by Неизвестный
“From what?”
“You don't remember?”
“I don't even remember the sex.”
“I don't expect anything from you,” he said. “For getting me out of jail.”
“You owe me nothing.”
“I mean, I expect nothing. No favors. No kindness.”
“Forget it.”
“What did it cost?”
“Cost?”
“To bribe the guards. To get me out.”
“You don't need to know that.”
“Had to be in the thousands. US thousands.”
“Doesn't matter.”
“Had to be a good chunk of money to buy me out of that jail. Ten thousand minimum.”
“Don't get on with this. It doesn't really concern you, what it cost.”
“Easy for you to say. Ever spend a night in a Mexican jail?”
“Not a Mexican jail,” I said. “There was a jail in South Dakota. . . maybe Iowa. The graveyard shift jailer tried to rape me.”
“Guess I was long gone by then.”
I nodded.
“What do you do, to make so much money?”
“I work on the edge.”
“On the edge.”
“Yes.”
“Edge of what?”
“Between a little money and a lot.”
“Is it legal? What you do?”
“I work on the edge,” I said again. “I'm not even sure where that edge is any more. Not about what's legal and what isn't. About who I am. What I'm doing.”
“Ah,” he said with a smile. “Identity. Who are we, anyway? Listen. Did you ever get back up to the rez?”
“I lived there for a year.”
“In Hopi?”
He seemed incredulous that I'd have ever gone back.
“No. In Tuba City.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“No,” I said after a long time. “That part of me I don't want to talk about.”
“So what's left to talk about?” he asked.
“Our daughter.”
“Ahhhh,” he sighed. “That.”
“Who is Luna?” I asked him later. “Nobody.”
“Come on, Jonathan. It's too late for games. I know that it's not a single person. I know it's the way women talk to each other, once they're out.”
“Once they're free.”
“That too.”
“Luna. It's a password. It's. . . a recognition thing.”
I took out Xochitl's Palm Pilot and re-created the chat room. I showed him the prompt, asked if he ever joined in.
“No. Believe it or not, I've never owned a computer. Never turned one on. No idea what this thing is you're showing me.”
I thought for a moment of joining the chat, but I wasn't ready for that yet, didn't quite have the one question formed that I had to ask. I turned the Palm off.
“But you do know about Luna?”
“It's. . . what do I say, it's an escape route. They talk, offer advice, tell each other about jobs, money, cities, hairstyles.”
“How did you get involved, Jonathan?”
It was the first time I'd said his name, and I stumbled over it.
“Johnny,” he said. “Down here, they call me Johnny. Or Juan. As for when. . . a woman approached me about a year ago.”
“You met her?”
“Never. First, I got a letter. Then a man came to see me.”
“And?”
“The man gave me a cell phone. After that, I talked to the woman.”
“Who was she?” I asked, thinking that it had to be Mari Emerine.
“She said she was called Luna. She knew there were women being smuggled into Mexico, then sold in the US as sex slaves, strippers, servants. Things like that. She said she could help with false identity papers, money, travel. A lot of things.”
“But you never met her.”
“No.”
“What happened to the women who got out?”
“I don't know,” he admitted.
“You ever hear from them?”
“Never. That was part of the deal. So they wouldn't compromise me. Compromise the network.”
“Luna.”
“Yes.”
“Was it a code word?” I asked. “Or her real name?”
“I never knew. She helped over a hundred women. That's all I know.”
“Did you ever know Xochitl?”
“Xochitl Gálvez?”
“Yes. So you did know her.”
“Know of her. Met Subcommandante Marcos once at a workers' strike. But Xochitl wasn't at that rally.”
“No, no, no. This woman I know named Xochitl, she worked at a maquiladora.”
“Can't be the same woman. Xochitl Gálvez is the name of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Vicente Fox government.”
And so one more little thing was explained. I told him about the Xochitl I knew. But he wouldn't talk about the only real thing I wanted from him. After another hour, I finally had to ask him, straight out.
“Where's our daughter?”
“I don't know where Spider lives now,” he admitted.
“This picture. Did you take it?”
“Nope. She sent it to me. Said she was living in West Hollywood.”
“You really don't know where she lives?”
“No.”
Jonathan had showered and was now eating his fourth bean and chile burrito. He wore an old tanktop and jeans that Rey had given him. Almost totally bald, his scraggy untrimmed beard had grown below his Adam's apple. I'd seen him in just the jeans, seen scars all over his torso. I figured he was just over fifty years old but totally without the paunch and love handles of men his age.
Looking at his face. . . weird.
Think of your first lovers, I mean, do you really remember what they looked like? Do you really recognize people you haven't seen for decades? Do you even know who they are?
Weird.
“About Spider,” he said. “When she was, I don't know, sixteen, seventeen. I got a postcard from Alabama. She knew where I was back then.”
“Where was that?”
“Prison. I was doing three to seven, up in Florence. A bar fight, somebody hit somebody hit somebody, I was the only drunken person left when the cops got there. Had blood on my knuckles. DNA match showed my blood on a dead guy. So she sent me this postcard, said she was coming west from Alabama. Moving to California. Stopped by, actually stayed in a motel in Florence for a week and visited me every day.”
