Introduction & Sample Chapter

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This book is copyrighted. This is a true story and is a work of memory. I have reflected deeply, made several trips back to the Navajo reservation and relied on photographs to verify my memories. Please note that memories are subjective, different people may remember some things differently. Any errors or mistakes are unintentional. Some names have been altered or changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.

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Introduction

         In mid-November 2015, I drove from my home near Sacramento to San Antonio to spend Thanksgiving week with my dad. But with some hesitation, I also planned a side trip to Window Rock, Arizona. I’d been putting this trip off for too long and recently decided that I needed to go see one of my childhood homes. It was time to face those memories head-on.
         I drove east to Reno, then got on Highway 395 South out of Carson City curving through the flat desert landscape dotted with sagebrush. My goal was to make it to Henderson, Nevada, just outside of Las Vegas for the night before going on to Window Rock. The next day, I traveled further south and joined Interstate Highway 40, which used to be the old two-lane Route 66 I remembered traveling on through each town. After continuing through Winslow, I passed the Petrified Forest National Park and then crossed into the Navajo Reservation. At Lupton, I turned off the Interstate to go north through a few towns that were just houses, trailers, and rusting trucks. Indian Route 12 hadn’t changed one bit and was as scenic as ever, with the red dirt emerging under the juniper and pinion trees. I was surrounded by large sandstone formations as I climbed steadily higher. I turned onto Highway 264, and as I drove to the outskirts of Window Rock, I noticed a couple of new buildings and gas station convenience stores. Some businesses I remembered were long gone.
         I rolled over the familiar cattle guard crossing on Indian Route 100, the only two-lane road going into Window Rock. I turned right and slowly proceeded up Circle Hill Drive while attempting to dodge huge potholes and the crumbling asphalt that I doubt had ever been maintained since I left forty-four years ago. After pulling into the driveway of a small adobe sandstone house that had been built in the 1930s or ‘40s, I got out to take a closer look.  The view was still incredible from here. You can see for miles above the Navajo government buildings and Window Rock itself, a hole carved by the wind into a red sandstone bluff and the Navajo capitol’s namesake. Window Rock is in the northeast corner of the state and sits atop the Colorado Plateau at almost 7,000 feet in elevation and has a population of about 2,000. Its original name, Niʼ Ałníiʼgi, meant “center of the world,” and it certainly felt like it was while living here.
         My childhood home was now abandoned and overgrown with weeds. I looked across the street to the Begays’ home and towards the hill of rocks I used to climb as a boy. I wasn’t sure exactly why I had come back. It hadn’t been a particularly happy four years of my childhood. In many ways, it had been one of the most difficult times I lived through, struggling to fit into a society I wasn’t a part of and also being forced into a makeshift family in which I knew that deep down, I didn’t belong.
         How did a white kid like me come to live on the Navajo Reservation in the 1960s? That experience alone—simultaneously ostracized for my privileged race while grappling to understand the racism against my friends, classmates, and neighbors—would be tough for any child. But I also struggled at home to find the security and stability that every kid needs while growing up. How did I make it through a turbulent childhood that included my parents’ bitter divorce, my mother’s mental breakdown, my brother’s mental disability, and two stepparents who never seemed to want me around?
         I looked at the house and this neighborhood, remembering both my heartache from those years as well as some good times. I knew I had to mine my own memories to write this story, because who else would remember it now that I am an only child, my parents have passed, and I have no children of my own. This story of these four years on the Navajo Reservation is not always uplifting, and it doesn’t have a happy Hollywood ending. But it is the true story of an ordinary boy thrust into circumstances beyond his control who had to make the best of the situation he was in. The only way I knew how to do that was to make new friends, learn from the people who had survived here for generations, and keep moving forward. I knew someday that I would get out of this house, make my own way, and create the life that I had always dreamed of. This is the story of that boy in the house, gazing out his window towards Window Rock, knowing there was a way to get through it all.

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Chapter 1

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           I was just six years old when my father came back from his second Vietnam deployment. The past few years without him had been tough on me, and I thought everything would be okay now that he was back with me and my mom. Boy, was I wrong.

           I was fast asleep in bed one night at our apartment in Phoenix. My dad came into my room and shook me awake. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go.”

