Day of the Dead

by J. A. Jance

  “Now, tell me, Tommy, since when did the alumni association start hiring babies to wheedle us out of our hard-earned cash?”

  Damning his blond hair and fair complexion, Erik LaGrange blushed. He couldn’t help it. And he had no idea what to say. Calling the wife of one of the university’s major donors an uncompromising bitch wasn’t an option. Fortunately, President Moore effected Erik’s rescue.

  “Hear, hear,” Thomas Moore said jovially. “Mr. LaGrange has been with us for years, haven’t you, Erik. Besides, Gayle, don’t we all prefer to look younger than we really are?”

  Erik was astonished. He had no idea President Moore even knew his name. The fact that he would save Erik by nailing someone like Gayle Stryker was beyond the realm of possibility.

  “Touché,” Gayle Stryker murmured with yet another smile as she collected the drink Erik had brought her. “So he’s good, then?” she asked President Moore, all the while studying Erik’s face over the rim of her glass. There was something brazenly suggestive about that look. “At raising funds, I mean,” she added innocently as yet another blush erupted from the top of Erik’s now too-tight collar.

  “Oh, yes,” President Moore agreed, giving Erik’s shoulder a hearty whack. “The best. That’s the only kind we hire.”

  Someone came up behind President Moore, tapped him on the shoulder, and led him off to another group of attendees, leaving a still-blushing Erik uncomfortably close to Gayle Stryker.

  “So how old are you, then?” she asked. “I don’t believe in beating around the bush.”

  “Thirty,” he admitted reluctantly. “I started out working for the alumni association while I was still an undergraduate—”

  “Studying what?” she interjected.

  “Poli-sci,” Erik answered. “By the time I graduated, I had lost all interest in politics. I was thinking about going to law school, but the alumni association gave me a job while I was trying to figure out what else I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ve been there ever since.”

  Gayle handed him her drink. Then she reached into a tiny jeweled purse and pulled out a business card, which she handed to him.

  “If you’re tired of raising money for the university,” she said, “you might want to come see me. Maybe you’d enjoy taking a crack at saving the world. I’ll be in the office all week. I might make you an offer you won’t be able to refuse.”

  She had sauntered away then, leaving Erik holding both the card and a lipstick-marred glass containing a virtually untouched margarita. The card said “Gayle Stryker, CFO, Medicos for Mexico.” Erik slipped the card into the pocket of his tux. Then, because he didn’t know what else to do with the margarita, he lifted it to his lips and polished it off in a single gulp.

  That was the beginning, Erik LaGrange thought to himself as he sat on the rock-bound ledge of the mountain. And five years later, this is the end.

  At two o’clock in the morning a bleary-eyed Dolores Lanita Walker sat before her computer screen and longed for sleep, but sleep proved elusive this long Friday night, just as it had for days now. She knew she should be studying. Finals were coming. She didn’t really need to sweat them. She’d already been accepted into the medical school at the University of Arizona back home in Tucson. But what she really wanted was to be there right now, to be home where Lani knew she was needed.

  Four years earlier, her parents had tried to convince her that it would be far simpler for her to do her undergraduate work in Tucson. Her father had been especially adamant on that score. One way or another, Brandon Walker had lost two of his three sons. He didn’t want to lose her, too, but Lani had stuck to her guns. Rather than stay home, she had come to Grand Forks, North Dakota, and enrolled in a program called INMED—Indians into Medicine at the University of North Dakota’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

  As an orphaned Tohono O’odham child who had been raised in an Anglo household and attended predominantly Anglo schools, Lani had wanted to go somewhere else to school, to a place where it would be possible for her to meet and interact with other Native American kids—kids from tribes all over the country, who would know what it was like to live in that uncertain no-man’s-land between Anglo and Indian cultures. She wanted to spend time with people who, like her, negotiated those treacherous minefields every day of their lives.

