by AULT, SANDI
Momma Anna came up to me as I stood just inside the door, watching the activity. “Eeeee! You got more hurt.”
“Yeah, I got more hurt.”
“This time, you look like somebody beat you.” Her face was full of concern.
“That’s right,” I said. “Two men.”
“What they do?” she said, anger rising in her voice.
“Just a couple of bad guys. They jumped me and beat me up.”
Momma Anna reached a hand out and tenderly touched my cheek. “Eeeee! I go get you some snow,” she said, and she turned and went toward the kitchen. I went to the kitchen table and sat down to watch the ladies as they finished their project. Momma Anna came through the back door with a pan full of snow. “It nice shady by fence, no wind there,” she said. “Snow stay long time.” She packed the white stuff into a dish towel, rolled it up, and handed it to me.
I pressed the cold pack to my face.
By this time several of the aunties had come to examine me and make exclamations of shock and worry. It seemed that each of them had a home remedy to recommend.
“My sister got a drunk for husband,” Yohe said. “He beat her all time. She put that cactus jelly on her face. She say it best cure.”
“Best cure that one,” Momma Anna said, “big stick. Crack him over head, he don’t come home drunk maybe.”
When the goods had all been distributed, and the cloth covers tied once again over all the baskets, the women gathered in the kitchen. “Now we burn cedar,” Momma Anna said, and she went to the woodstove for her little cast-iron skillet. From a micaceous pot that she had made with the figure of a small bear perched on the lid, she spooned out some cedar tips into the pan, struck a stick match on the rough cast-iron bottom, and then lit the cedar. It flared, then smoldered, glowing red.
The women formed up in a circle and as Momma Anna carried the smudge from one to another, they fanned it toward their faces, washing themselves in the smoke. When the time came for Yohe to bathe in the cleansing vapor, she began to pray aloud: “God, please bless our people, bless our old ones, bless our children, bless this white girl, she get all better, nobody beat her no more.”
Anna Santana and I made five trips before we got all the baskets delivered. Mountain lay in the back of the Blazer, and we stuffed six or seven baskets in behind him each time, then ventured out on the ice-packed dirt roads around the pueblo. As we jostled over the rattle-boards and ruts, the little plastic seat belt cutter clacked and clattered as it bounced against the gearshift knob. Finally, I was so annoyed by the noise that I slipped the short elastic leash off the shifter and stuck the small tool into the back pocket of my jeans. The brass wildlife identification tags hanging from Mountain’s collar jingled, too, as the Chevy’s suspension shuddered over the dips and drops in the narrow dirt lanes. Momma Anna turned to look at the wolf in the back. “Wolf sound like he got sleigh bell,” she chuckled. “Jingle bell, jingle bell,” she sang, pointing to Mountain with a smile.
We took the baskets to run-down adobes with sweet-smelling smoke twirling from the chimneys, to the small, thick-walled apartmentlike dwellings in the big adobe structures on the village plaza, and to stick-built HUD homes out on the flatter ground west of the village, where horses with shaggy winter coats stood and stamped in the snow, their breath fogging in the cold. At each place, I forced myself to get out of the car and help Anna get a basket out of the back; then she would scurry to the door, wrapped in her blanket, and spend a few minutes making the delivery while Mountain and I waited in the Blazer. By the time we had made the final round, my joints had loosened up from all the movement, and although I was still bruised and painfully sore, I found myself feeling a little better for having done some easy work. The swelling in my face had also gone down considerably after I had applied the cold compress my medicine teacher had made for me from the snow.
We delivered the last basket to Sica Blue Cloud Gallegos. I went with Momma Anna to her door. Sica greeted us with a smile and asked us in.
“We got work do,” Anna said. “We got mud and snow on boot. Happy Christmas.” She set the big basket on the floor just inside the door.
“Wait,” the old auntie said, and she hobbled away for a moment, then returned. She held out a hand to me, her fingers closed over something in her palm.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Take it. You will see.”
