“And Belinda said, ‘If I ever have a boy, I want to name him Jeremiah.’ Jeremiah. You know what that means?”
And then I get what she’s doing. Her question has Jeremiah stumped and intrigued. He lowers the rifle completely and readjusts his position in the tree house. His hesitation is just long enough for me to slip into the space right up under the platform. Grandma A keeps him talking. Heart pounding, I consider the quickest route to the back porch. And all I come up with is the bloodied track. I look up, hoping there’s some way to know if Jeremiah can see me. But there’s no way to know. He’s still considering Grandma A’s question, or maybe he’s fallen asleep. I pray for swift, silent feet to carry me. I cross the expanse from the tree house to the back porch. And my prayers, however small, are simply not answered. A stubborn old board creaks under my boot.
Then I hear, “Hey, uh, where’s that Indian girl?” And since the prayer for silent feet isn’t answered, I pray that Grandma Alice can remember what Jeremiah means and somehow convince him not to shoot.
In my renewed pact with silence, I hear Grandma answer him.
“God will uplift,” she says. “That’s what it means. God will lift.”
I hope that’s true.
I feel for the screen latch in the darkness, running my hands over the weathered doorframe. “Cass,” I whisper, hoping my call will seep through any opening. I fumble for the rusted hook and free it from the eye. Slipping through the screen, I turn the knob to the house. The stillness is thick.
“Cass?” I call again. I can barely make out the doorway from the backroom to the living room in the glow of the single lamplight.
“Over here,” she says, flatly.
Her voice makes me jump.
“Careful. I’m not alone.”
Of course you’re not. That would make things too simple.
I remember tracing the way
your blood flowed just beneath your skin
Copper shot through in green
I remember the streams
rising and falling
in veins stretched across your landscape,
the back of your hand
a fine network of tendon and bone
your pulse, a soothing rhythm
When I thought I was alone
In the dark.
I remember Sicheii’s fire
flickered in shadows and light
My fears would come
And settle
like birds on a wire
I traced and retraced
my steps and then your stories
Until I felt wingbeats turn into dreams
And fade in the distance.
(found caught in the bumper of Sicheii’s truck)
Chapter 26
Love is blind. That’s what they say. But I say trust is. Blind trust in things turning out all right, blind trust that prayer will fix everything, blind trust that any of this makes sense and somehow has a deeper meaning is simply blind. I don’t know the beginning, and I certainly don’t know the end. So, why do I try? And while I’m standing here, contemplating my very existence, Cassie switches on her flashlight.
“You have to forgive me,” Maverick’s auntie says over her, holding Cass hostage with her vermin-killing .22. “You just have to.” Her aim is shaky. She points her rifle at Cassie, pleading with her through the crosshairs. Strangely at Cassie’s mercy and yet…
Let’s hit pause. Honestly, I don’t know how we got to this point. Someone, besides me, has some explaining to do. How is Cassie, you know, the one at the business end of the gun barrel, in charge of this situation?
And then his auntie says, “Loretta.” She turns her head slightly in my direction, and I realize this is some kind of makeshift introduction.
What do I say? “Pleased to meet you?”
Cass is calm. She doesn’t say anything and doesn’t move. Since that’s weird, in and of itself, and since I’ve spent my whole life standing beside Cassie, that’s what I do. Stand with her—blindly. Oh, except this time, I sit beside her, staring down the barrel. I figure it ups the stakes, and maybe, just maybe, it will be enough to make Loretta rethink this whole situation. But no. . . That’s not what it does. Instead…
Loretta panics. “Why won’t you forgive me?” she shouts. Somehow Loretta has missed that Cassie, to this point, has said nothing. Cassie’s hands are tucked under her thighs. And there’s a look of resignation on her face.
Then Cassie looks up at her captor, “What do you want me to forgive you for? Killing a mountain lioness, orphaning a cub, treating your own flesh and blood like dirt…”
“No. No. Just stop.”
“Okay,” Cassie says. And then she adds, “It’s not up to me, anyway.”
“Oh, yes, it is,” Loretta insists, settling herself once again behind the barrel. “’Cuz if you won’t forgive me, who will?”
Then because the silence isn’t a good enough answer, she repeats, “Who will?”
Crack! The sound of a .45 fills the night air.
Grandma A! I can’t believe I left her out there with that maniac.
I’m on my feet again, and I move toward the window.
“Don’t you dare. Sit down,” she says, training her sights on me. But what Loretta doesn’t know is I’ve also spent my life watching my relations being treated like vermin, so a .22 doesn’t scare me… much. I look her straight in the eyes. Hers are wavering, watering blue pools unable to stand against flashing obsidian, especially when I push the gun barrel aside and walk to the window. There’s nothing to see out there in the dark except the faint glow of the snow in moonlight.