“What was she like? What did she look like?”
“Um.”
“I haven't seen her since you took her from me.”
“Hey, Laura, I'm sorry. That was totally wrong for me to do that.”
“We were young, we were. . . on the edge back then. Wild. Crazy. I hardly remember those days.”
“Me either. I'd eaten some peyote that day, that's all I remember. You were ragging me about leaving a jar of honey open, and there was this long trail of ants across the kitchen floor and up onto the tabletop and into the honey. You were ragging me, hell, I don't remember anything more than picking up Spider and a box of Pampers and getting into my pickup and driving until I ran out of gas in an Iowa cornfield. I tried to call you, at that camp we'd broken into, where we were living. But you'd already gone.”
“Looking for you, Jonathan.”
“Even I didn't know where I was. Family took me in, told me how to feed Spider. I was high almost every day, so I left Spider with that family for a year. Went back, got her, moved to Minneapolis, got a day job as a trucker, we drove all over the country for ten years. Been in every state except Oregon. I loved that girl.”
“So did I.”
“I loved you, Kauwanyauma.”
“Who knew what love was, back then. We were so young. The picture, Jonathan. How did you get her picture? Tell me how she knew where to send it.”
“She said she looked me up on the Internet. Said she found two hundred and seventy-
three guys named Jonathan Begay, and she was contacting all of them in Arizona first, and if that didn't work, she'd start in other states. I was working in Yuma back then. Front desk clerk. Hardware store. I sold a lot of dynamite to those militia crazies. I guess I got mixed up with them, for a while. Hard to forget my crazy AIM years, protesting the government. So that's when I got the picture. I drove right out to LA without stopping. Went to the address in West Hollywood, but they said they didn't know her there. Still got that address.”
From memory, he wrote it down for me.
“Listen, there's something you've got to know about her. From that week she stayed in Florence. Came to visit every day. By the third day, she was telling me a lot of stories, a lot of. . . um, a lot of stuff she did.”
“Like, what stories?”
“Why she called herself Begay. Said she admired my life with AIM. Like my way of dealing with the law, which as I remember was pretty much telling them to kiss my ass.”
“She still call herself Spider?”
“Hated that name, she told me. Hated spiders, actually. She was calling herself Ashley. Or Kimberly. One of those yuppie names. Heather, maybe. Amber. I don't remember, except that she didn't ever want to be called Spider. Didn't want to have people think she'd turned into something creepy.”
“And what kind of girl did she turn out to be?”
“I don't know whether to tell you, Laura.”
“Tell me what?”
“She's a grifter.”
“What?”
“Told me all the cons she'd pulled. Her partners, her lovers. Toward the end of that week, she was flinging her whole life at me, like it was my fault, except she was proud of it, proud of what she could do.”
“Had she been arrested?”
“Don't know. I think so, I think maybe that was why she left Alabama.”
“A grifter. Like, who did she con? How?”
“She never told me those things. Just the money she'd conned. People with money. That's who she went after.”
“Well. Maybe she's changed.”
“One thing I learned from living down here. People are what they are. You try to change them, they've got traditions, they've got family histories, they've got the class of people they were born into.”
“Even so. Maybe she's changed.”
“I hope you find her,” Jonathan said after a long time. “I hope you do.”
He fell asleep for a time.
A grifter. A con woman. I hated knowing that about her. Partly because I wanted her to be nice, to be civilized, I don't know, something at least different from me. In a way, with some of the scores I took down, I was also a grifter, a con woman. I'd sometimes do anything to get the digital information I needed.
But my daughter a grifter?
Unpleasant.
I wished I didn't know that. But the flipside of that wish was the gratitude to know at least something about her.
About three or four o'clock, Rey came out one last time, watched Jonathan's mouth open and close, snoring very lightly.
“You know he's not sleeping either.”
“I know.”
“Who?” Jonathan asked, awake and instantly alert.
“Garza.” I said. “Hector Garza.”
“Which one was that?”
“The man who took me away. The first time.”
“That guy. I'd never seen him before.”
“You don't ever want to see him again.”
“He wanted something from you,” Jonathan said to us. “What?”
“It was only about money. Not about you at all.”
“Just money?”
“That's right. But a lot of money, he said. He knew about Basta Ya helping women get across the border. Maybe he thought we were doing it for profit. But he was talking about millions of US dollars, and I think he knew I wasn't anywhere near that kind of money.”
“Garza's not sleeping,” Rey said. “He wants us, wants something from us.”
“What does he want? That's what I'd like to hear more about. I'm going to do some computer work.”
I logged into the chat room. Five differently numbered LUNA users were logged in, but as soon as my LUNA5 prompt appeared, they all disappeared but one.
LUNA5: > this is laura
LUNA13: > i've been waiting for you
LUNA5: > good, and i've been waiting to ask you a question
LUNA13: > stay away from us
LUNA5: > who are you?