           “Where?” I asked. He wouldn’t tell me but as we walked outside of our apartment to the car, I realized my mother wasn’t there and she wasn’t going with us, wherever that was. “Where’s Mom?” I asked him.

           “You’ll see,” he said bitterly. He started our white VW beetle bug and we sped off. I stared at his profile in the dark as the streetlights rolled over us quickly. In the daylight, he was a tall, and handsome man with short black hair. Tonight, I hardly recognized him. Finally, we pulled up to a motel parking lot and he parked the bug so we could face the doors of the rooms. My dad turned the car off.

           “What’s going on?” I kept pestering him. “Why are we here?” I asked. He wouldn’t answer me, so I got bored and laid down in the back seat, drifting off to sleep while he kept watching and waiting for someone or something to happen.

           The next thing I knew, I woke up hours later when my dad opened the door of the car. I realized he had been to the motel office because he had a room key in his hands. “Come on,” he said. I wondered, Were we going to sleep at this motel tonight?

           He pulled me by the hand as I stumbled in my pajamas up the second-story steps of the motel, groggy from being up so late at night. We found the room he was looking for, and he opened the door with the key. I took a step inside in front of him. The lights immediately came on, and I saw my mom and a strange man in bed together. It was clear they were naked together underneath the covers. I stared in shock.

           My dad looked down at me and said, “Take a look at your mother. She’s a slut and a whore.” Then he raised his arm and pointed with his finger. “Look at her with another man!” he shouted.

           Mom jumped out of bed, running naked towards us while screaming at Dad, “What are you doing?! Get the hell out of here! How dare you!”

           I started crying, standing just past the doorway between my parents.  My mind went numb, and I didn’t know what they were saying. I could not wrap my head around why she was here with this other man in the middle of the night.  While my parents screamed at each other, I looked over to the man, who was calmly sitting up in the bed with the sheets over his lower body.

           Who was he? How could my mother do this to Dad and me? Was I to blame? I was filled with these questions that my father wouldn’t answer until we left. In the car on the way home, he said, “She doesn’t want to be with us and likes that other man more.” When we got home, I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about was if I’d ever see my mother again.

           I did see my mother again. Although this incident at the motel was seared into my memory to this day, I don’t remember much about those days and weeks after. Only that I was left with a neighbor while my parents, Casey and Joyce, sorted out what would happen next. They soon got divorced and my father left for a job at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. My mom received all of the personal property they acquired during the marriage, along with custody of my older brother Don and me, with visitation rights for Dad.

           Only a couple of months after the divorce, Mom ultimately had a reckoning with herself. After years of mental instability, she had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the VA psychiatric hospital in Phoenix. She had been a rebellious teenager, and her first marriage at age 17 in Maine ended in divorce. Then she married my father soon after joining the Air Force because she was pregnant with Don. In the psychiatric hospital, she had callously referred to Don as “unwanted” and as “Casey’s son.” Joyce had a difficult birth with Don, who became mentally retarded, the common term used back in the day, as a result of a spontaneously arrested case of infant hydrocephalus caused by forceps used on his head during childbirth.

           Raising Don had been extraordinarily difficult for my parents. His behavioral issues caused all sorts of problems. After I was born in Japan and we returned to the States, he incessantly teased me to no end. When we moved to Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix, Don was put on various medications to try to control his behavior and hyperactivity, but it didn’t help much. He still needed constant supervision and attention. Before my father left for his first deployment to Vietnam as a special military advisor in 1963, my parents decided to place Don in an institution for disabled children called the Arizona Children’s Colony in Coolidge. Perhaps Joyce’s guilt about Don, her affair, me seeing her in bed with another man, and the divorce pushed her over the edge. She’d already been taking tranquilizers for years to cope.

           I said goodbye to my brother in Coolidge and my friends at the private Arizona Language School, where I’d been enrolled for the past two years. I was caught in a whirlwind of tumult between my parents. When I boarded an airplane toting a single suitcase of clothes bound for Washington, D.C., a stark realization that I was unwanted set in. It all happened so suddenly and now, I was facing a different life without Mom. I didn’t know what to expect, but I looked forward to being with my dad again and seeing his family, who lived on a farm in Pennsylvania. My father dropped me off there right after I arrived while he looked for an apartment for us in the D.C. area. Those few weeks at the farm with my relatives were a brief return to normalcy.