“Yeehaw,” Grandma Alice declares. Her voice booms from the direction of the tree house. “Now I know why Norm didn’t want me to handle guns much.”
There she stands, shouldering Jeremiah’s rifle as if they are life-long buddies enjoying an afternoon at the shooting range. Crack! She takes another shot. I don’t know why I ever worried about her. I turn back to figure out Cass. Loretta is not made of the same stuff we are. She sure doesn’t seem so tough to me, all weak-handed and begging for mercy, so why is Cassie so passive?
The next shot comes from inside the house, and I’m hit, in the quad.
“I said, sit down,” Loretta says.
“Ow! You want me to forgive you for that, too?” I say, clasping my thigh. The bullet grazed me, taking no flesh. “You realize that thing is mostly bark, but it can bite,” I say, taking my original spot on the floor up against the wall next to Cassie.
“Shut up,” she says.
I search for her eyes, and when I catch her gaze, I say, “I can forgive you if it means that much to you.”
I can’t help myself. She’s weak, and she disgusts me.
Then I realize something is not adding up right. Something tells me the joke is on me. And things are about to get uglier than I imagined.
Cassie has been riveted to that spot on the floor since I got here, and she hasn’t said much. Time marches on in this weird tense silence. I look at Loretta and then back at Cass. Finally, Cassie slides her palms out from under her thighs and considers the dark stain of coagulating blood on her palms. She tests the movement of her fingers. The skin is stiff with blood. She turns her hands over, raising them up for her captor to see, and she says, “Who should I forgive for this?”
Loretta looks away.
“Shut up!” she says. “Just shut up. I can’t think around you.”
All this time, I thought Cassie was… was I don’t know. But the real reason she’s pale, practically mute, and glued to the floor, is that she’s hurt. It’s a matter of time until Alice and Jeremiah’s jolly night at the shooting range turns into something else.
So then I do what has to be done.
“Forgive her,” I say to Cassie, turning to look at her eye-to-eye.
“What?” she says. She turns her head to look back at me. The effort is straining her now. I plead with her with my eyes. Come on, Cass.
“J
ust do it,” I say. “Trust me.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to,” I insist.
“I can’t.”
“She forgives you,” I say to Loretta.
“Nope. Not good enough. I need to hear it from her,” Loretta says with confidence rising. “She’s the only one.” She settles back behind the rifle sight.
“Or else what? Are you gonna shoot her?”
“Yep,” she says. This time her hands are more steady. She’s not looking at me. She’s squaring up for a shot at Cass.
“Well, that’s stupid,” I say.
And then I immediately regret it.
She flinches for a moment and gives me a side-glance.
“I mean that’s stupid to ask Cassie for forgiveness for the thing that you’re about to do to her again.” I almost get tangled in my own logic. Cassie needs a doctor now, and that’s all I can think about.
I need Grandma Alice’s words in my mouth. I need the words that will make Loretta drop the rifle and… and help me get Cass out of here. I don’t have any stories of baby blankets, knitting booties, and baby names.
So then I say, “What was your mom like?”
“What?”
“What was she like? My mom, my Ama, died when I was little, so I like hearing about other people’s moms.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You know, Cassie doesn’t have a mom, either,” I say.
I have no idea where I’m going with this.
Then I say, “Sorry. I distracted you from… like the whole holding us hostage thing and whatever.”
I am really failing at this.
Loretta looks up from her rifle and says, “The what?!”
“You know the holding us hostage thing and stuff.”
“Is that what I’m doing? I mean, is that what you call it?”
“Yeah,” I say. Now who’s asking the weird questions?
“I never really thought about it that way,” she says, lowering the rifle. “I mean, I guess I never really thought about what I was doing at all.”
Okay. Weird. Now I’m lost.
She pauses, slides forward in her chair with the rifle in her lap, and then says, “Do you ever have those moments where you wonder how you got here?”
“Uhhh… sure,” I say. Like how about right now?
Then she says, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be this person.” She sets the .22 in a dark corner of the room and comes back to stand in the light of Cassie’s beam. “Didn’t someone say, if you don’t like how your life story is going, you can change the ending?”
She doesn’t wait for me to say anything.
She grabs her coat and hat, slides into her winter boots and walks out the back door. The screen door creaks shut.
In the strange unfathomable silence that follows I think, maybe, just maybe, I’m not the only one who’s praying.
The men came for you in the morning
colored sand flowed
through their fingertips
gypsum, ochre, sandstone, charcoal
Then they held you
so close
You could not stand
On your own
You could not stand
I did not remember
that you were small
I did not remember
Until they asked the Holy People
to heal you
I did not remember
And when the sky
turned
pink,
turned
orange,
The sand shifted.
And the Holy Ones scattered
To the wind.
