Kachina

by Rada, J. R.

Marcy loosened her grip and straightened up. David reached up and wiped away a tear that was hanging off the tip of her nose.

  “I think we should move you back into the house as soon as possible,” she said. “I don’t like the way the doctors at this hospital think they are so important. They wouldn’t let us in to see you until visiting hours began this morning. And all that after we spent most of yesterday trying to see you. No one would let us in! Imagine keeping parents away from their son!”

  David looked closely at his mother’s face. The past five weeks had aged her at least a decade. The wrinkles in the corners of her eyes had deepened. The corners of her mouth seemed to turn downward in a perpetual frown. There were dark circles under her eyes. She had tried to comb her hair, but she still looked slightly disheveled.

  He hoped that the fact he had been found alive and well would change some of that. Ease the wrinkles. Bring the smile back.

  David was the youngest of his five siblings and the only boy. When it came to raising a son, his mother had drawn on the only experience in child rearing she knew. She had tried to raise him the same way she had done with her daughters. But David was not a girl, and the open affection that had raised his five sisters had nearly smothered him.

  His mother had gradually given David the room he needed to grow. She had surrendered her time with him so that he could spend more time with his father and learn what he needed to know to grow into a man. Fishing. Boy Scouts. Cars. Now it was as if his mother had forgotten all that. She was once again playing David’s over-protective mother, and no one was going to stop her. She was going to take care of him whether he wanted it or not.

  How could he tell her he didn’t need his mommy without hurting her feelings?

  Marcy finally gave in to her emotions and started crying again. The tears rolled down her cheeks and fell onto David’s blankets.

  “I prayed every night that God would bring you back to me, and he did. He did,” Marcy said.

  David stroked his mother’s head trying to calm her down. He looked in his father’s direction for help. He noticed his father’s clothes were wrinkled, and he wondered if his father had slept in them last night. Lewis walked around the foot of the bed and took his wife by the shoulders. He led her to the plastic chair with vinyl cushions in the corner of the room. Marcy’s hips barely fit between the arms of the chair.

  “How do you feel son?” Lewis asked after he had helped his wife sit down.

  “Fine,” David answered.

  “I can give you a blessing if you want. I have my oil with me.” Lewis held up the small vial on his keychain.

  David shook his head. “I’m fine, Dad.”

  But he really wasn’t. He still couldn’t remember what had happened after the fall into the cavern, and he got a headache that felt like someone dropped a stick of dynamite in his ear and it exploded in his head whenever he tried to remember. If his mother hadn’t been in the room, David might have told his father about the headaches. Since his mother was nearby, he chose to keep silent. He didn’t want to give her another reason to cry. He had worried her enough to last the rest of his life.

  “Despite what Mom thinks, they’re treating me really well here,” David said. He patted his stomach. “It’s already hard to tell I was near starvation two days ago, isn’t it?”

  Lewis Purcell nodded. “Now that you mention it, you don’t look like you lost any weight. How’d you manage that?”

  David had no answer so he shrugged. The movement caused a twinge of pain because his shoulders were still stiff.

  “You know, I think your mom is right about inviting you back to the house for a few weeks. Nothing permanent. Just until you’re well again. You’re not going to be working with a full head of steam for the next couple of weeks, and you’re going to need some help. So why don’t you come home with us, son? We can make up your room, and you can stay as long as you need to,” Lewis offered enthusiastically.

  David smiled as he remembered the rancher on the north shore of Utah Lake. He wondered if the fish were biting this summer. He tried to remember what his room looked like. At first, he saw nothing but a bare room. Then the details began to fill in. He saw his twin bed with the Speed Racer sheets and blanket. From the ceiling, hung an air force of model airplanes. The small desk in front of the window looked out over the lake. It was a boy’s room, and to return to it, he would have to become a boy again for his parents. David didn’t think he could do that or if he was even willing to try. He had been on his own for eight years now and he wasn’t all that anxious to return to living under someone else’s rules.