  Lani hadn’t been wrong. Her three roommates in this poorly insulated rental house were proof enough of that. Margie was a Paiute from Nevada, Darlene a Rosebud Sioux, and Laura a Black-foot from Montana. Laura, an accomplished skier, had taught them all to ski, while Darlene had helped Lani learn how to ice-skate. The four girls shared many of the same values and laughed at the same jokes. And they all shared similar beliefs that decreed storytelling to be a wintertime occupation.

  It still surprised Lani to realize that her best friend, Leah Donner, who still lived in a dorm, was actually a White Mountain Apache. In the language and history of the Desert People, the word Ohb means Apache. Ohb also interchangeably means enemy.

  But when Leah Donner and Lani Walker had met in a Society and Literature class their freshman year, they discovered they had more in common than either expected. Some INMED students came to the U of ND needing and finding remedial help in one or more subjects. Leah Donner and Lani were both outstanding students. Not only were they both smart, they were also orphans who had been raised in adoptive families. The two girls had been abandoned long after the practice of Anglo parents’ adopting Indian children had fallen out of fashion. Leah had been raised in an all-Indian household. She was surprised to learn that Lani’s parents were both Anglos.

  It was to Leah that Lani told the story of the blond and black people hair charm—the kushpo ho’oma—she wore around her neck. It was to Leah that Lani first revealed her prize possession—the sturdy medicine basket Lani had woven for herself, making it as much like Nana Dahd’s original as possible. It wasn’t quite as well made as that of Rita’s grandmother, Oks Amichuda—Understanding Woman—but it was respectable enough. And it was to Leah that Lani had finally confided her worries about what was going on with Fat Crack Ortiz—about how sick he was and how much she needed to be home with him.

  “I don’t get it,” Leah had said impatiently over dinner the night before. Months later, Leah was still smarting over the fact that Lani had backed out on their verbal agreement to spend the summer after graduation together, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders. Leah was still signed up to go. Lani was returning to Tucson as soon as she finished her last exam.

  “That Fat Crack guy isn’t really a relative of yours,” Leah said. “If he’s diabetic and too stubborn to take his medicine, what are you going to do about it? Sit there and watch him die?”

  “Yes,” Lani said. “If that’s what’s needed, it’s exactly what I’ll do—sit and watch him die.” And that was all she said, because even with Leah—even with her very best friend—Lani Walker couldn’t explain it all, couldn’t tell the whole story.

  Six

  Lani Walker stepped out of the steamy shower and toweled herself dry. As always, she couldn’t ignore the ugly scar Mitch Johnson’s superheated kitchen tongs had seared into her breast six years earlier. Even when the damage was hidden beneath her clothing, for Lani it was always there, just like the broken white marks Andrew Carlisle’s teeth had left on her mother’s breast years earlier.

  In a way Lani couldn’t explain—the same way she couldn’t explain what she sometimes saw in the sacred crystals stored in her medicine basket—she knew that the similar scars she and her adoptive mother wore on their bodies made her Diana Ladd’s daughter in a way far more profound than adoption papers from any tribal court. It was also why she kept the scar a secret from her mother as well as from everyone else, including her best friend. It would hurt Diana too much to know about it, and to tell Leah would require too much explanation.

  She hadn’t told Fat Crack about it, either, but she was sure he knew. He had come to her every day, bringing her a soothing
salve as well as the salt-free evening meal called for during the required sixteen-day fast and purification ceremony—her e lihmhun—after Lani had killed Mitch Johnson. She and Fat Crack had talked about many things during that time. She had used the salve, but they hadn’t talked about it.

  On the last night, Fat Crack had brought not only the food for that night’s evening meal, but also his huashomi—the fringed buckskin medicine pouch he had been given years earlier by an old blind medicine man named S’ab Neid Pi Has—Looks at Nothing. After the two of them had eaten together, Fat Crack had taken a stick and drawn a circle around both Lani and himself. Once they were both inside it, he opened the pouch, took out some wiw—wild tobacco—and rolled it into a crude cigarette, which he lit with Looks at Nothing’s old Zippo lighter. Sitting on the mountain with a beloved family friend who was not only the tribal chairman and a respected medicine man but also her godfather, Lani smoked the traditional peace smoke for the first time.