LUNA13: > we are many people
LUNA5: > yes, i know why you use this chat room, but who are *you*
LUNA13: > we are many women
LUNA5: > *you* are the woman who runs things
LUNA13: > not important who any of us are
LUNA5: > but who are you
LUNA13: > what does it matter, you know what we do
LUNA5: > yes, you help women get out
LUNA13: > so our names are of no importance
LUNA5: > Jonathan begay is sitting two feet from me
A long, long pause.
LUNA13: > is he safe?
LUNA5: > safe from what?
LUNA13: > Garza
LUNA5: > how do you know about that?
LUNA13: > is he safe?
LUNA5: > yes, and he will head south into Sonora this morning
LUNA13: > i have prayed for his safety—thank you, Laura
LUNA5: > he was my husband
LUNA13: > i know
LUNA5: > WHO ARE YOU, THAT YOU KNOW SO MUCH?
LUNA13: > not important
LUNA5: > it is to me—listen, this chat room is being monitored by the us attorney's office, by some very powerful and sophisticated tracking software in Phoenix
LUNA13: > you mean Carnivore
LUNA5: > yes
LUNA13: > i told you that i've been waiting for you, in this chat room
LUNA5: > why?
LUNA13: > to say goodbye
LUNA5: > don't go
LUNA13: > it's time to go, it's time for me to be free
LUNA5: > i want to meet you
LUNA13: > in a day or two, that will no longer be possible—btw, don't worry about feds and their carnivore
LUNA5: > why?
LUNA13: > they know little about us and understand less
LUNA5: > please, don't go, i want to meet you
LUNA13: > you already know me
LUNA5: > who ARE you?
LUNA13: > goodbye, laura
The LUNA13 prompt disappeared. And I suddenly realized who it was.
Alex stumbled outside before sunrise.
“My mom's dying,” she announced. “I need to get to Phoenix today.”
She went back inside to get dressed.
Rey was wearing his cammies.
“You can stay here as long as you want,” he said to Jonathan. “I'm leaving you that old pickup.”
“Thank you.”
“But I'd advise you to move on. These people, they have ways of knowing about us. There'll be visitors here today. Tomorrow at the latest. Probably in the middle of the night. So take what you need. Leave as soon as you can.”
“Today we've got to cross the border,” Rey said to me privately.
“North,” I said.
“Let's go east.”
“East? Why?”
“I was thinking—Florida.”
“No, Rey. I am not running away from this.”
“You're the one who told me about Garza executing that woman. You think he wouldn't hesitate putting a bullet in your head?”
“North,” I said. “It's foolish to go to Tucson.”
“Actually, further north than that. Back to Hopi. Back to the reservation. I want to talk to a policeman.”
32
Once he recognized who I was, Floyd Seumptewa stared at me with amazement.
“Return of the prodigal Hopi,” I said.
He glanced at some papers on his desk and turned them over.
“Aren't you going t
o say hello?”
“Laura Winslow. I didn't think I'd ever see you again.”
He wasn't wearing a uniform. His office in the Hopi Tribal Center was down the hall from the Tribal Police.
“Are you still Captain Seumptewa?”
“Had to leave that. Broke my leg in the rodeo last year. Just can't much get around, couldn't go on patrol.”
“So what do you do here?”
“Special information officer. Miss Winslow, what are you doing here?”
“I need some special information.”
He grasped the edge of his desk and levered himself upright, clicking locks on a full-length brace on his right leg. Stumping over to the window, he pretended to look out onto the main street of Kykotsmovi.
“Did they ever find her?” I said.
“Who?”
“Judy Pavatea.”
One of the lost butterfly maidens.
“No. Didn't find her body. Didn't find any of the other missing Hopi girls. That was a sad business back then. I heard that you'd found the man who killed them, up in Cheyenne. But then you just. . . vanished.”
Rows of kachina dolls stood in a glass-fronted bookcase. Many of them were clowns. One looked like the Joker character from Batman movies. On the opposite wall was a tapestry about three feet high and five feet long with vertical lines in red and blue and gold and bordered on the left and right with tasseled fringing.
“Gold embroidery threads in there,” he said. “From Japan. My daughter-in-law made that one.”
An alabaster carving stood on his desk next to a pen set. Butterfly hairdo.
“Sewa,” he said, and went to sit down again. “Little sister. I keep it here to remind myself of Judy Pavatea.”
He thrummed his fingers against the desk, squinted at me, finally turned over the papers he'd been reading when I first walked into the room.
“Laura Marana.”
He held up both hands, palms toward me. I must have looked in panic at the door I'd shut behind me.
“Nobody up here cares about this notice. I picked it up from this morning's duty pile after I saw that the officers had no interest in it. It's a notice from the US Attorney's Office in Phoenix. Be on the lookout, that kinda thing. Who'd've thought I'd look up and see you right in front of me.”
“I can explain all of that.”
“You don't have to.”
“I don't?”
“Whatever you've done, there's got to be an explanation. But in my heart, you helped us when nobody else wanted to. So to me, you're just a tourist in here looking for some kind of information about the Hopi villages.”