by J. A. Jance
“What’s wrong?” Wanda asked, once they were in the Ford. “You got mad at Rita for just touching the book.”
“I wasn’t mad,” Gabe returned, although his protest was useless. After all their years together, Wanda knew him far too well for him to be able to get away with lying.
“It’s the book,” he said. “It’s dangerous. I didn’t want her near it.”
“How can a book be dangerous?” Wanda asked. “Rita’s just a little girl. She can’t even read.”
Gabe did not want to argue. “It just is,” he said.
“So what are you going to do?” Wanda asked. “Take the book to some other medicine man and have him shake a few feathers at it?”
With that, Wanda had squeezed her broad form against the door on the far side of the car. She had sat there with her arms crossed, staring out the window in moody silence as they started the sixty-mile drive back to Sells. It wasn’t a good way to end a birthday party.
Looks At Nothing had taught Gabe Ortiz the importance of understanding something before taking any action. And so, in the week following the party, he had read the book, Shadow of Death, from cover to cover. It was slow going. In order to read it he had to hold it, and doing that necessitated overcoming his own revulsion. It reminded him of that long-ago day, when, as a curious child, he had reached into his Aunt Rita’s medicine basket and touched the ancient scalp bundle she kept there.
Ni-thahth Rita had warned him then about the dangers of Enemy Sickness. Told him that by not showing proper respect for a scalp bundle he could bring down a curse on her—as the scalp bundle’s owner—or on some member of her family. She had told him how Enemy Sickness caused terrible pains in the belly or blood in the urine, and how only a medicine man trained in the art of war chants could cure a patient suffering from that kind of illness.
It was late when Fat Crack finally finished reading. Wanda had long since fallen asleep but Gabe knew sleep would be impossible for him. He had stolen outside, and sat there on a chair in their ocotillo-walled, dirt-floored ramada. It was early summer. June. The month the Tohono O’othham call Hahshani Bahithag Mashath—saguaro-ripening month. Although daytime temperatures in the parched Arizona desert had already spiraled into triple digits, the nighttime air was chilly. But that long Thursday night, it was more than temperature that made Gabe Ortiz shiver.
It was true, he had known much of the story. In the late sixties, his cousin, Gina Antone, his Aunt Rita’s only grandchild, had been murdered by a man named Andrew Carlisle. Diana Ladd, then a teacher on the reservation, had been instrumental in seeing that the killer, a once well-respected professor of creative writing at the university, had been sent to prison for the murder. Six years later, when the killer got out and came back to Tucson seeking revenge, he had come within minutes of killing both women—Diana Ladd and Rita Antone—and Diana’s son, Davy, as well.
That much of the story Gabe already knew. The rest of it—Andrew Carlisle’s childhood and Diana’s, the various twists of fate that had put their two separate lives on a collision course—were things Fat Crack Ortiz learned only as he read Diana’s book. Knowing those details as well as the background on Andrew Carlisle’s other victims made Fat Crack feel worse instead of better. Nothing he read, including the knowledge that Andrew Carlisle had died of AIDS in the state penitentiary at Florence a few months earlier, did anything to dispel his terrible sense of foreboding about the book and the pain and suffering connected with it.
Gabe Ortiz was a practical man, given to down-to-earth logic. For an hour or more he approached the problem of the book’s danger through the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. When, at the end of several hours of consideration, he had made no progress, he walked back into the house. Careful not to disturb Wanda, he opened the bottom drawer of an old wooden teacher’s desk he had salvaged from the school district trash heap. Inside one of the drawers he found Looks At Nothing’s buckskin medicine pouch—the fringed huashomi—the old medicine man had worn until the day he died.
In the years since a frail Looks At Nothing had bequeathed the pouch to Gabe, he had kept it stocked with sacred tobacco, picking it at the proper time, drying, storing, and rolling it in the proper way. Gabe had carefully followed the sacred traditions of the Peace Smoke, using it sparingly but to good effect, all the while hoping that one or the other of his two sons would show some interest in learning what the medicine man had left in Gabe’s care and keeping. Unfortunately, his two boys, Richard and Leo, nearly middle-aged now, were far more interested in running their tow-truck/auto repair business and playing the guitar than they were in anything else.