  The powerful smoke had left her light-headed, so some of what they said that night had drifted away from her conscious memory in the same way the silvery smoke had dissipated in the cold night air. Other parts of it she remembered clearly.

  “What’s the point of the e lihmhun?” she had asked. “Why did I have to stay out here by myself all this time?”

  “What have you been doing while you’ve been alone?” Fat Crack asked in return.

  “I made a medicine basket,” she said. “I gave Nana Dahd’s medicine basket to Davy because I knew he wanted it. I made a new one of my own.”

  “Good,” Fat Crack said. “What else?”

  “I kept thinking about the evil Ohb,” she said, “the one who came after me, not the one who came after my mother. And about Oks Gagda—Betraying Woman, the woman who betrayed the Desert People to the Apache and whose spirit stayed in the cave along with her unbroken pottery.”

  “What did you decide about Oks Gagda?” Fat Crack asked.

  Lani closed her eyes. “When Nana Dahd first told me the story, I thought it was just a ha’icha ahgidathag—a legend—like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.”

  “And now?” Fat Crack inquired patiently.

  “I know she was a real person once,” Lani replied. “As real as you and me. When I broke her pottery, I freed her spirit and let her go.”

  Fat Crack nodded. “That’s true, too. So you’ve put this time to good use.”

  “But I still don’t understand why.”

  “Because you took a human life,” Fat Crack explained. “Even though it was self-defense and justified, it’s still a terrible thing for you and for your thoakag—your soul. You need to come to terms with why it happened and to understand I’itoi’s purpose in all this—why you’re alive and why Mitch Johnson is dead. Tell me now,” Fat Crack added, “who are you?”

  “Lani,” she replied. “Lani Walker.”

  “Who else? What did Nana Dahd call you?”

  Lani smiled, remembering. “Mualig Siakam,” she said at once. “Forever Spinning, because when I was little, I’d twirl around and around like the girl who turned into Whirlwind.”

  “What else did Rita call you?” Fat Crack asked.

  Looking at him in the starlight, Lani had realized he wasn’t smiling. These were serious questions that required serious answers.

  “Kulani O’oks,” Lani whispered. “Medicine Woman.”

  Unlike Forever Spinning, this name was not a happy one. As a child, Lani had been left alone by an elderly caretaker. After falling into an ant bed, she had nearly died from the hundreds of bites inflicted when disturbed ants had swarmed over her body. Her copper-colored skin was still mottled with faded patches from those bites. It was the ant bites and Lani’s presumed relationship to Kulani O’oks—the great Tohono O’odham medicine woman who had been kissed by the bees—that had caused Lani’s superstitious blood relatives to give her up for adoption.

  “And?” Fat Crack urged, staring at her intently across the darkness.

  Lani looked back at Fat Crack, studying his impassive face. She had yet to tell anyone about the new name she had given herself in the aftermath of the pitched battle in the limestone cave. What had saved her from Mitch Johnson was the timely intervention of a flying bat whose velvety wings had touched Lani’s skin in passing. That brief caress had somehow imbued Lani with the certain knowledge that the darkness of the cave was her friend rather than her enemy—that by surrendering herself to the darkness instead of fighting it, she could be saved.

  On Lani’s final venture into the cave, where she had gone to leave her one remaining shoe as a tribute to Betraying Woman’s moldering bones, she had discovered a talisman of her own—the dried, baby-finger-like bones from a long-dead bat.

  “Nanakumal Namkam,” she whispered hoarsely.

  Fat Crack nodded. “Bat Meeter,” he said. “You have met Bat and made some of his strengths your strength. That, too, is good, so taken together, what do you think all this means?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When Looks at Nothing came to me and told me I would be a medicine man,” Fat Crack said, “I thought he was crazy. How could I be a Christian Scientist and a medicine man at the same time? It didn’t make sense, but I know now he was right.”

  He paused while Lani waited. Finally he spoke again. “You know the duajida?”

  “The nighttime divination ceremony?” Lani asked.

