God's Country

The road to Paco Ano reservation is yellow and dusty, year round. A few scraggly eucalyptus trees attempt to line the way, taken over by ground scrub and weeds, including a few seemingly natural occurrences of the hallucinogenic datura plant. The sky is often dusty, too, leaving a sting in nose and back of throat like a warning of steel in the heavens, manmade cancers waiting to fall back to earth. The road weaves in and out of what San Diegans call mountains although any Denver native would quickly tell them different, that these are nothing but stone topped hills, given a taste of accidental majesty by the fact that they occur so close to the low, flat ocean.

There are a number of reservations near San Diego, and Paco Ano is possibly the least of them, the barest and meanest, the poorest. It might be true, but who would know? Who would have business visiting them all? Those forgotten outposts of once-proud people, subsiding into poverty, alcoholism, violence. As children growing up in American schools we are taught that Native Americans, or Indians, as they were still called in my day, are somehow better than we are, cleaner, more noble. It was the white man who corrupted them, laid them low, took away their way of life and dignity. Raped the shit out of them and threw them, broken and bleeding, on the trash heap of life, shoved into little unused corners of land where no one would see them, no one would remember them. What they say about the white man is, of course, true. But what no one says is that the Indians were often violent before the white man came. That they killed each other over the fair division of local resources. That despite their impressive survival skills, they sometimes starved. That they were still men, like other men. Some had wonderful marriages and some beat their wives and children. Some revered the Great Spirit and the gods of the land, and some violated their precepts and were exiled. Some killed in defense of their homes, and some for malice. It is sure that the Indians were not "better" in some collective, absolute sense, in their isolation before the white man came. But it is also sure that after we arrived, they became significantly worse. Again, not an absolute, moral judgment type of worse, but most certainly worse off. They've stayed where we put them, there on that trash heap, still broken, still bleeding, only some two hundred years of being the dominant culture has reduced most of our guilt to bits of iron ash, floating in the sky.

I wasn’t part of it, we tell ourselves. My grandparents didn’t even come over from the old country until long after they were already on the reservations, we say, having no real idea when any of that happened. Heck, my own people have been oppressed, we justify, pointing to historical deeds of varying degrees of heinousness and outrage. I wasn’t even born yet! Our children protest. And we collectively forget, in the wash of daily politics and diaper-changing, struggles with co-workers and the dreaded consequences of ties and pantihose, sick children and friends’ deaths. The ongoing plight of the Indians doesn't even impinge on our consciousness, or hardly ever.

There are the Thanksgiving moments of sentimentality, about how the Indians saved the Pilgrims. Most of us, of course, aren’t descended from that handful of dirty, pasty fanatics. Nonetheless, they are somehow "our" forefathers. Every now and then a western makes it into the mainstream theaters, due to the poor judgment of some hapless studio exec who believes this one will finally cause that resurgence in the genre the American public has been waiting for. Intellectuals will occasionally flatter themselves that they understand the situation of the "real" Americans, the first Americans, the natives. They offer esoteric solutions in scholarly journals no Indian reads and walk away, self-satisfied, their hands undirtied by more than the accumulated scum sitting atop their computer keyboards.

The truth is that these days, even most Indians fail to understand the plight of the goddamn Indians. Miranda Ruth certainly did, and she was considered one of them, vaguely descended from a combination of Iroquois and Navajo, or that's what her grandmother Lupe always told her. Miranda suspected that Lupe herself was from Guadalajara and a liar. Miranda was born and raised in Vallejo Centrale, a dusty hop away from Paco Ano. Growing up, she had never had reason to visit there. It was home to an obscure tribe calling themselves the Paquitos, though surely that could never have been the original name they called themselves, back before the evil white man came. In any event, nothing as good or as well known as the Navajo, who still called themselves a nation, or the literate Iroquois.

Miranda never thought that much about her possibly fake heritage. Rarely thought about the Indians at all, in fact, as she worked her way through an American school alongside the rest of us, eventually going to nursing school and taking a job with the county as a visiting nurse. Despite the heavy paperwork, she preferred it to the close, antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital. She got to drive all over, meet interesting people. Mostly old people, it was true, with a variety of post-surgery issues not quite severe enough to keep them in the hospital, but bad enough that their ancient life partners (if any) were not competent to care for them alone. The old people often smelled bad, but their stories were good. Miranda particularly liked the ones who were a little senile, as their stories were often the best. She enjoyed guessing what parts were made up, and what were real. Discovering which of her patients had been floozies, which ones had been heros. She was a favorite with the patients, who were rarely listened to – who in fact could have told a thing or two about being thrown on the trash heap of life to the Indians – and they consequently voted her "The Patient’s #1" so often the county gave in and got her a special trophy, then disqualified her from the competition so as not to kill morale.

Her skills were good, but it was her patience that was legend. It was that quality that had her driving on the dusty road to Paco Ano on a gorgeous Saturday in June, 1985, to visit Rick. Rick Fuentes, an Indian, a startlingly good-looking and very young man in his early 20s, a paraplegic, and one of the nursing agency’s chronic patients, had gone through every nurse on staff in the last three years. Not "gone through" in any romantic sense. Quite the opposite: one after another, they had refused to go back. In desperation, unable by law to turn him away, the agency had given him to Miranda. She’d been seeing him six days a week for nearly a year now – the longest any single nurse had managed to last. Her co-workers were incredibly grateful. She just smiled, not telling any of them that he was her favorite patient and she didn’t know what all the fuss about.
On this particular day, though, she was not particularly happy to see him. She squinted through her dirty windshield, knowing better than to turn on her wipers, which would only turn the yellow dust to thick mud. It was hot for June, this far inland, the "mountains" foiling any breeze that may have tried to sneak this far from its ocean origins. He had called her early that morning in a panic.