  “Thanks, but I’ll be able to manage on my own,” David said.

  “But you’re sick, Davey...” his mother whined.

  David tried not to wince at his mother’s insistent use of “Davey.” He hadn’t gone by that name since he turned thirteen, but to his mother, he still seemed to be only twelve. He didn’t want to be a boy again. Something had happened to that boy that shouldn’t have.

  David leaned toward his mother and held out his hand to her. She put her hand in his, and he placed her hand on his forehead.

  “Do I feel sick to you, Mom?” he asked.

  “No,” she reluctantly admitted. “But a fever is only one way to tell if you’re sick.”

  David took his mother’s hand from his forehead and patted it. “I’m fine, Mom. Really. Just relax. I tell you what; the first weekend after I get out of here, I’ll drive up to see you in Provo so that you can see that I’m fine. You and Dad can baby me all you want then.”

  “I never baby...” Marcy started to say.

  David squeezed his mother’s hand slightly. “You do, Mom, but when I come up to the house, you can do it and I won’t even complain. Dad and I will just sit out back on the pier and catch a few fish. Maybe even eat a few.” David smiled in his father’s direction.

  His mother stood and smoothed his hair down like she was petting a dog, but David didn’t complain. There was an odd sense of security in his mother’s touch. Maybe he should consider going back to Provo for a few days, not weeks. He wouldn’t mind eating a few home-cooked meals instead of the TV dinners he filled his apartment freezer.

  “It must have been horrible for you to be trapped down there for all that time,” his mother said.

  David didn’t know if it had been horrible or not. He couldn’t remember any of it. All he remembered was the blackness.

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” David said tactfully, but he didn’t say that he couldn’t talk about it because he couldn’t remember it.

  “I understand.”

  She tried her best to smile, but David could tell she was still worried. Oh, well, David thought, I guess that’s part of a mom’s job description. He put his hands behind his head and tried to enjoy his mother’s company.

  CHAPTER 11

  David rolled onto his side trying to remember what had happened to him in the cave. His parents had left an hour ago leaving him alone with what few memories he had of the past five weeks. What had he been doing? How had he stayed alive?

  He closed his eyes and pictured his hike from his car in his mind. He saw the ground crumbling beneath his feet in slow motion and the black hole opening up under him. He saw the area around him quickly fading to a small dot as he fell into the hole, and then there was darkness. He focused on trying to remember what had happened immediately after the fall. If he could remember even a little bit past the point where his amnesia began...

  A sharp pain stabbed the center of his head and David winced. It was the same pain he had felt when the Indians had said Kuskurza. But they were nowhere around this time, and he hadn’t said the word. He had only tried to remember.

  Since David was no glutton for punishment, he quickly gave up trying to remember. His memory would return at its own pace and without any pain. Or so he hoped. To help ease the pain of his headache, he grabbed the remote control and turned on the television. Watching the news on CNN took his mi
nd off of thinking about the cave.

  The pain in his temples receded to an annoying throb as he drifted into a fitful sleep filled with dreams of the darkness in the cavern he couldn’t fully remember. He wanted his memory to return. He had to know what had happened to him in the cave. It was important that he remember. He had lived for five weeks under near-impossible conditions but couldn’t remember any of the time. If he couldn’t remember it, there was always the possibility it wasn’t true.

  What wasn’t true? David puzzled over the odd thought until he began to dream.

  He dreamed the same dream he had last night. The bright light gradually dimmed. The stone mountain quivered, and finally exploded throwing pieces of stone in every direction. But it wasn’t the stone shards that scared him. It was the absolute blackness he saw spreading out from where the stone mountain had stood. Something had been freed because the light had gotten too dim, and it was something that shouldn’t be free.

