~ The Shadow Walkers ~

by

Jim Green

It’s dark when we return. Inside we find everything in order, but July and Benny’s great-grandmother are no place to be found.

I walk out of the hogan into the high plateau night. The entire canyon is bathed in soft moon glow. To the east lies black silhouettes which are the large cottonwood trees looking like giant faceless monsters with shaggy skin. A quarter moon moves from the east. Great dark, red sandstone walls suck at the light reminding me of honey on the fry bread the old woman cooked in the grease pot two days before.

Benny Chee walks up beside me and stops. He says nothing, but I can hear his breathing and smell the smoke from his clothes.

The wind blows gentle curls along the canyon floor that has been home to Benny’s family for hundreds of years. Once in a while the swirls fly like powder disturbing the clearness of the moon, but, with a corrective eraser, the night god or whoever controls the wind isn’t satisfied. Like a brush stroke of paint from his huge easel, the titan changes the view into moonlit, crystal high desert air, replacing the smudge with an image so clear you can almost touch it with your fingertips.

“They’re gone, aren’t they?” I say to Benny; the unbefitting question invades the night.

“Don’t know,” he answers. “Maybe.”

“Will those two find what they’re looking for?”

“Yes, they’ll find them,” Benny speaks so softly I can hardly hear his words. “They’ve been planning. I’ve heard about it happening before. Naneesh have stories.”

“But you said them. Who will they find? Where will they go, and what will they do there? What’s it like.”

“I have no idea. That world is for those special people like my great-grandmother...” he waits, then, “...and July. Nobody but people like them could ever make that journey. I’ve heard stories of Naneesh who made the choice to go. I wasn’t sure the stories were true.”

“Will they ever come back?” I see the faint wisp of a cirrus cloud floating across the quarter face of the yellow-white moon.

“I can’t answer one way or the other. I just don’t know.”

The angle of moon dust flooding the red sand hills to the south catapults over the barchan dunes, the night not saying red but saying ripples and tufts of savage grass and the black un-patterned footprints of two people who have danced in strange movements up and over the dunes.

“They headed that way. See there in the moonlight. Those dark spots look like their footprints.” I walk toward the dunes.

“Wait,” calls Benny, “you can’t go with them. You can’t see what they’re doing.”

I hurry, my sprint fighting the loose sand of the dunes and destroying the shadowed sets of footprints.

At the top of the first sand dune I stop, catching a sea of faint white moonlight bathing the high desert floor. My eyes struggle to see across the distance. I wish there was a full moon, but my eyes can still follow the dark patterns of footprints that mark the sand.

Then I see them.

Way in the distance, two dark figures move in strange dancing gyrations up the bank of sand that climbs to the base of a monstrous cliff with a talus slope like you see in the Grand Canyon.

The night is cold. They move in slow and gentle motions as if reaching for seeds of summer dandelions floating in the hot wind. Their dance is of perfection, of connection, of union with the moon-cast shadows attached to them in the sand. And then the shadows become their own.

I feel Benny’s presence beside me.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he says.

I can say nothing.

“Flow has waited a long time for July Bobby,” he whispers.

Four black figures in the moonlight do the dance of the ancients. They mimic the call of nature like the spirit ritual of uncountable ancestral ways.

The two ladies, one a collection of five generations--a matriarch who has lived in the red walled canyons and desert valleys for more than four score--and one less than one score--one who has struggled desperately with the uncertainty of knowing--these two, as different as is the night the day but alike more than even the tufts of savage grass that line their way... these two find balance in their choice.

As I have learned, and as I know now, they have reached gozaa, their final place. And so together the two ladies--one old and frail and one young and real--walk with their shadows under the light of the milky moon.

Life or fate or destiny or whatever painted them into a portrait with a stroke of colors much different from most. July discovered an answer; Benny’s great-grandmother had been waiting. Now both complete the portrait.

Benny and I watch a symphony. The distance protects us from discovery. We breathe; we strain; and soon there is nothing but the stillness of the night. Even the faint desert breeze quiets itself.

Moon dust of a billion eons sprinkles the night, and there is nothing but the ever-present painting of the titan god who controls the wind.

After the longest time and with nothing moving but the eyes of Benny and me as we search the desert, Benny takes me by the arm.

“Let’s go,” he says. “At least we know for sure.”

I can’t speak. I continue to look back as if another glance will reveal something to me, something I have to see, and yet, I wonder if it can be like the glance of Lot’s wife for disobeying the law?

“Where did they go, Benny? Where are Flow and July?”

“They have reached Hozjo,” he says. He’s speaking in Navajo again.

“What’s that?” I ask. “What’s Hozjo?” and I struggle to make the sounds he makes.

“Balance,” is all he says, and then again, “balance.”

I stumble down the dark dunes, remembering the story of the shadow world he told me as we sat at the base of the high rock wall with the great cleft, where the ancients built their home hundreds of years ago.

Before we reach the hogan yard, Benny speaks to me in monotone. “Well,” he says, “we can pack up now, and I’ll take you to Flagstaff tonight, or we can sleep, and I’ll get you there tomorrow.” He pulls the rawhide latch on the door. “Either way, you’ll probably have to wait several hours for your father, maybe even a day or two. I can’t see his rig pulling in before late tomorrow night. Could be an awfully boring wait.”

“What are you gonna do?” I ask him.

“I’ll drop you off. I’m not staying with you, not going to Phoenix, not going to Durango. I’m coming back here. This is my home now.”

“And the bikers? What about them?”

“If they come, I’ll see them. I’ll see them from the top of Doo Quo. Remember, this is my country.”

“Okay, let’s go tonight then,” I say after some thought. “I don’t think I can sleep anyway.”