“Dammit to hell,” my father mutters. “I need those trucks moving.”
A vaguely familiar man approaches the Escalade, irritation and anxiety twisting his expression. He stands outside the door, obviously waiting for my father to get out. Dad rolls the window down halfway, not bothering to so much as lean forward. Anger strikes out on the man’s face like a snake’s forked tongue before he gains control of it and steps closer to the window, his features falsely placid. He looks deferential for a man who barely deigns to acknowledge him.
“Mr. Cade,” he says, leaning close enough to the window to be heard.
“Beaumont,” Dad responds, his use of the man’s name jogging my memory. He’s a division leader I met at one of the company picnics held at our Dallas compound. “You said you had this situation under control. I’d hate to see what you consider a disaster.”
Beaumont clears his throat and loosens his collar before speaking. “It was under control, sir,” he says. “We were on schedule. I caught wind of this planned protest yesterday, and contacted the office as soon as I heard. I thought they’d send someone. I didn’t expect you to come personally.”
“I am someone,” Dad snaps, “keeping you on your toes. I needed to see this shit storm for myself. Who are all these people?”
“Mostly people from the reservation,” Beaumont says. “But some students from local universities showed up, too. As you can see, some have chained themselves to the construction equipment. Some just arrived from the run.”
“What run?” I ask from the shadowy corner on the other side of the back seat.
Beaumont’s eyes flick in my direction, narrowing before returning to my father’s face.
“Uh, sir,” he starts, his tone cautious, his expression closing off even more. “We can talk later or—”
“It’s all right,” my father says impatiently. “You can speak freely in front of him. It’s my boy Maxim.”
“Oh, yes.” Beaumont relaxes and inclines his head to me like I’m some kind of prince and my father his liege. “Good to see you again, Maxim. How’s Berkeley treating you?”
“The run?” I ignore the pleasantry and press for the information I requested. “What kind of run?”
“Yes, well, some of them call themselves water protectors,” Beaumont answers. “They raise awareness through these marathons. They finished one today.”
I nod toward the media trucks. “Seems like they raised some awareness about this pipeline.”
“It’s a small story in the big scheme of things,” Beaumont insists. “Some old Indians and a bunch of kids from the reservation, worried about something that’s not likely to ever happen.”
“You mean a spill?” I demand. “They’re worried their main source of water will be polluted? Is that what you mean?”
Beaumont glances from my scowling face to my father’s. The look he gives my dad says it all without him uttering a word. Whose side is your son on anyway?
Not yours. That’s for damn sure.
“We have the contingency, right?” Dad asks, ignoring the byplay between me and his corporate henchman.
“Yes, sir.” A smirk tweaks Beaumont’s mouth. “Everything’s in place. It will only take one call, and I can—”
“Can you hear me?” someone yells through a bullhorn, slicing into Beaumont’s assurances. “Can you see me?”
My father rolls the window down fully, leaning forward to see who’s behind that voice. I lean forward, too, and I freeze.
It’s a girl. A woman. She’s young, but there’s power in her stance, in her face. The late daylight loves her, kissing the hollows under the rise of her cheekbones. The wind carries her hair as easily as it carries her voice, whipping the dark strands behind her like a pennant on a battlefield. She seems to command the elements as effortlessly as she does the crowd’s attention, standing on a mound of dirt, a hill as her stage. Even if she weren’t slightly elevated, she would tower. She’s a straight line of color sketched into the desert landscape, transformed by a glamor of dust and sunlight.
“I said, can you hear me?” She repeats loudly, more intensely. “Can you see me? Because I don’t think you can.”
Her black T-shirt blasts “REZPect Our Water” across the front, and tucks neatly into the waistband of a flowing patterned skirt stopping at knee-high buckskin moccasins. She’s a perfect blend of past and present and future. A smattering of stars decorates the skin around her left eye, while lines of color fan out from her right.
Stars and stripes.
I find myself grinning at the sly humor painted onto her skin, a wordless commentary on patriotism and colonialism and probably a dozen subtexts I wouldn’t know where to start naming.
“I don’t think you can,” she continues, “when corporations lay pipelines on land we were promised would be protected.”
A shout rises from the crowd.
“I don’t think you can,” she shouts into the bullhorn, “when my ancestors who bled and died find no peace in the very land they sacrificed for because trucks and plows turn over their graves.”
The crowd releases a reply mixed with English and a tongue I don’t understand, but obviously affirms her message, encourages her to go on.
“Four years ago,” she says, “on a day like today, my mother left for a protest in Seattle much like this one. She never came back.”
She lowers the bullhorn and stares at the ground for a moment. Even from here, I see the bullhorn shaking in her hand when she raises it again.
“Our women disappear,” she says, her voice wavering, but fierce, “and no one cares. No one searches. No one says their names, but I say her name. Liana Reynolds. I didn’t have her body, but I had her name, and I came here to sacred ground and whispered it. The wind carried it to my ancestors. I asked them to recover her spirit. To take her home.”
She shakes her head, impervious of the tears streaking her face. “I came here to mourn. When it was time for the rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood, I came here to dance. We worship here; we wed here. The ground where you sit, our pews. The trees around you, our steeples. You are standing in our church.”
Her voice rings out, commanding and broken. A lone tear streaks through the vibrant stripes around her eye. There are no shouts in reply. No raised fists. Only lowered eyes. Shaking heads as her sorrow takes us hostage.
“And the man elected to represent us,” she goes on, her features hardening into an angry mold, “is the one who betrayed us. Senator Middleton, shame on you! You sold our land to Warren Cade. Land we were promised would be protected, you gave away. It wasn’t yours to give!”
The air trembles beneath the weight of her words, and like she summoned it, a desert wind, a sirocco lifts the dark river of hair hanging down her back and tosses it like a mourning wail through the air.
“It wasn’t yours to give,” she repeats, even more fervently. “Liar. Trickster. Thief.”
The crowd echoes back, as if they’ve done it a thousand times.
“Liar! Trickster! Thief!”
“Is it because you never saw us that you don’t care?” she barrels on, and even through the bullhorn, it’s a whisper. A barely there question, as if she doesn’t want to ask because she already knows the answer.