  The scene abruptly switched and David saw a white-skinned man sleeping in front of him. The man looked human, except that his skin was white like David might have looked under the bright light of the television reporter who had been at the press conference. This man looked like an albino except his fingers were longer than normal human fingers. David noticed the charred, black hole in the man’s chest.

  Who was the man?

  David could see a stone wall behind the man and assumed he was in a cave. Had David seen an albino sleeping in the cave?

  The headache returned, and David tried to fight it off. He had to remember. He was so close! He had to remember. Why did his head hurt every time he tried to remember?

  Had David stumbled on a murder victim in the cave? The pain intensified making him want to cry.

  He woke at three o’clock in the afternoon with a throbbing headache. The red-haired nurse who David had seen when he first woke up in the hospital came into his room a few minutes later with his medicine. After seeing the sexy television reporter and the beautiful Hopi woman, this woman did not look as attractive to David as she had looked at first. She was older than he would have thought yesterday, and heavier, too. David asked her for some aspirin, and she left his pills on the bed tray and went into the hallway to get the aspirin.

  David took the aspirin and followed it up with a swig of water.

  “How are you feeling?” the nurse asked as she took his temperature. “You certainly look better than you did yesterday.”

  “I feel okay, I guess, but I keep getting a painful headache,” David told her hoping she might be able to explain it. “I’m hungry, too.”

  The nurse cocked her head to the side. “You ate lunch only a couple of hours ago when your parents were here. You’d better be careful how much you eat, Mr. Purcell. Dr. Haskell doesn’t want you to upset your system any more than necessary. If you throw up, the doctor may put you on a liquid diet,” the nurse warned him.

  David knew she was right, but he couldn’t help it. He was hungry. Besides, he didn’t feel sick at all.

  The nurse cast a curious glance in his direction just before she left the room as if she expected David to start eating the sheets or something.

  David leaned back in his bed and stared out the window. He thought about how good it was to see the sun again, and how close Dr. Haskell said he had come to losing his sight. Why wasn’t he even temporarily blind like Dr. Haskell expected him to be? There hadn’t been any light in the caves.

  Or had there been?

  He thought about the dimming light surrounding the stone mountain. That pyramid hadn’t been above ground. The first time he dreamed about it, David had thought it had been on the surface because of the bright light, but as the light dimmed, hadn’t he seen rock walls further away on the other side of the pyramids? He tried to remember, but his temples throbbed.

  Sooner or later he would remember, but he wasn’t sure he was going to like it when he did.

  CHAPTER 12

  Sarah sat down in the shade of the tent and wiped the sweat from her neck with a bandeau. Her grandfather sat outside the tent in the direct sunlight, yet he was not sweating. He sat cross-legged on the hard ground staring at a small stone he held in his hand. He kept turning the stone over and over as if it was some sort of talisman.

  Sarah reached into the canvas bag that was sitting on the ground inside the tent and pulled out a piece of jerked beef. She held it out to her grandfather. Adam acted as if he didn’t see it.

  “I never thought of you as a sulker,” she said trying to trick him into saying something.

  It didn’t work. He sat and stared at the small stone. It turned over and over between his fingertips. She looked at the stone wondering if that was what held his concentration or if he was simply lost in his thoughts. She decided he was probably thinking about David Purcell.

  Sarah shook her head in frustration. Why he would waste his time thinking about an impolite white man was beyond her.

  She scooted back deeper into the tent to get out of the heat of the sun. Picking up the canteen, she sloshed around the contents. She hoped Adam would hear the sound and come in from out of the sun for a drink. When he didn’t move, Sarah unscrewed the cap and took a gulp of the cool water from the canteen, then tossed it back on the ground.

  She couldn’t understand it. They had given up a season’s crops to sit in the middle of the desert and meditate. They had driven two-hundred miles on her grandfather’s crusade to save the Fourth World, and the object of their journey had thrown them out of his room.

