love like my two daughters, except maybe a little more. Never would have had them if the pill had been around.”

She stops at a double plot. “There's my father and mother.”

The headstones are engraved with flowers, clouds, a rainbow, and the words, “Life is a rainbow of beautiful memories.”

“After my father died I told my mother, That headstone doesn't remind me of you. And she said, ‘We just want people to think we were happy.' ”

Next door is Bill, her husband. Roberta explains how he died at home, how the last thing he asked for was a squirt of Chloraseptic Sore Throat Spray. “When I go, I want a bench here. My husband wasn't a Christian, so I want it inscribed with something for the both of us: Joy shared is doubled, sorrow shared is halved.”

She waves to a passing family in a minivan. “Nice to visit. Of course the dead are gone. These are just their shells. We loved their souls, not their shells.”

But Roberta misses the body, too. She hovers over her husband's grave, and for once is silent. The mine tailings glow like a sacrament in the final light.

“Hard to believe he's been gone since ninety-eight.”

1998? It says 1997 here.

“Really? Why, I've never looked. You're right! Got to get that changed.
Susan, she made that. She's just a mess. Bless my soul, I've got to pray for her.”

Before I leave, Roberta asks me to please send my kids to church. She's praying for me, too.

 

NORTH OF AJO, the saguaros are slimmer. I've dropped a thousand feet since Tucson, and lower means hotter and drier. The foothill palo verdes are not only smaller than their relatives back on the reservation, but they're farther apart from one another—say, a six-foot-tall tree every twenty feet. With their spine-tipped branches, each one bristles with a simple message for the deer and other nibblers: back off.

There is no wind this morning. The static clouds look like rolling pins. A small yellow butterfly is dead on the road, one wing inexplicably intact and looking like a Post-it note stuck to the asphalt. It's the only roadkill, so the vultures are patient, not bothering to break their huddle in a dead ironwood tree along Ten Mile Wash.

I'm weary of a desert without the sun, but there is blue hope on the northern horizon. To the east and west are barbed wire fences with the same sign posted every hundred yards:

They mean it. A jet comes low over the volcanic knob of Hat Mountain, pulls up hard just before the highway, and releases a bomb directly overhead. I flinch and swerve, as if I can outrun the thing. But the bomb, like the jet, continues to gain elevation. Unlike the jet, it has no engine and after it reaches its zenith follows a trajectory that ends with an orange flash and a tower of dust. This rewarding bit of calculus enabled the pilot to hit a bull's-eye two miles away, without flying over it.

The desert as target: it's one way to use a land that has long been deemed useless. “A typical desert is an area of wasteland,” wrote D. A. Hufford in his 1902
Death Valley,
“whose use mankind has not yet discovered.”

But mankind long ago discovered how to use the desert. The Sand People, the Hia-Ced O'Odam, lived a life of pure movement on the lands
that are now the bombing range. They lived so lightly that the government did not recognize them as the rightful caretakers, and they were not granted a reservation. Landless, the Sand People now live in nearby towns, nomads no more.