The Pale-Faced Lie

by David Crow

“David won’t amount to much.” He slammed the booklet down and left the kitchen. The room started spinning and I couldn’t breathe—he might as well have punched me in the stomach. As I heard the TV come on, I vowed to learn more than anyone in our family and at school—in my own way. I promised myself that someday, when I became rich and famous, everyone would be sorry for making fun of me. Every night, I read until bedtime. Then I read with a flashlight under the covers until I fell asleep. In the morning, I often woke up on top of a book or magazine, and some of the pages would be crinkled or torn. The reading specialist at the clinic had taught me to read with a ruler, to keep my eyes following the print. I still read slowly, but the ruler helped relax my mind. In time, I learned to memorize everything, even the smallest details.

The next weekend, and all of them after that, there would be just as many drunks and angry wives. Nothing ever changed in Gallup. Watching these men get beaten somehow made me feel better about what went on at home. And I discovered that Mom wasn’t the only sad woman. Gallup was full of them.

As he approached with the belt and the buckle, I pictured myself resisting torture at the hands of the Japanese after trying to escape. I did everything to pretend not to be me, but it never worked. I was stuck with being David Crow no matter how much I wished to be someone else.

Every day brought the possibility of a beating, so it didn’t matter if I lied to get out of trouble. Lying was always preferable to the truth if it produced a good reaction from Dad.

He and Mom weren’t hard to figure out. I could control Dad, unless his anger had reached a fever pitch. The trick was to catch him before that happened. It took split-second timing. That night it worked. The way to control Mom was to make her feel important. All I needed to do was agree with whatever she said. Once she thought I was on her side, I didn’t have to worry about her saying anything to Dad.

Our destruction knew no bounds. Sam and I ramped up our pranks all over Gallup. Somehow, hurting other people made me hurt less.

If grief could have killed her, she’d have been dead. I wondered if she might be better off dead and hated myself for the thought.

WHEN WE HEARD A SOFT KNOCK late one afternoon, I thought I was hearing things. But then it happened again. Sam, Sally, and I looked at each other on the couch, our eyes wide. No one had come to our house since we moved to Mud Flats. I opened the door slowly and saw the friendly face of an elderly Navajo woman. Nothing could have surprised me more. Heavyset, her gray hair in a tight bun, she wore a traditional red velvet full skirt and black blouse and lots of turquoise jewelry on her wrists and fingers. I recognized her as the woman I’d seen coming and going from the rusted trailer across the street. “I been watching. Think you need help,” she said. “I Evelyn.” She smiled and leaned forward, scanning the living room behind me. “Where your mother? Why you here?” It took a while to understand her broken English, but I felt her concern from that first instant. Her bright brown eyes exuded greater warmth than I’d ever seen. “I help make dinner.” She walked into the house and moved from room to room like part of our family. “You do homework.” If there was a God, he must have sent this angel of a woman to us. For the first time in forever, a blanket of calm fell over the house. Sam, Sally, and I saw her every day after that. “What learn in school?” she would ask. “The bullies beat me up, and the dogs keep biting us,” I said, showing her the holes in my pants and the cuts on my face. “I wash off blood, shoo dogs and bullies,” Evelyn would say with a smile.

Sometimes in bed at night, I worried she might not come again. But each day, the second we got home, Evelyn appeared. She was the first adult who truly loved me—she cared for me without wanting anything back. I knew that whatever happened, she’d be on my side.

Evelyn would tell us stories about the Long Walk, known as the “fearing time,” after the Navajos lost the war against Kit Carson. “When Grandma little girl, she live near here. Soldiers round up Navajo people, force them walk many miles. Can’t walk fast enough as soldiers on horses. They fall. Soldiers shoot them. Food full of maggots and worms. Many starve. Apaches kill many too. Navajo people prisoners for four years. Walk home to sacred place. Everything in God’s plan.” How could she forgive what had happened to her people? And how could she be so kindhearted? I didn’t understand. She filled the house with noisy laughter. She told us to have hozhoni (harmony) and show ajooba (kindness) because those things will return to you. She even offered to walk us to school.