Back outside, seated on a white plastic chair rather than on the ground, as the wiry Looks At Nothing would have done, Gabe examined the contents of the bag—the medicine man’s World War II vintage Zippo lighter and the cigarettes themselves. He had thought that he would light one of them and blow the smoke over the book, performing as he did so the sacred act of wustana, of blowing smoke with the hope of illuminating something. But sitting there, he realized that what was needed for wustana was a living, breathing patient. Here he had only an object, the book itself.
Rather than waste the sacred smoke, Fat Crack Ortiz decided to try blowing from his heart instead. He remembered Looks At Nothing telling him once that the process was so simple that even an old woman could do it.
Holding the book in his hands, he began the chant, repeating the verses four times just as he had been taught.
I am blowing now to see what it is that lives here,
What breathing thing lies hidden in this book.
There is a spirit in here that sickens those around it,
That is a danger to those around it.
I want to see this strength so I will know what kind of thing it is.
So I will know how to draw it out of where it is hiding
And how to send it away to that other place,
The place where the strength belongs.
As Gabe did so, as he sang the words of the kuadk—observing the form and rhythms of the age-old chant of discernment—he began to figure it out. As time passed, he began to see the pattern. Without quite knowing how, he suddenly understood.
The evil Ohb—Fat Crack’s Aunt Rita’s enemy—was back. The wicked Mil-gahn man who, twenty-one years earlier, had somehow become a modern-day reincarnation of an ancient tribal enemy, was coming once again. Somehow the dreaded Apache was about to step out of the pages of Diana Ladd Walker’s book and reenter their lives.
Gabe remembered reading in a newspaper article several months earlier that Andrew Carlisle was dead. That meant that if he was not coming in person, certainly the strength of the Ohb was coming, bringing danger to all of those people still alive who had once been connected with Diana Ladd and with Rita Antone—the woman Gabe called Ni-thahth, his mother’s elder sister—in that other, long-ago battle. The fact that Carlisle was dead meant nothing. His spirit was still alive, still restless, and still bent on revenge.
Time passed. When Gabe at last emerged from his self-induced trance, the stars were growing pale in a slowly graying sky. Stiffly, Gabe Ortiz eased his cramped body out of the uncomfortable plastic chair. Before going back into the house to grab a few hours of sleep, he limped out to where the cars were parked and put both Looks At Nothing’s deerskin pouch and Diana Ladd’s offending book in the glove compartment of the tribal chairman’s Ford sedan.
Once, long ago, when Looks At Nothing had first told him that Gabe had the power to be a great shaman, Gabe had teased the Gohhim O’othham—Old Man. He had laughed off the medicine man’s prediction that one day Fat Crack, too, would be a great mahkai—a medicine man with a tow truck. That idea had struck him as too funny, especially since it came from a man who clung stubbornly to the old ways and who looked down on all things Anglo—with the single notable exception of that aging Zippo lighter.
Looks At Nothing had much preferred walking to riding in a truck. Gabe wondered now what the old shaman w
ould say if he knew his deerskin pouch and sacred tobacco would be riding to town the next day in a two-year-old Crown Victoria. Looks At Nothing would probably think it was funny, Gabe thought, and so did he.
A few minutes later, still chuckling, he eased himself into bed. As he did so, Wanda stirred beside him.
“It’s late,” she complained. “You’ve been up all night.”
“Yes,” Gabe said, rolling his heavy body next to hers, and resting one of his hands on her shoulder. “But at least now I can sleep.”
The sentence ended with a contented snore. Within minutes, Wanda fell asleep once more as well.
Lani had told the man that she would be late for work if she arrived any later than seven. That wasn’t entirely true. The first two hours she spent at the museum each day, from seven to nine, were strictly voluntary. She went around on the meandering paths, armed with a trash bag and sharp-pronged stick, picking up the garbage that had been left behind by the previous day’s visitors.
