Read Online Walk Me Home by Catherine Ryan Hyde - Free Book Online Page A

nearly knocking her down.
    “That Fred Na’akabayo’s boys?”
    Carly’s heart is pounding so hard she thinks it might kill her. Literally. Maybe it’ll just break and stop. She opens her mouth, but she’s too scared to speak. The first sound just cracks and comes out a cross between a little squeak and nothing at all.
    “Speak up for yourself!” the old woman barks.
    She looks like one of her eggs, the brown one. Both in shape and color. Her skin is the exact same color of brown as the egg in Carly’s trembling hand. Her fluffy white hair is pulled straight back. Her cheeks are fat and drooping, deep diagonal caverns on either side of her mouth casting shadows in the moonlight. Her eyelids droop down on the outside, so far they must make it hard to see.
    “No, ma’am. We’re…just…two girls. Just passing through.”
    “Should of known,” the old woman says. “Even Fred’s rotten boys ain’t rotten enough for this. They got more respect than to come in my henhouse at night. You’re Anglo, ain’t you? Sound Anglo.”
    “Anglo?”
    “White.”
    “Yes, ma’am. We’re white.”
    “Well, don’t that just figure. Got some neighbors think there ain’t no such thing as a good Anglo, and here I always argue for judgin’ ’em one Anglo at a time. That’s what I get for bein’ such a lib’ral thinker. One thing I can say for every Anglo I ever met—they got no respect. Don’t respect their world. Don’t respect each other. And they sure as hell don’t respect no Wakapi.”
    Carly breathes, disjointed, yet sure now that she and Jen are not about to die. She knows it’s bad. But not how bad. But she knows it’s not death. Meanwhile she wonders why she had to tell the woman, in all this moonlight, that they are white. And not boys.
    “Wakapi,” Carly says. “I thought this was Navajo reservation.”
    “It was, but now it ain’t. Navajo Nation goes all around Hopi and Wakapi like a donut, but with two donut holes. So whatever direction you come from, you was on Navajo land. But now you ain’t. Now you’re on my land. Now you’re in the private henhouse of Delores Watakobie, where you got no earthly right to be. I don’t take no truck with Anglos, but I don’t need ’em, neither. I sure’s hell don’t need no trouble from ’em. I don’t come to your house and take what’s yours. I never done nothin’ to you or your people. And this’s how you pay me back for that respect.”
    “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Carly says. And she means it sincerely.
    But Delores Watakobie huffs. “That ain’t hard, to be sorry. That don’t amount to much.”
    “We’re starving. Literally. Starving. We’ve been walking fifteen miles or more a day. Sometimes twenty. And we got lost out here, and we didn’t have anything to eat or drink, and we didn’t want to die.”
    Delores Watakobie does not lower the shotgun. She continues to sight down the barrel of it as she speaks.
    Carly can hear Jen quietly crying beside her.
    “Had no choice. That what you’re saying?”
    “Yes, ma’am. That’s what we’re saying.”
    “We? I only hear one of you open your mouth so far.”
    “That’s what we’re saying, ma’am,” Jen squeaks, sobs evident in her voice.
    “You didn’t have a choice to knock on my door and say you was hungry and thirsty and near about to die?”
    Carly doesn’t answer. There’s too much to explain in the answer.
    “’Cause if you had, here’s what I’d of said. I’d of said, ‘You girls want two scrambled eggs each with your fry bread? Or can you handle three?’ But that ain’t the situation we got ourselves in now, is it? That choice is water over the dam now, ain’t it?”
    “We’ll just go now,” Carly says, backing one step away.
    “No you will not,” Delores Watakobie says, raising the muzzle of the shotgun a little higher.
    Now Carly starts to cry, too.
    Delores says, “You could do me a favor and try not to act like it’s so damn mean, me havin’ a