I opened my palm and the old woman dropped two small, shining black stones into my hand. “Obsidian?” I asked.
“Apache tear. For the deserter boy. You keep. Happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas, Grandmother,” I said.
As I followed Momma Anna out to the car, I saw Eloy Gallegos heading toward his auntie’s house. “You go ahead,” I said to my medicine teacher. “I’ll just be a minute.”
Gallegos approached me. “How are you today?” he said, smiling, giving a little nod. “I thought you would still be in the hospital.”
“I need to tell you something. I’m grateful for what you did last night—”
“It was nothing.” He shook his head as if to dismiss it.
“I wasn’t finished.”
Gallegos raised his chin and studied my face, but he didn’t speak.
“I don’t change sides. You need to know that. I think I’ve figured out what you’ve been up to, and as soon as I have the proof, you’re going to pay.” We stared at one another for a few moments, and then I dipped my chin ever so slightly and walked around the man and on to the car where Momma Anna and Mountain were waiting.
Back in the Blazer, I sat looking out the windshield, without starting the engine.
“You got angry heart,” Momma Anna said.
I let out a big breath. “I do.”
“Eloy?”
I nodded my head. “He seems like he’s so good to Auntie Sica. But he’s not what he seems. He’s sick with greed. He’s a monster as a landlord, lying, stealing, even endangering my friend’s life with his greed—my life, too—causing people pain, and not caring that he does.”
My medicine teacher was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke. “You got Apache tear. Hold up to light.” She pointed a finger at my hand.
I held one of the stones between my fingertips against the window. With the light behind it, the black obsidian appeared almost clear, as translucent as a tear.
“You see that? That our sorrow, tear freeze like ice.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This time, some sadness too big, our heart cannot heal. Some thing too evil, some thing too dark. We not understand, our mind cannot hold it all. We try, our spirit grow sick and weak.”
“Like the Indian school?”
She nodded. “We have no way understand that. We have no way. We cannot. We need put that sadness someplace so our heart can live. Not enough power heal that, not this time. Maybe next other time.”
“So, you . . . choose not to feel it.”
“No! We all time feel it. We choose not carry it, not hold it. We ask Grandmother Earth, Father Sky hold it, that way we use heart for love, not for sadness.”
I opened my palm and looked at the two stones.
“We all got them,” Momma Anna said. “That one man live here, he keep the sheep. His father Tanoah, but his mother Apache. Those boy, his relative. He bring us those stone. They have legend, next other place about Apache tear, women cry for brave lost in battle. But we cry here for those boy, and for Tanoah children, too.”
“The man who brought these to all of you here at the pueblo, is his name Daniel Kuwany?”
“That the one. He say he not forget his relative. Sometime he forget about sheep, though. He go off and leave them, go out there somewhere, wander off. He go for days, come back drunk. Take everybody long time, round up sheep.”
As I drove Anna home, I said, “I keep running into stories about that abandoned Indian school. Everywhere I turn, I find another person who attended there, another sad story. And lately, I’v
e had a lot of bad things happen to me that I don’t understand—horrible things, abuses that came at me out of nowhere, like this beating. I’m just trying to get through but I’m confused and out of my element, and I don’t understand what’s happening. It makes me think of how the children must have felt when they went to that school.”
“They children in story. This time, everybody all grown up.”
“Sometimes I think that children who have suffered a lot never really grow up. They look like it, but part of them is still trapped in the past and can’t move on, like those Apache tears.”
“You grow up just fine.”
“I know. But I can relate to all the stories because I knew a lot of pain and misery as a child, especially because I was abandoned by my mother.”
“You always have good mother right there,” Anna said.
“No. No, I didn’t. My mother left when I was very small. I didn’t really have a childhood. My father started drinking soon after that.”
“Your mother all time there for you, maybe you just not see her.”
By this time, we had arrived at the Santana home. I put the Blazer in park and looked at my medicine teacher. “No, Momma Anna, my mother was not there. She left. She left, and I was alone.”
