“—bone?” I wonder.
“Snow turquoise.”
“—snow?”
“White. White turquoise. Very, very rare. But look at it more closely.”
He passes it to me and I turn it toward the light. A copper vein runs through the center of it, almost in a perfect oval and within the oval shape other copper-colored lines delineate some features while two distinct round shapes of blue turquoise stare out, like eyes.
“It’s a face,” I marvel.
“My father called this piece The Shadow Catcher. And he’s the one who made it.”
He turns the bracelet around and shows me the silversmith’s stamp on the back in the shape of a standing bear. “That’s my father’s mark. ‘Owns His Shadow.’ That was my father’s name. Bear Clan.”
“So of all the pawn shops in all the cities in the West—”
“Native craft cooperative.”
“—so of all the native craft cooperatives in all the cities in the West this guy with my father’s papers and your father’s bracelet walks into—”
“This is not my father’s bracelet. This one is.”
He slides up his sleeve and shows me a similar one, not a duplicate, exactly, made of the same stone but with only a trace of the other’s distinct facial image.
“He made two bracelets from the same piece of snow turquoise. One he kept for himself. That’s the one that I wear. The other, with the face in it, he gave to his friend because the face inside the stone looked so much like him.”
I stare at the image in the piece of turquoise — copper-colored hair and beard, two piercing blue eyes…
“Who was his friend?”
“Edward Curtis. The photographer you mentioned.”
“Are you messing with me, Lester?”
I have to ask but I can tell he isn’t.
“When the man showed me this bracelet I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost. I couldn’t help it. I looked at him and said, ‘Who are you?’ And his eyes grew round and he parted his lips as if to speak and clutched his chest and then fell down. I went around the counter and I held his head and he looked at me, desperate. I had to leave him on the floor to go call 911 and when I came back I could see he’d had a stroke, one eye was closed but that other eye—” He stops, then tells me—“pleading. I think he knew that he was going to die. He was trying to tell me something. So I had to follow him to here. With these”—he indicates the jewelry—“and these.” He shows me a set of keys and I notice what appears to be a house key among them.
“He’s wearing a wedding band, so he must belong to someone.”
“He left his car in my daughter’s parking lot. I was thinking I could search it for his address. Then they told me they had found his closest living relative, and that you were on your way.”
We stare toward the open door of the room where Mr. Wiggins lies unconscious.
“I saw his driver’s license,” I mention. “I know where he lives.”
We exchange another look, and Lester weighs the old man’s house keys in his hand. “Middle of the night,” he mentions. “Can you stay ’til daylight?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t want to leave, in case he wakes up.”
“I can understand that”
“I have a duty to him.”
“Yep.”
“Even if he has a wife, she would be very old, like him. We don’t want to wake her up and scare her. Another heart attack.”
“—still. I think she’d like to know. Given his condition.”
“Better that we wait ’til morning.”
“—okay. You’ve got a point. I know what those unexpected calls are like. The news that you don’t want to hear.”
He studies me. “—your father?”
“—for starters.”
“How did he die?”
“Suicide. — yours?”
“—in his sleep. We didn’t know his age but figured ninety-seven.”
“And he really knew Edward Curtis?”
“Owns His Shadow scouted sites and translated for Mr. Curtis in ought-eight, ought-nine. Owns His Shadow spoke the English Mr. Curtis liked. He had been transported from the reservation to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania when he was still a boy, so he had learned the white man’s ways before he broke with all of that and made his brave escape back to the Navajo. I have a picture of them. Owns His Shadow and Mr. Curtis.”
“I would like to see it.”
“Well it’s home in Tuba.”
“I haven’t been to Tuba City for a while.”
Again, that focused look. “What were you doing in my nation?”
“Research.”
“—on the rez?”
I pick up The Shadow Catcher and hold it so the spectral image in the stone faces both of us. Invisible at first, the image forms before my eyes the longer that I look at it, as if it were exposed but still invisible light held captive on a page of photographic paper floating in the shallow pool of a transparent chemical bath. After several seconds a familiar likeness gathers in the fine lines of the stone. “This man, actually. Curtis.” I turn the bracelet in my hands, appreciating every subtlety. “This is really beautiful,” I say.
“Father said that Curtis thought so, too. I’d like to know how he let it go from his possession.”
“Well he’s been dead for fifty years. And in his last thirty years or so he was always scrambling just to make ends meet. Lost everything. Gave away the copyrights to all his American Indian work to J.P. Morgan’s heirs to cancel out his debts to them. In the end he went a little crazy and spent a couple decades right here in Nevada just prospecting for gold.”
“Father lost all touch with him.”
“I’m not surprised. Aside from that one picture that you have of them, did he photograph your father?”
“Owns His Shadow?” Lester grins. “Father would not let another steal his image.”
“But you said there is a picture—”
“In it, father looks away. And points. Like this.” He swivels on the bench and points away from us, toward a sign at the opposite end of the hall that reads EMERGENCY EXIT.
“But your interest is with Curtis, not my father,” he intuits.
“Used to be. I wrote a book about him.”
“And it’s finished?”
“Yes.”
“And you talked to those who sat for him and had their shadows stolen?”
“No.”
He makes a little bubbling sound deep in his throat and whispers, oh. He looks toward the open door into the dying old man’s room again. “You should have waited.”
“For what?”
He inhales deeply and resumes the posture I had found him in, but with his eyes wide open now, not closed, his eyes locked on the open door.
“Until the silent ones have spoken,” Lester murmurs.
clara and edward