(found in the apricot tree branches at Maverick’s house)
Chapter 27
I just realized it’s my birthday. I imagined eighteen candles, ablaze on a cake that Sicheii specially ordered, decorated with a cross to symbolize Spider Woman, and a diamond to symbolize Dinétah, or the homeland. And then I remember, I just imagined it.
So, even though all that might be unrealistic, especially the part where Sicheii orders a birthday cake, I never imagined spending my birthday sitting on the floor of Maverick’s broken home wondering how to staunch the flow of my best friend’s blood. And when something is too awful to imagine and even harder to realize, I zone out. I blank. I freeze.
The last time was when Ama passed. I lay there in the early morning light, knowing there was nothing I could do to staunch her spirit as it left her. So, I lay there. So, I lay there…
“Ahzi,” Cassie says softly. “I’m kind of bleeding.”
“I know.”
I look down to witness the flow, the deep red, coagulating. Vermilion. That’s what Mrs. Crumbley would call it. Vermilion. It’s unmistakable.
“Ahzi,” Cassie says, more insistent this time.
I don’t say anything. I don’t do anything. I just look at her.
“Ahzi,” she says softly, as if giving in. “Ahzi, please.”
And something about the eerie softness in her voice startles me. I try to clear my mind and remember the details of how I got here and more importantly any details that might help me remember how to get Cassie out of here. Come on, think.
The silence, the silence is deafening and overwhelming. I know that it is not supposed to be this quiet. Come on, think.
Okay. I came here in the Apache.
And… and I came here…with…
Grandma Alice. Grandma Alice?!
Why, why, why is it so hard for me to tell myself… anything.
Snap out of it!
Okay. I have to help Cassie. Come on, brain!
Step one. Find Alice.
“I’ll be right back,” I say.
“Wait,” Cassie says, startled. “Wait. Don’t go.”
“Just hang on,” I say. “Hang on.”
I ease out the back door ’cuz as soon as I remember Alice, I remember Jeremiah and his gun. I slip through the shadows along the back side of the house and round the corner preparing myself for anything.
“Well, would you look at that,” Alice declares into the cold night air to no one in particular. “I’m outta ammo.”
“Alice?” I say.
“Yep,” she says. She doesn’t look at me. Instead, she trains her sights on some target that the rest of us can’t see.
“Where’s Jeremiah?”
“He…uh… took off with what’s her name when she come out.”
“Oh,” I say. I watch her more as she experiments with various ways to hold the rifle. “What are you still doing out here?”
“Waiting for you girls,” she says, all casual, like she’s waiting for us to finish “powdering our noses” as she calls it.
“Cassie’s hurt,” I say.
“She is?” Alice sets Jeremiah’s rifle down. “Well, what are we waiting for?” She clambers off the tree house porch. And when she does, she turns back into the woman I remember. “You should have said something earlier.”
Grandma A means business. She whisks us both back into the house.
Her steps slow as she fumbles for the light switch. The back porch light comes on, followed by the kitchen light. And as she swoops into action, I wonder Why couldn’t I?
Cassie’s shoulders visibly drop. She practically cries with relief.
“Grandma,” she breathes. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.”
“Sweetie, where are you hurt?”
“The back of my thigh,” she holds up her palm to show her the blood. “I’m shot.” Cassie rolls to one side and tests her strength on her good leg. She reaches for a steady hand, and I do it again. I just stand there. Alice is all the help she needs. She steadies her, unknots the green bandana from around her neck, and forms a makeshift bandage. She presses it up against the wound and secures it with a broad strip she fashions out of a kitchen towel. Cassie’s face twists in protest, but she doesn’t complain out loud.
“That oughtta hold ‘til we get to the truck. You up for
this?”
The weird thing is that Alice turns and looks at me. She asks me if I’m up to this.
“Yeah. I’m right here.”
Grandma A shifts her weight to a steady position on Cassie’s left, and I’m on the right. Cassie rallies, testing the hurt leg in hesitant alternating steps with the good one.
Blood surges at the wound site with the pressure, eventually soaking through the fabric. But we press on. And we walk like that through the snow, through the night, through the bottlenecked canyon, through the stream, and over the rise.
Because you have to. You just have to.
Chapter 28
“We have a surprise for you,” she says. “But…”
“But what?”
“Well, it’s a surprise so…” Cassie, full of life once again, pulls a red bandana from her back pocket. And she does that thing that amazes me. Like it doesn’t matter that I failed her, that I couldn’t be there when she needed me in the way that she needed me. And she just accepts it. She accepts me. I look down at the time-tested paisley design on her bandana. And something about it tells me…
“I have to trust you,” I say. I knot the bandana in place over my eyes.
“Exactly,” Chad chimes in.
“Exactly,” says Maverick.
Chad’s smooth palm takes hold of my upper arm on the left. And Maverick guides my right palm to rest on the carved muscle of his left forearm. This is too much already.
Diamonds at Dawn Page 12