“That’s why a man should always carry a gun. That bigger bastard would be no match for Smith and Wesson. When some asshole gets too loud, the smaller man needs to find a way to shut him up. I’ve never met a man I couldn’t beat, but sometimes there’s more than one.”

Of course, the principal and I got to know each other very well. But nothing he said or did ever deterred me. I was on a mission, constantly looking for ways to cause some mischief, get a few laughs—and ease the sadness I felt all the time.

“You’re scared, and bullies sense fear,” he said. “Throw the first punch so hard, the bully will run away. No one will expect it—not from you.”

“Jab with your left and punch with your right,” Dad said, demonstrating with his fists in the air. “Move your head back and forth so it isn’t an easy target. You want to keep your opponent off balance.” For two weeks, the lessons continued daily in the backyard while Sam looked on, laughing most of the time. I grew more confident, trotting to my right, swinging at Dad’s palms. My blows were getting more accurate, making him smile and nod.

“Your daddy did me dirty,” she said. And I’d done her dirty too. Nothing she or the courts could do would change that. Dad’s law was stronger.

“You need to understand the world around you, boy. Study science and math. Learn the importance of Avogadro’s number and pi and the Pythagorean theorem.” I followed, astounded he was so smart. But he didn’t act like other smart people. He loved violence as much as he loved knowledge, as if they went hand in hand. “And you should learn the stories in the Bible—not as religion, but as history—along with the works of the ancient Greeks and English greats. You can’t be ignorant about the world you live in or the origin of the universe or the laws that govern the planet. Otherwise, you’re no better than that helpless coyote.”

“If we killed that old man, where would we bury him? Where’s the nearest—” “Whoa!” I bolted up in my seat. “Why would we kill him? Why are you asking me that?” “We’re not going to kill him. That’s not the point, goddamn it. Listen up. I’m teaching you something here. Do you see a place where we could dump the body so no one would find it? Where’s the nearest police station? How many routes are there away from here? How many vehicles passed us in the last ten minutes in either direction? What color were they? How many people were in them? What were the license plates? State and number. What do you remember?” Another one of his games. Okay, I’d play along. “Three cars and a truck have passed us. Two cars were blue and the third was green. The pickup was red, and three Navajos were in the back. But, Dad, it’s not so much about how close we are to a police station. What really matters is how close we are to a car, or even a pedestrian, who might tip off the police.” He whipped his head around and stared at me, a smiling spreading across his face. “You’re right, David. You’re finally paying attention.” He sped up and passed the old man. “If you don’t know all these things, you can get caught. Murder is the easiest crime to get away with because you have no witnesses. Robbery, kidnapping, any of the other crimes—there are witnesses or people you need to depend on. The perfect murder will never be solved.”

I couldn’t imagine that other dads took their ten-year-old sons to steal tools from their employer or explained how murder was the easiest crime to get away with or insisted that rules were for losers. I closed my eyes to stop him from talking to me, pretending to go to sleep.

One day, I stopped by to see my friend Richard Kontz, who lived with his parents and eight siblings in the small house attached to the post office. His father, Rex Kontz, was the postmaster. He invited me to join the 4-H Club, which he led in their backyard, and penciled me in on the Little League team he coached. Our first 4-H project called for raising a sheep. When I told him about the grounding, he said, “I’ll reserve a sheep for you to feed, clean, and shear in our yard before your parents get home. You can keep the profit you earn from the sale.” That hour went by so fast. It seemed like five minutes. I couldn’t wait to return the next day. When the Kontz children and I made mistakes, Mr. and Mrs. Kontz didn’t yell, hit, or write outlandish punishments on a board. All they had to do was show disappointment in their loving, dark eyes. I wanted to please them, trusting they had my best interests at heart. When I did well, like hitting a home run, Mr. Kontz’s face lit up, and he gave me a huge smile. Over time, I learned from Richard that his dad had fought the Japanese in the Pacific, including the bloody Battle of Guadalcanal, but he never talked about it. That would be bragging, and Mr. Kontz would have no part of it—the complete opposite of my dad. Mrs. Kontz couldn’t have been kinder to me. One afternoon, she took me aside and held my shoulders. “If you follow the rules, and I know you will, you can always come to our house when you need a place to go.” Apparently,...