During those two hours, doing mindless work, she was able to watch the animals from time to time and simply to be there with them. Working by herself, without the necessity of talking with anyone else, she remembered the times she had come here with Nana Dahd and with her brother Davy.
Nana Dahd. Dahd itself implies nothing more than the somewhat distant relationship of godmother, but for Davy and Lani both, Rita Antone had been much more than that. Diana Ladd Walker may have owned the official title of “Mother” in the family, but she had come in only a distant second behind the Indian woman who had actually filled the role.
Ambitious and forever concentrating on her work, there was a part of Diana Ladd Walker that was always separate from both her children. While Diana labored over first a typewriter and later a computer, the child-rearing joys and responsibilities had fallen mainly on Rita’s capable and loving shoulders.
By the time Lani appeared on the scene, Davy was already eleven years old and Rita’s health was becoming precarious. Had Davy not been there to pitch in and help out, no doubt it would have been impossible for Nana Dahd to look after a busily curious toddler. In a symbiotic relationship that made outsiders wonder, the three of them—the old woman, the boy, and the baby—had made do.
Long after most males his age would have forsaken the company of women, Davy stayed around. He, more than anyone, understood what it was Nana Dahd was trying to do, and he was willing to help. Whenever he wasn’t in school, he spent most of his waking hours helping the woman who had once been his baby-sitter care for his little sister.
When the three of them were alone together in Rita’s apartment—with the old woman in her wheelchair and with Lani on her lap while Davy did his homework at the kitchen table—it seemed as though they existed in a carefully preserved bubble that was somehow outside the confines of regular time and space.
In that room they had spoken, laughed, and joked together, speaking solely in the softly guttural language of the Tohono O’othham. It was there Lani learned that Nana Dahd’s childhood name had been E Waila Kakaichu, which means Dancing Quail. Rita Antone’s dancing days were long since over, but Lani’s were only beginning. The child danced constantly. Her favorite game consisted of standing in the middle of the room, twirling and pretending to be siwuliki—whirlwind. She would spin around and around until finally, losing her balance, she would fall laughing to the floor.
Just as Rita had given Davy his Indian name of Olhoni—Little Orphaned Calf—Nana Dahd gave Lani a special Indian name as well, one that was known only to the three of them. In the privacy of Rita’s apartment, the Tohono O’othham child with the Mil-gahn name of Dolores Lanita Walker became Mualig Siakam. Rita told Lani that the words mualig siakam meant Forever Spinning.
There in Nana Dahd’s room, working one stitch at a time, Rita taught Davy and Lani how to make baskets. Davy had been at it much longer, but Lani’s tiny and surprisingly agile fingers soon surpassed her elder brother’s clumsier efforts. When that happened, Davy Ladd gave up and stopped making baskets altogether.
Rita taught Davy and Lani the old stories and the medicinal lore Rita had learned from her own grandmother, from Oks Amichuda—Understanding Woman. Had Rita been physically able, she would have taken her charges out into the desert to show them the plants and animals she wanted them to understand. Instead, the three of them spent hours almost every weekend at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, with Davy pushing Nana Dahd’s chair along the gently graded paths and with Lani perched on the old woman’s lap.
For Rita, every display in the museum was part of her comprehensive classroom. As they went from one exhibit to another, Rita would point out the various plants and tell what each was good for and when it should be picked. And on those long afternoons, if it was still wintertime, so the snakes and lizards were unable to hear and swallow the storyteller’s luck, Rita would tell stories.
Each animal and plant came with its own traditional lore. Patiently, Nana Dahd told them all. Some tales explained the how of creation, like the spiders stitching together the floating pieces of earth. Others helped explain animal behavior, like the stories about how I’itoi taught the birds to build their nests or how he taught the gophers to dig their burrows underground. There were stories that did the same thing for plants, like the one about the courageous old woman who went south to rescue her grandson from the warlike Yaquis and was rewarded by being turned into the beautiful plant, the night-blooming cereus. And there were some, like the stories of how Cottontail and Quail both tricked Coyote, that were just for fun.
