Carolina Crimes
Page 26
He gazed at the imprint of ancient Lake Cahuilla that marked the mountains below him like a ring on a bathtub. He wished he had known the lake in those days, perhaps 1492 when the first white man, Christopher Columbus, sailed to America. The fresh waters of Lake Cahuilla then were full of fish, and the surrounding reeds and grasses teemed with life. Torres’s people would have expected the water to last forever, like the moon and the stars.
Standing high above today’s Salton Sea, a puddle compared to ancient Lake Cahuilla, Torres removed all thoughts from his mind, even the internal dialogue people used to soothe themselves. As he had a thousand times over, he asked the spirits for guidance.
Seconds or minutes later—the toloache made gauging time difficult—a cold wind brushed the back of his neck. He spun toward the western mountains and the forest named for the white man’s dead president, Cleveland. There, the yellow sky had grown dark. Black clouds covered the mountains and lightning fired in the cracks of the storm. Thunder rumbled as the rain and blackness raced toward him.
Were the spirits talking?
A sound startled him, and he stared again at the trail where shafts of sunlight still remained. Dream or reality, he could not say, but into this surreal brightness walked a man-sized Nataska, the black ogre kachina of Hopi legend—the kachina, or spirit, known as The Punisher of Wicked Children.
An invisible hand probed Torres’s chest. His heart seemed to pause beating. He knew of the spirit Nataska from his mother, who carried both Cahuilla and Hopi blood. But this black ogre kachina frightened him more than the doll he had seen as a child, more even than his Hopi grandmother’s terrifying stories of Nataska eating children who misbehaved. The Nataska before him now displayed long sharp horns protruding from his red scalp, and oversized eyeballs that radiated black-light purple. The rows of jagged, triangular teeth inside his long, reptilian mouth resembled those of a great white shark.
Though frightened, Torres refused to run. He understood the black ogre’s presence must be connected to his earlier misadventure at the elephant trees. Had Torres himself not punished two wicked children there? Obviously, this kachina was part of a vision the toloache and the spirits had prepared for him.
The long-toothed vision pointed his legendary saw toward a depression in the earth, a dark shadow on the trail. A clean-edged rock there caught Torres’s eye, a hand-worked piece of flint. Nataska nodded, encouraging Torres to retrieve the arrowhead or broken spear point, and as Torres reached for the hand-sharpened rock, perhaps a talisman hewn by an ancient warrior, a strange hiss stabbed his ears. As he touched the pointed flint—the very same instant—a numbing explosion of air and sound knocked him flat against the earth.
Sweat poured from his skin. He could barely draw breath. What was that earsplitting slash of air, that black, winged shape that had raced above him? He sensed some gigantic predatory bird swooping down to eat him. He cried out in panic.
Noise and the giant bird passed, yet fear so gripped him, Torres at first refused to behold the manmade nature of his imagined predator. Only when the plane was miles away, brushing a rocky mountain, did he understand. The huge military bomber had passed only a few hundred feet above him at the exact instant he touched that rock.
Oh, Great Spirit, what a sign!
In the storm-darkened sky, only lightning showed the aircraft’s downward path, and he witnessed the crash like an old, silent film—in blinking pictures that caused the aircraft to lurch and shrink and end in fire. After passing above Torres in the southern Santa Rosa Mountains, the plane had touched one Fish Creek mountain peak and exploded behind another one many miles away and off to the west.
The fire winked at him through a cloudy sky. He cried no tears for the men he assumed were inside, or their families, and yet he felt distraught. His body withered from foot to scalp as he had at his mother’s funeral. Why? Of what sadness had he been thinking before the coolness of the sudden storm touched his neck and Nataska had appeared in the shafts of light? What despair stayed with him still?
The dead Lake Cahuilla…how the white man’s slime and poisonous mushrooms now covered the bed of an old lake. Among his clan, he had listened to many stories of the abundant game and happy life their ancestors had lived around the old lake’s shores.
Could the day’s events have been coincidence? Those blasphemous teenagers. The visit of Nataska. The flint. The crash of the plane. And this overwhelming grief he still felt for the lost Lake Cahuilla. Surely, everything was connected. Surely, the spirits offered him a message.
He squatted on the mountain trail to rub his new flint. On-again, off-again showers soaked his clothes and chilled his skin. But the flint warmed in his hand, the rock becoming so hot he cupped his palms to catch the next rain. When his hands filled with water, taming the flint’s unnatural heat, Torres grasped the message of his visions. To heal his tribe, he must fill the valley below with water as he’d filled his hands with rain.
Torres rose to his feet and danced. What joy he would experience destroying what the white man had built. What happiness and unity he could build for all indigenous peoples by returning Lake Cahuilla to the Cahuilla.
Yes, he would need help. Much. And his dancing slowed as he considered the task’s difficulty. Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles relied heavily on Colorado River water, so the dams and waterways were strong and well protected. The world, and everyone in the Coachella and Imperial valleys, had learned a serious lesson in 1905-07 when the Salton Sea had been created. The fertile commercialized land of both valleys rested several hundred feet below sea level, and was still subject to flooding from a redirection of the Colorado River. It had happened in 1905. The white man had built many dams, canals, and reservoirs to safeguard his families and farms since then.
But did the difficulty matter? By directing his visions and tampering with nature itself, the spirits clearly had gifted him this exact responsibility. Torres need not worry how impossible his charge, or even what exactly to do next. He had been chosen. The people and answers he needed already struggled to find him.
Click here to learn more about The Black Kachina by Jack Getze.
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