AFTER LIVING IN FORT DEFIANCE for more than three years, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I had grown to love the Navajo people, and the reservation felt like home to me. Every day I tried to outdo myself entertaining my classmates, and they never got tired of it. I continued playing Little League even after I turned thirteen. Mr. Kontz discovered a rule that allowed an exception if the team was short a player. We had only eight without me. On the nights before our games, he and Mrs. Kontz let our team camp out in their backyard. In the mornings, we crammed into the bed of his old black pickup truck, and he hauled us, sometimes more than fifty miles, to baseball fields. We each brought twenty-five cents to help pay for gas. Thomas Kontz, Richard’s oldest brother, bought us Cokes when we won. After our games, we went to the movies at the Window Rock Civic Center for a dime. Our baseball uniforms got us discounts on candy and hot dogs. Sam and I had a tight group of friends and were as much a part of the team as the Navajo boys. In a place that had once felt so hostile, the Kontz family, Henry, Jim, Tommy, and my other Navajo friends accepted me in a way that seemed impossible when we arrived in Mud Flats.

Over the summer, I had secured a pitching position on our baseball team and then tried out and made the high school football team. The following spring, I’d be running the one-mile and two-mile races on the track team. On my paper route, people waved instead of shooting me with BB guns, my weirdo customers continued providing much-needed comic relief, and the dog packs ran from me in fear. Mr. Ashcroft and I had long discussions every afternoon before I went to see my second family at the Kontz residence. And on the weekends when I didn’t go on stealing trips, Henry and his dad took me everywhere with them. This was my town.

Sam and I shared a huge room on the third floor that had to be bigger than our whole house in the government compound. The street was lined with cars I had read about but never seen up close: Mercedes Benz, Audi, BMW, and Volvo. Our little suburb had more roads, bridges, libraries, recreation centers, and sidewalks than on the entire reservation. How could the Navajos have so little in a land where there was so much?

“Did your mother get those clothes at Goodwill or from a dumpster?” another girl asked. The whole table erupted with laughter again. I looked down at my clothes and saw them through their eyes: dirty jeans with worn-out knees, a faded flannel shirt, and frayed, stained tennis shoes. A Gilbert Blackgoat pounding would have felt comforting by comparison.

The incident made the front page of the Montgomery County Sentinel. I felt powerful and invisible again.

As my miserable luck would have it, the day I returned, Mrs. Ralph handed out another English exam. Before we left for Fort Defiance, she’d assigned Silas Marner, a novel by George Eliot. I never cracked it open. I had no intention of trying to succeed in a world that had nothing to offer me.

For the first time, I saw my behavior from someone else’s point of view. We’d have gotten away with what we did in Fort Defiance, but we were playing in a new league with a new set of rules. I realized how far off Dad’s sense of right and wrong was from the civilized world.

We had people fighting over us like we were property, but none of them had our best interests in mind.

Wally’s eyes looked sad. He’d driven thousands of miles to help Mom make her case, and it wasn’t working out the way they had planned. But she wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard before. And even with an adoring husband and a beautiful baby boy, Mom didn’t seem happy. She blamed her misery on Dad’s cruelty and on missing us, but I’d never seen her content for more than a few infrequent moments. She didn’t ask us about school or about anything going on in our lives. Her singular focus seemed to be getting even with Dad and dragging us away because of a debt we owed her rather than providing a satisfying family life. Every conversation had always been about her and how life cheated her, and I couldn’t take another minute of it. Life hadn’t done me any favors either, and she bore some of that responsibility.

“No one on the team has more potential or tries harder. But you think you have all the answers. Well, you don’t. Life is going to get tougher and tougher unless you listen. Go home. Next time maybe you’ll pay more attention.” He gently touched my arm and smiled. “You can do better, and I expect it from you.”