“You always have mother. You are beloved and cherish daughter to her.” She opened the car door and began to get out.
I closed my eyes for a moment. I was too sore and tired to argue with this stubborn old woman. Maybe she was trying to reassure me that wherever my mother was, she would always love me, but I couldn’t take any comfort in that.
“Come in,” Anna said before closing the passenger door.
I followed her into the house, planning to say a quick good-bye and then leave. But Momma Anna gestured for me to follow her into the bedroom, a room I had never been in before. She showed me to a low altar that had been constructed from a plank of wood set on two large round aspen logs cut to the same height. Before it, she had folded a horse blanket, probably used for kneeling in prayer. On the altar was a framed photo of her father, Grandpa Nazario Lujan, who had passed away in November. In the picture, he was standing in front of a sunlit span of adobe with a white blanket draped over his shoulders, his long braids dangling in front of his chest, a cloth headband tied across his tall forehead. Anna had placed Grandpa Nazario’s blanket, one of the drums he had made, a silver and turquoise cuff, his drum-making tools, and many of his favorite things on the altar and on the floor around it. Momma Anna handed me a box of wooden kitchen matches and pointed to the tall glass jar candle with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on it. As I was lighting the candle, she disappeared from the room.
I wasn’t sure whether I was expected to kneel and pray at the altar, to remain and tend it, or to leave and follow my medicine teacher. I waited a moment and watched the flame flicker in the glass jar. Anna came back into the bedroom carrying a plate and a mug. She set them on the altar in front of the photo of Grandpa Nazario. She had fixed him a meal of some of the posole and elk-meat chili, a piece of pueblo bread, and a cup of coffee.
As I was leaving Momma Anna’s house, she held the door for me. “You know that guy Tom Leaves His Robe?”
“Old Tom? Yeah, I gave him a ride the other day, and then I saw him briefly again yesterday.”
“You maybe pray for him,” she said. “They find him drunk behind that Wal-Mart. He almost froze to death again.”
“Oh, no. Oh, no.” I lowered my head into my hand. “He wasn’t drinking when I saw him,” I said. “And the other day, he said he’d been sober for seven months.” Then I remembered Tom’s urgency to meet with his sponsor to do his fifth step, and the roll of tear-stained yellow papers he had clutched in his hand. “I have to go, Momma Anna,” I said. “I have to make a call.”
It took three tries before I got through to Diane, and by the time I did, I was at the BLM. “Those papers you found in Rule Abeyta’s home? Were they yellow, all curled up and water-spotted, written on with blue ink?”
“How’d you know?”
“Those weren’t things Rule wrote,” I said. “Those were the fifth step that one of his AA sponsees had written out, a guy named Tom Leaves His Robe. I gave him a ride the other day, and he had those papers rolled up in his hand.”
I heard Diane sigh on the other end of the line. “Damn. I can’t believe I had this all wrong. All the clues are dead-ending: that license plate number you wrote on your hand traces to a car totaled in an accident and destroyed for salvage metal. The sister at the pueblo church has claimed that the statue of the hanging nun belongs to the church and is a harmless icon. A nun says this!”
“You talked to Sister Florinda?”
“Yeah, because there’s a strange wrinkle there. Guess what our data guys found when going through Cassie Morgan’s finances? She had a will, fully executed. She left her entire estate to that little church at Tanoah Pueblo, named Sister Florinda Maez as the executor.”
I felt my eyes dilate. “Did the sister know about this?”
“She seemed surprised when I mentioned it. I haven’t had time to run the whole thing down. Like I said, it’s a little twist, but it’s not giving me a buzz. Anyway, the lab report is back: the blood on the rope is Cassie Morgan’s. But the DNA from the skin samples on the ends of the rope is not a match with Rule Abeyta’s, so we are releasing him.”
I was quiet.
“The Silver Bullet is upset with me because he says I arrested the wrong guy, even though he was with me every step of the investigation. I’m headed out to Tanoah Pueblo in a little bit. I’m going back over everything. We must have missed something.”