As the children learned the various stories, Rita had encouraged them to observe the behavior of the animals involved and to consider how the story and the animal’s natural inclination came together to form the basis of the story. What was observable and what was told combined to help the children learn to make sense of their world, just as those same stories had for the Tohono O’othham for thousands of years.
Rita—her person, her stories, and her patient teaching—had formed the center of Lani Walker’s existence from the moment the child first came to Gates Pass, from the time before she had any conscious memory. When Rita Antone died, the day before Lani’s seventh birthday, a part of the child had died as well, but there on the paths of the museum the summer of her sixteenth year—wandering alone among the plants and animals that had populated Nana Dahd’s stories—Lani was able to recapture those fading strains of stories from her childhood and breathe life into them anew.
And each day at nine o’clock, when she finished up with one shift and had an hour to wait before the next one started, she would make sure she was near the door to the hummingbird enclosure. For it was there, of all the places in the museum, where she felt closest to Nana Dahd. This was where she and Davy had been with Rita on the day Lani Walker first remembered hearing Rita mention the story of Kulani O’oks—the great Medicine Woman of the Tohono O’othham.
“Kulani,” Lani had repeated, running the name over her tongue. “It sounds like my Mil-gahn name.”
And Rita’s warm brown face had beamed down at her in a way that told Lani she had just learned something important. Nana Dahd nodded. “That is why, at the time of your adoption, I asked your parents to make Lani part of your English name. Kulani O’oks and Mualig Siakam are two different names for the same person. And now that you are old enough to understand that, it is time that you heard that story as well.”
Whenever Lani Walker sat in the hummingbird enclosure, all those stories seemed to flow together. Kulani O’oks and Mualig Siakam were one and the same, and so were Dolores Lanita Walker and Clemencia Escalante.
Four different people and four different names, but then Nana Dahd had always taught that all things in nature go in fours.
Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz, Rita Antone’s nephew and his wife, had stopped by the Walker home in Gates Pass on their way home from Tucson that warm September day. Wanda Ortiz, after years of staying at home with three kids, had gone off to school and earned a degre
e in social work from the University of Arizona. Her case load focused on “at risk” children on the reservation, and she had ridden into town earlier that day in an ambulance, along with one of her young charges.
“It’s too bad,” Wanda said, visiting easily with her husband’s wheelchair-bound aunt in Diana Walker’s spacious, basket-lined living room. “She has ant bites all over her body. The doctor says she may not make it.”
At seventy-one, Rita Antone could no longer walk, having lost her left leg—from the knee down—to diabetes. She spent her days mostly in the converted cook shack out behind Diana and Brandon Walker’s house. The words “cook shack” hardly applied any longer. The place was cozy and snug. It had been recently renovated, making the whole thing—including a once tiny bathroom—wheelchair-accessible. Evenings Rita spent in the company of Diana and Brandon Walker or with Davy Ladd, the long-legged eleven-year-old she still sometimes called her little Olhoni.
On that particular evening, Brandon had been out investigating a homicide case for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Diana excused herself to go make coffee for the unexpected guests while Davy lay sprawled on the floor, doodling in a notebook and listening to the grown-ups talk rather than doing his homework. Rita sat nearby with her owij—her awl—and the beginnings of a basket in hand. She frowned in concentration as a long strand of bear grass tried to escape its yucca bindings.
“Ant bites?” Rita asked.
Wanda Ortiz nodded. “She was staying with her great-grandmother down in Nolic. Her father’s in jail and her mother ran off last spring. Over the summer, the other kids helped look after the little girl, but they’re all back in school now. Yesterday afternoon, the grandmother fell asleep and the baby got out. She wandered into an ant bed, but her grandmother is so deaf, she didn’t hear the baby screaming. The other kids from the village found her in the afternoon, after they came home on the bus.