“Listen carefully to what I have to say,” he said in his calm, fatherly way. “Thefts can happen anywhere. It’s up to you to keep track of your equipment. Black or white, it doesn’t matter. I’m disappointed that you taunted their team and got into fights. That’s not good sportsmanship, and it’s not what I’ve taught you. I don’t care what they said to you first. You should never respond to unkindness with more of the same. It makes you lesser. Let’s go home and do better.” I loved Coach Ford. He always took the high road, and I was proud to be on his team.

“It’s a miracle you’re all right. Those men could’ve killed you,” she said, touching his arm. “You had no choice but to take the stereo to save yourself.” There’s no way she believed that story. Much like how Mom got on Dad’s good side by asking for his help to punish us, Mona kept on Dad’s good side by playing along with him no matter what he said. How the hell did he find two women who would put up with his bullshit?

No one else would have done that, and no one else could have convinced those rioters that he was one of them. How had he managed to get away with so much in his life? For the millionth time, I wished he wasn’t my father.

Of all the mean things he’d ever said to me, nothing seemed truer. Other than manual labor, sports, and reading things teachers didn’t assign in school, I had little going for me, and time was running out.

“You taught me well.” I threw my legs over the side of the bed and stood to stretch. “If I can survive you, Mom, and Mona, I can survive anything.” Dad smiled. He’d taken that as a compliment.

“Life skills are more important than a formal education.” Dad put his hands on my shoulders and looked down at me with a soft smile. “A formal education will earn you a salary. Self-education will make you a fortune. You aren’t doing well on the formal education side of the ledger. You don’t seem to like working for other people, but you like to work. Read the great books, learn from the geniuses of the ages, and run your mouth right. It’s time for you to figure it out on your own.”

Still, I somehow knew that despite my physical limitations and all the shit I’d been through—or maybe because of it—I could do better.

“I’m David Crow.” I held up my Walter Johnson High School diploma and a small mirror. I breathed on the glass. “The steam on the mirror proves I’m alive,” I said. “And the diploma proves I’m a Montgomery County high school graduate. You have to accept me.” “Is that right?” Dr. Davis let out a big laugh. “You’re a real character, aren’t you?” He put his hand on my back and led me into his office.

She narrowed her eyes at me like I was a lazy bullshitter unworthy of her help, and she was right. A few phone calls later, she gruffly handed me my list of classes. “No one has ever come to this office without applying to the school and left with their entire schedule filled out.”

Dad was going to work for the BIA in Washington for only six months, but most of high school, we went back and forth between here, Fort Defiance, and North Carolina, where my stepmother’s parents live. I missed nearly a year of classes. Thanks to my track coach, Chauncey Ford, Walter Johnson gave me a diploma. But I didn’t pass anything. I’d be pumping gas, caddying, and working construction the rest of my life without his help and yours. You’re giving me a chance—thank you.” “I’m not sure I understood most of what you said, but you’re welcome to come to my office anytime. You certainly know how to find me.” He got up and walked around his desk to shake my hand again. “Based on what I’ve seen, you’ll be just fine. Welcome to Montgomery College, David Crow.”

When I called Dad to tell him how well things were going, he said, “I never got to go to school. There’s nothing to brag about, boy. You’ve had it easy. Is that all you called about?” He hung up. Sam joined the army the day he graduated from high school, right after Dad gave him the same speech about being on his own at twelve. I drove Sam to the bus station, and we hugged for a long time, not knowing when we would see each other again. He was still fearless and reckless. As I watched him board for Fort Dix, I couldn’t imagine how he’d survive in the military. Lonnie had transferred to the University of Maryland to complete her undergraduate degree in education, and she was now working on her doctorate at night and teaching elementary school during the day. Sally moved in with her to finish high school.