           My father found an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. I enrolled at Charles Barrett Elementary, my first public school, in the second grade based on age, not academic level, which was the opposite of the language school where I had already learned to speak, read, and write in English, Spanish, and Russian. Mom had me tested prior to schooling and found I was above average in intelligence with a curiosity mindset. I was intellectually gifted with an ability to comprehend material several grade levels above my age so she enrolled me in private school. Now, second grade at Charles Barrett was likely the right decision since I was academically bright, but I no longer had the direction and discipline the language school provided. Over the course of the school year, I became very shy and was a less-than-average student. I’d spend hours daydreaming and just couldn't focus. 

           Without question, my poor self-image, self-esteem, and lack of self-confidence that stemmed from circumstances around my parents' divorce impacted my studies. I likely suffered from post-traumatic stress, after the motel incident and didn’t have any emotional support while Mom and Dad focused on themselves and how their lives might be impacted by their break-up. I was desperate for parental love, security, and encouragement with assurances that everything was going to be okay, but it wasn’t there. My insecurity was so deep that once while staying with my aunt, uncle, and cousins when Dad was away, I became unreasonably frightened and distraught that he wouldn’t return and had abandoned me to grow up with my aunt and her kids. It was all in my mind, but I was so grief-stricken that he had to get me the next day, cutting short any duty he was on.  

           I soon became comfortable and content living with my dad in Alexandria. At the end of the school year in 1967 when I was eight years old, I got a telephone call from my mother. She dropped a bomb on me. “I want you to come back to Arizona and live with me and Will,” she said.

          Will was the man in the hotel room. I knew that they had gotten married recently, but I hadn’t realized it would affect me so far away in Virginia. “We just moved to Window Rock for his new job,” she explained. Both she and Will had worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Phoenix, and they had moved to Albuquerque in the meantime.

           “Where’s Window Rock?” I asked her.

           “On the Navajo Reservation,” she explained. “In the northeast corner of the state.”

            I couldn’t even comprehend where that was. Or what a reservation was. All I knew was that I didn’t want to move. I liked my third-grade classmates, my Cub Scout troop, and hanging out in the bowling alley on Wednesday nights while Dad bowled and socialized in a league. Dad and I were best friends and pals. I idolized him and when he wasn’t working, we did everything together: traveling, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and even sleeping in the same bed since having one is cheaper than two. My dad was a terrific single father. To me, he was just like the single dads in popular television shows like The Andy Griffith Show and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.

           I had grown used to the fact that my mom hadn’t been part of my life for two years. She never wrote, didn’t send gifts, and only called around the holidays or at my birthday. She had become a past memory of my earlier life. I couldn’t imagine going back to live with her now.

           “Why do I have to go?” I asked her on the phone.

           “Well, I’m married now,” she explained. “It’s best for you to live with a mother and a father.”

           “But Will’s not my father,” I insisted.

           This reasoning didn’t matter in the end. My father reluctantly agreed with her that it would be better for me to live with them, and after all, she did have custody of me according to the divorce agreement. Dad reassured me that everything would be fine and that we’d see each other in the summers. I knew that the worst part of this move, aside from missing Dad, was that there would be no more weekend, holiday, and summer trips to Pennsylvania to visit my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, the only family I knew.  

           We packed Dad’s white 1965 Rambler American car that summer to drive to Arizona.  We stopped to see Jesse James’s hometown in St. Joseph, Missouri, a highlight for me since I remembered hearing about him as a young outlaw from the Wild West who took from the rich and gave to the poor. From there, we traveled south and joined Route 66 in Texas going west. We talked about a million things, especially my apprehensions about moving to the reservation. He turned to me and promised, “Your mom will do her best.”

           As we crossed into New Mexico, the Southwest landscape from my childhood became more familiar, but the wide-open spaces, the incredible mountains, and the dazzling sunsets were no comfort to me. I began to cry as we got closer, looking out the window and wondering what my new life would be like. I tried to convince my dad to turn back, but it was too late now.

           We crossed the border into Arizona just a mile or so from Window Rock. It was desolate here, with hardly any trees or cactus like I was used to in Phoenix. Finally, we pulled up to what was to be my new house on Circle Hill Drive, a small home built for government employees who work on the reservation. Mom and Will came outside to greet us, but I didn’t want to get out of the car. I could only stare at these two people who seemed like strangers to me.

 

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