“So we’re back to square one.”
“We are.”
And I’m still a target, I thought.
“I’m having better luck with my personal sleuthing. I found out that the landlord’s creepy cousin is named Benny Baca, and he’s done some time in California. I ordered his sheet, and I’ll know more when it comes across the wire. He’s no appliance repairman. I can use this to discredit Eloy Gallegos in an appeal in district court.”
“Wait a minute—Benny Baca? Have you looked at that sign in the big lot at the end of your street? It says ‘Baca Land Development Company.’ This supports what I suggested to you at the courthouse yesterday—that Gallegos wanted you off his land because he’s either trying to put together a development deal of his own, or to sell to a developer. But he must need an easement.”
“Good, that’s good. I’ll run the Baca Land Development Company and see what I get. Hey, guess what else I found out.”
“What?”
“I know Agent Sterling’s first name.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s Sterling.”
“So he goes by his first name?”
“No, that’s both his first and his last name. He’s Sterling Sterling.”
40
Answering the Call
I sat at a desk in one of the cubicles at the BLM that afternoon, staring at the paperwork Roy had left for me. It was an application to the Natural Resource Police Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico, as a candidate for BLM ranger training in the spring program, which was a ninety-day residential assignment. Roy had already submitted my records, and this was more or less a formality.
Mountain had made the rounds of the few folks working there at the BLM office on Christmas Eve day and collected a minimal supply of rubs, scratches, and attention. Now he lay on the floor at my feet, snoozing contentedly. I worried over how to handle the issue of his care while I was gone to the training. The past summer, I’d deployed with an incident management team on a fourteen-day assignment to a wildfire, and entrusted Mountain to Momma Anna’s care, but she had ended up bringing the wolf to the wildfire. And Tecolote couldn’t manage the wolf for more than a few hours. Now that he was prone to running away and chasing coyotes, I didn’t trust him with anyone but Kerry. And Kerry was going to Washington.
I filled out the first page with my
personal information, then doodled on a notepad, unable to concentrate. I shoved the paperwork away. My side pained me terribly, as did my face. It still hurt to pee, although I’d stopped passing blood. I was not only worried and hurting, I felt edgy and confused. I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t know why the two men had attacked me, why any of the attacks in the past week had happened, or what it all had to do with the murder of Cassie Morgan. Until that case was solved and I was safe on the streets, I wouldn’t be able to make any plans.
My joints had stiffened up while I had been sitting in the chair, so I forced myself to get up and move. Mountain fell in beside me as I pulled on my coat and walked down the unusually quiet hallway, through the empty lobby, and outside to the parking lot to get a breath of fresh air. A deepening cold was causing the afternoon to go gray and miserable. During the time I had been in the cubicle inside, most of the employees had left the BLM to begin their Christmas holidays. There were only a few cars parked in the lot. I went to the Blazer and took out the bag Tecolote had given me. In it, I had brought the carne de cabra from the refrigerator at home to give to the wolf for his dinner before going to the pueblo that night. Kerry was due to pick us up in fifteen minutes, so I thought I would go ahead and feed Mountain now.
Back inside, I filled Mountain’s water bucket and then opened the packet of meat. There were five thick red slices of gamey-smelling flesh. I picked up one between my fingers and tossed it to the wolf. He raised up and snapped the meat between his jaws, then almost inhaled the whole piece without chewing. I made him wait for the next one, and this time I held it up and said, “Be nice, Mountain, be nice.” A filament of drool stretched from his lip halfway to the floor. He came forward and took the slice gently, then chewed and swallowed it quickly. I set the paper with the three remaining slices on the floor and made the wolf wait—in terms of wolf behavior, this was an exercise that maintained my role as the alpha. I gave the release, and he gobbled the meat down in seconds. Protecting my sore ribs as I moved, I began working my way out of the chair to go wash my hands when the phone on the desk in the cubicle rang.