  “I have done the duajida for you, Little Bat Meeter,” Fat Crack said softly. “Every time it is the same. The spirits say you will be two things at once—Kulani O’oks, Medicine Woman, and also a doctor.”

  “A doctor?” Lani asked. “As in a hospital?”

  Fat Crack nodded. “It’s the same thing my auntie, Rita Antone, told me long ago,” he said. “And the duajida says it is true.”

  Pulling her robe on over her naked body, Lani glanced at the window. It was still night outside on the frozen prairie beyond the double-pane glass. And since the night wasn’t over, it was still all right for her to do a duajida of her own.

  For days now she’d had a nagging feeling that something was terribly wrong back home. Since Fat Crack was the one who was ill, she was convinced his condition was the source of her malaise. Because no one seemed willing to tell her what was really going on, it was hardly surprising that Lani might look to some other means of finding out what she wanted to know.

  She went to the dresser and took down a small framed picture that dated from the night of her high school graduation. She stood in her cap and gown flanked on either side by Gabe and Wanda Ortiz. After retrieving her medicine basket from her dresser, she sat down cross-legged on the floor, pried off the tight-fitting top, and spilled the contents onto the rug.

  There before her was everything that had been there that night on Ioligam, and a few things more besides. Most had come to her from or through Nana Dahd: First came a piece of ancient pottery with the faint image of a turtle etched into the red clay. That had belonged to Rita Antone’s paternal grandmother, Understanding Woman. There was Nana Dahd’s sacred scalp bundle along with the shiny smooth bone owij—the awl—the old woman had used to weave her wonderful baskets. A few items were Lani’s alone—things she had retrieved from Betraying Woman’s cave—a blackened fragment of a broken pot and the delicate bone from a dead bat’s wing. Last of all was the soft chamois bag that held Looks at Nothing’s precious crystals.

  Lani’s fingers trembled as she untied the string and spilled the crystals out into the medicine basket, confining them there rather than risk losing one on the floor. Taking the photo in one hand and a crystal in another, she held them up to the light and studied the faces through the haze of rock. She focused her gaze on Fat Crack’s smiling face. The first three times she did it, nothing happened. Then she picked up the fourth crystal.

  After a few seconds she noticed a slight shifting in Gabe Ortiz’s features. They seemed thinner somehow. It’s because he’s ill, Lani thought. He’s losing weight.

&nbs
p; Then Fat Crack’s face changed altogether. It seemed to dissolve and then remake itself. Gradually someone else’s features emerged. For a moment a blond Anglo woman’s face—a face Lani had never seen before—seemed to hover there under the crystal. Then those features, too, disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a bare skull. What does this mean? Lani wondered. And what does this Mil-gahn woman have to do with Fat Crack?

  Shaken and having no idea what the crystals had told her, Lani carefully returned them to the bag. Then she placed the bag, along with all her other treasures, back in the medicine basket and closed the lid.

  With the medicine basket restored to its hiding place, Lani turned once again to her computer. Looks at Nothing’s sacred crystals had left her feeling even more distressed. The old ways hadn’t worked, so it was time to resort to new ones. Lani switched her computer back on and sent three e-mails in a row. Half an hour later, as the sun touched the still winter-brown landscape outside her window, Lani Walker finally lay down and went to sleep.

  Maria Elena heard the click of the lock. There was a single blanket on her bed. Ashamed of her nakedness, she pulled that over her now, even though she knew it was useless. He would peel away the puny covering once he reached her. The harsh light flashed on overhead. She cringed and squeezed her eyes shut, not only to close out the bright light but also to keep from seeing his face as he came toward her. To keep from seeing the terrible greediness in his eyes as he reached out to tear away her blanket. To keep from knowing exactly when his hurtful fingers would reach out with some awful tool to probe some part of her that should never have been touched. Somehow to put off the dreadful moment when she would writhe in agony and hear herself pleading and begging for him to stop.

  It was as though, by not seeing him, she could avoid or delay what was coming. By not seeing it happen, she hoped somehow to distance herself from the pain and deny its reality while she endured whatever was to come. Acceptance was not an option.