My hands shook as I ripped open the package. Inside were pictures of me and a note in Mom’s unmistakable, childlike handwriting: “I’m no longer your mother. These are yours.” I flipped through one photo after another—from the EPNG days, a few from Albuquerque, and two from my tenth birthday party in Gallup. One had Violet hugging me as I blew out the candles. How I faked that smile I’ll never know. Each picture brought back a worse memory until I couldn’t look anymore. It was as though I’d witnessed my own funeral and no one had come to say goodbye. I couldn’t stop crying. My childhood replayed in my mind—along with a voice telling me that every horrible thing that happened had been my fault. I hadn’t hurt this much since the day in Gallup when Mom begged me not to leave her in that cold, empty house. I deserved this for not going with her. Since her awful visit in Kensington, I hadn’t been in touch. Comforting her seemed impossible, so I’d given up. I sat alone in the parking lot, feeling lost. I had begun to lower my guard to let in a few of my fraternity brothers, but if they really got to know me, they’d want nothing to do with me. Choking on guilt, struggling to inhale, I vowed never to let anyone get close enough to hurt me again.

“You found yourself working with a bunch of fucking ex-cons. This is philosophy class without the tits.” Over the next several weeks, I asked each of them why they’d gone to prison and if the experience had changed them. Was it true what Dad said—that no one could be rehabilitated, beginning with himself? “Stop trying to figure us out,” said one beefy worker with tobacco-stained teeth. “All any of us wants is some ass, lots of whiskey, and money.”

His bloodshot eyes and boozy fumes told me he’d been drinking all day. I nodded to the bartender, and as he placed the beer on the counter, the Navajo slurred, “What is rich bastard like you doing here?” I was dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and a well-worn shirt, but to him, I must have looked rich.

As I hurried to my car, Mr. Kontz’s words swirled around in my head. What you do without education? . . . You want to be laborer rest of your life? . . . You Anglo . . . Not Cherokee . . . You don’t belong here. At that moment, I was sure of two things: I couldn’t stay there. And Mr. Kontz loved me enough to be totally honest.

AS I DROVE DOWN ROUTE 66 past all the stores and restaurants, nothing seemed the same. For years, whenever I thought of home, Gallup and Fort Defiance came to mind, but that day, all I felt was a deep sense of guilt and loss.

It was pointless to confront Dad about the lies. He would just explode into a rage. No, it was up to me to find my own truth. But how would I begin? The Crow children had been lied to since birth—the myths had become our identity. Being a Cherokee was the only point of family pride. I had no good truths to replace the lie.

“Mom, I can’t. I’m headed back to college.” “You don’t love me or you’d stay here.” Her definition of love was obligation and guilt. It was the only love the Crow family had to offer. “Can’t you forgive me? Dad treated you wrong—we all did—but we were scared kids. Can we have a relationship that isn’t based on the past?” “Yes.” Then she blurted a verbatim repetition of her previous complaints, as if her mind were stuck on an endless loop.

It occurred to me that the Navajo people were victims of the worst of the political system, and even those who wanted to help them didn’t have a clue what they were about. These misguided civil servants reminded me of the easterners who came to the reservation to experience the pure Native American spirit, to touch Mother Earth and Father Sky, only to find that Navajos lived in third-world poverty with little hope of better lives. They left as soon as possible, never to return.

No one influenced me more than Mr. Ashcroft. During our many afternoon conversations at the trading post, he’d tell me about the Navajos, how they were butchered like animals during the Long Walk, similar to what Evelyn had told us. He said that when the Navajos were allowed to go back to their sacred lands, the government rounded up their sheep, their greatest source of pride and income, and burned them in pits while they stood and wept. The BIA said they got rid of the sheep to prevent erosion, but all they needed to do was return the land to the rightful owners—the Navajos—and they would have solved the problem. The Anglo government took away the Navajos’ livelihood and dignity, giving them welfare and unemployment instead.

An even more blatant example of the government’s hypocrisy was their role in regulating alcohol. The politicians and bureaucrats pretended to care about alcoholism but allowed minors to drink with adults all day and all night. They just opened more jail cells and operated additional paddy wagons, letting the drunks back out in time for Sam and me to fire cherry bombs at them. As Dad said, “Half the PhDs in the country study Indian alcoholism, but nothing changes. No one in the government really gives a shit. They just want the tax revenue.”