"You gotta come now," he’d said, in his demanding way, the first point of alienation for most of his past nurses. No greetings, no names.

"Is something wrong?" she’d replied, barely awake, ignoring his tone and responding instead to the urgency beneath it.

"Sandy’s coming over."

"Rick, you want me to get up two hours early on a Saturday morning because you have a date? Can’t she come over for lunch?"

"You hungover or something?" he sneered. Miranda sighed.

"Well, yes," she admitted. He laughed.

"Please," he said quietly. Rick never said please. She was defenseless.

"All right – I’ll get there as soon as I can."

"Right on," he said, and hung up. No goodbye, no thank you.

She sighed again, shaking her long brown hair over her face, stretching her 30-year-old bones and muscles. She rolled over and practically fell out of her twin bed. Every morning she promised herself she’d get a double bed, but by evening all she wanted to do was crawl into it. She got up more carefully and immediately made the bed, hospital corners and all. She brushed her teeth, ripped a comb through her hair and pulled it back with a convenient scrunchy. She threw on yesterday’s jeans and a t-shirt, socks and sneakers. The other thing she liked about the agency was the lack of dress code. She had a uniform smock she was supposed to wear, but rarely did except for messy patients. On weekends, all bets were off. She mentally rearranged her schedule. She only had two other patients today – with this early of a start, she might be done by noon.

She went into the kitchen, stifling her urge to call out to her mother. Her mother was gone, dead six months now, of lung cancer. The smell of her incessant Marlboro Lights was finally starting to leave the old ranch house, even the ancient carpets giving up their smelly ghosts under the systematic onslaught of rug cleaners and enzymatic odor eaters Miranda had pelted them with. But she still kept forgetting she was alone. Remembering put her in a bad mood, and she skipped breakfast, making do with coffee and half a glass of juice.
"That’s not enough to get a healthy start on your day," Nadine Ruth’s dead, raspy voice chastised her on her way out the front door to the old Honda Civic parked in the driveway.

"Like you ever gave a shit about health," muttered Miranda back, dropping extra medical supplies in the trunk, slamming into the driver’s seat and turning the ignition key.

She bumped down the long dirt track from the house to the rural street that served to connect several farflung properties, including hers, to the main road through town. Nadine had owned the house and the land outright, the only gift her runaway father had left behind. She’d rather have the house anyway, Nadine had said, and Miranda believed the same. It had been pretty once, a few wild acres of childhood paradise, filled with dogs, cats, chickens, even a pig named Polly. But Nadine’s illness had left little time for care of land or livestock. The place was emptied out now. The orchard, oranges, limes, avocados and a couple of wimpy nectarines, was terribly overgrown, a lone pomegranate tree spilling its bounty onto thick weeds. Abandoned outbuildings lent to the overall sense of debilitation, illness, decay. Nadine’s death had been a long time coming.

"Have you fed the ducks, Miranda?" Nadine had gasped out, sallow and thin, her bones like rotten branches, her heavy gray hair gone thin and strawlike.

"Shut up about the fucking ducks already, Ma," Miranda had said without heat, sponging her mother’s sagging limbs. "The ducks are dead. Save your breath for something useful." But it was too late, the limb turning cold under her nurse’s hands, Nadine’s spirit flown after her beloved poultry.

Miranda had missed only one day of work, in order to make the funeral arrangements. She was, after all, accustomed to illness, to death. The next day, she was back on the job, patient and smiling, stopping at the store after work for a whole trunkload of cleaning products. These days the house was more immaculate than it had ever been while her cheerful, slovenly mother was alive. The mess of her was gone, and Miranda was grateful for that. But she missed her. She could admit that now.

She remembered her mother’s warning, the first day she had gone out to the res, to meet Rick, the problem patient.

"Watch yourself out there," Nadine had said, sliding an egg fried in lard onto Miranda’s plate. Miranda rolled her eyes and ate around it, nibbling on whole wheat toast and fresh tomatos.

"I’ll be fine, Ma," Miranda replied. "It’s not a penal colony."

"Those Indians, they don’t like us," Nadine said, collapsing into a vinyl chair and lighting up. She was already confined to the house, unable to bear the touch of pollenated air in her raw, scraped lungs. An air cleaner ran in every room of the house, twenty-four hours a day. But she still smoked, at least a pack a day. Miranda wasn’t sure where she obtained her smokes. Miranda had flat refused to buy her any more. But Nadine collected a monthly disability check from the Teacher’s union and she had a few friends who came to visit when Miranda was at work. Nadine had to be responsible for her own actions, thought Miranda, shrugging. She wished she had been firmer later, when the entire weight of paying for and caring for Nadine’s illness came to rest squarely on her small shoulders.

"What do you mean, Ma? They’re our people, according to Gramma Lupe," she said mildly.

"Our people," Nadine snorted, pausing to inhale deeply. "Those are not our people. Those are dirty, violent people, and you mind me and watch yourself."

"Yes, Ma," Miranda said, not bothering to argue.

She’d learned a lot about how not to argue from her lifetime of living with her mother. There was never any point. It only made for disharmony. Nadine was who she was and nothing Miranda could say would make her any different. Miranda liked things peaceful, quiet. She liked the thoughts in her head to stay there, unchallenged by people who simply didn’t understand. Consequently, she was in fact a rather lazy thinker, having gone all her life unchallenged by anyone at all. But she was well-liked, reasonably intelligent, vaguely liberal in a San Diego Democrat sort of way. The kind of person who wouldn’t argue with her mother, who would care for her through a long, messy, demoralizing illness. Not at all the kind of person who would steal a child.