  They should be on their way back to Oraibi now. If it had been up to Sarah, they would never have come in the first place. She could have told her grandfather that David Purcell wouldn’t believe a story about Kuskurza and the Bow Clan. Adam hadn’t seen it that way, though. He thought David already knew what Adam wanted to tell him, and he only needed to talk to David to fill in the gaps in his visions.

  Her grandfather insisted on staying until he could talk to David. She and Adam had driven out of town and made camp about half a mile off of Highway 191. She had thought they might stay in a hotel in Blanding, but they didn’t have enough money to pay for a hotel room. Even though it might not be the most-comfortable place to sleep, at least there weren’t white men around to stare at her and Adam.

  “He’s a white man. What do you expect him do? He doesn’t believe in the legends of our people,” Sarah said sharply.

  Adam turned slowly and stared at her. His features were frozen in a stone mask and for a moment, Sarah could see every wrinkle etched in his face. He looked furious, and Sarah thought he was mad at her. Then his face softened and he smiled.

  “He acted as if he didn’t know what I was talking about,” Adam said finally.

  “Maybe he didn’t.”

  Sarah crawled toward the front of the tent to talk to her grandfather, but she still didn’t want to sit outside in the hot sun.

  “But he was there. I saw him in my visions. He was the white man running from the Bow Clan. The one I told you about. It was him.”

  “Are you sure you couldn’t have been mistaken?”

  Adam shook his head fiercely. “No! It is him. I’m sure of it. As soon as I saw him in the hospital, I recognized him from my vision.”

  Sarah reached out and took one of his wrinkled hands in hers. “It may have been him, but what if it wasn’t a literal vision you saw? What if it was something that needs to be interpreted?”

  Adam thought for a moment and then said, “David Purcell would still be involved.”

  “Yes, but he might not necessarily know that he is involved. The chase you saw might be symbolic of a struggle between the Bow Clan and the whites,” Sarah told him. “Maybe he never saw the Bow Clan in the caves. Maybe he is a symbol Taiowa used to represent a white man.”

  Adam slowly shook his head. “He knew what the sipapu was.”

  Sarah sighed. “Grandfather, we tried to talk to him, but he won’t listen. If he knows what’s down there, he can’t remem
ber it. You heard what he told those reporters. He has amnesia. Let’s go home. Maybe you can get part of your crop back from Paul.”

  Adam held up his hand to silence Sarah. “No. We have come to learn what David Purcell knows about Kuskurza, and we must find out.”

  “But he knows nothing,” she insisted.

  “You are wrong, young one. He knows much. He just does not know he knows it. We must help him remember.”

  Sarah knew his use of the words “young one” were meant as a mild rebuke. A warning that she should respect her elders, but she ignored it. She was tired of watching her grandfather humiliate himself.

  “You’re not going to be able to convince him, you know. The next time he sees you coming, he’ll call hospital security and have you thrown out,” Sarah warned him.

  “Nevertheless...”

  Sarah slapped the ground hard with both her hands and a small cloud of dust puffed up. She stared into Adam’s eyes and yelled, “You’re crazy! Do you know that? Why are you walking into a situation like that? Do you like letting white men humiliate you? If your roles were reversed and David Purcell needed to warn you, do you think he would have come to Oraibi? No. He would have shrugged and said, ‘Oh, well. What’s the loss of another Injun?’“

  “Sarah,” Adam said calmly.

  She continued her tirade. “He’ll just use you, and when he’s gotten what he wants from you, he’ll leave you without anything. That’s the kind of man he is. You can’t trust him. Indians and whites can’t live together or work together.”

  “Are you speaking from personal experience?” Adam asked calmly.

  Sarah buried her face in her hands and started crying. Adam slowly stroked the back of her head as she leaned forward against his shoulder. She didn’t want to cry in front of him, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t judge a race by a single man,” Adam explained to her.

  Sarah raised her head. “I’m not.”

  “You are. You don’t know David Purcell. Taiowa has chosen him to help the Hopis.”