by Beau Johnson
“What about our experiment?” Billy said.
“Scrap, too, it looks like. I see nothing resembling our cruise missile, nothing left bigger than a piece of furniture around here.”
“Jeez. Maybe Pinella deployed our missile when he saw they were going to crash. Get those explosives away. The missile had emergency parachutes, right?”
“Yeah, but I doubt he had time. Besides, we’d already know it. We installed a separate transponder on the weapon. There’s no signal.”
“Shit.”
Oh, yeah. A whole big smelly pile of the stuff. She and General Payton had seen their share of crap flying over Iraq, three times drawing an anti-aircraft missile lock-on, having to destroy an enemy radar site. This was way worse. None of their combat team had suffered a scratch during the war. Tony Pinella and his crew were dead.
“Listen, Maggie, I need proof our exploding air to ground missile isn’t on the loose, okay? Find me pieces at least. I’m going to have some congressman grilling my ass tomorrow or the next day. The crash of an Air Force test plane will be on TV soon, I promise you.”
“We’ll find it,” Maggie said. “I’ll give you a call as soon as we do.”
Not a scratch during the war. Maggie had lost her hand afterward, when she’d been reassigned to the 22nd Fighter Squadron at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. Small arms fire during a postwar mission over Iraq had caused her F-15C to crash in the German countryside, destroying a barn and wiping out half of a popular farmer’s cattle herd. Her commanding officer at the time had questioned Maggie’s piloting in his incident report, said she could have avoided most of the damage. The bastard. His comments were the result of Maggie having ended their romantic relationship. He’d even showed her the negative report, offered to change the wording if she’d resume the affair.
He would always be The Bastard.
“It’ll be dark in a few hours,” Billy said, “I’m going to give you tomorrow as well. But if you don’t get that missile back, find some wreckage to show those pricks on the Armed Forces Sub-Committee, you can drag your ass up here to Edwards and explain to my CO in person. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Maggie had suffered a recurring dream since her wartime crash, but that night the repeat arrived in particularly vivid format. In the dream, or nightmare as the images turned out, Maggie’s arm was whole again. Maggie reclaimed the title of complete and uncut, a woman with all her parts, all her charms, all her natural born self. And Whole Maggie did what she loved best—fly an F-15C Eagle, soaring between white clouds in a soft blue sky.
Flying, floating, weightless.
Above the earth and free, twisting and banking faster than the wind.
Then suddenly out of control.
Flying was like heaven to Maggie, soaring like the birds, and she first woke up from the dream breathless and sweaty, still lost in the flying. But seconds later, when her consciousness came all the way back, a stinging heartache grabbed her. Maggie’s left arm and hand were missing two inches below the elbow. The normal, four-limbed human she’d been born no longer existed.
Maggie Black was forever different.
TWO
Asdrubal Torres often used his weekends to hike and forage in the barren mountains and deserts near Southern California’s Salton Sea. The plants and rocks and creatures had been sacred to his mother’s Cahuilla people for thousands of years, and by living alone among the dry land’s natural inhabitants, fasting, sometimes drinking a toloache to invite the spirits, he rejoined a natural, harmonious world the white man had nearly destroyed.
With no elephant tree bark for his toloache one Saturday, Torres walked to a harsh, secluded mountain valley where a few of the sacred and dangerous trees still grew. The sky was blue and clear, and the air warm but not hot. He found himself singing one of his mother’s old bird songs as he made his way along a dry creek bed dotted with golden-flowered manzanita bushes. He’d heard his mother sing the song many times, although she had never explained its meaning, nor was he certain of all the words. But even when humming, the rhythm and melody played happily inside him, a sign perhaps of his own contentment at the beginning of another vision quest.
His happy mood vanished as he approached the ancient and revered trees. Hearing voices, he crept to where he could scale the arroyo’s bank and observe from behind a house-sized stand of the prolific manzanita. Had he angered the spirits with his song’s unremembered words, his humming? His mother’s warnings about the power of these trees had alerted him to an “ever-present spirit” that threatened violent death.
What he saw made the blood roar inside his ears. Two teenagers—boys he recognized from his own reservation—not only relieved themselves on this rare and sacred desert stand of elephant trees, they inexplicably laughed while doing so. Their urine collected near the snakelike exposed roots spreading from the largest tree’s bulbous trunk. Grandmother of this whole stand, the tree these boys had selected to poison with their waste was at least five hundred years old. Perhaps one thousand.
Could these ignorant children be unaware of the blasphemy they committed, the risk they took with their lives? His fingertips pressed white against his palms. How could any Cahuilla, even drunken teenagers, defame the sacred trees of their forefathers? Many Cahuilla enemies—Serrano, Yuma, and Mojave braves—had died from arrows tipped with poison from these elephant trees. His mother always used great care to honor and praise those departed souls and the courage of the warriors’ tribes whenever she collected bark.
The boys ceased their laughing when Torres appeared from behind the big yellow bush. “You urinate on your own spirit, fools,” he said. “The power of every ancient Cahuilla warrior lies—”
“Fuck yourself, culo.”
The world stopped spinning for Asdrubal Torres. Staring at the sneering, disrespectful boy who had cursed him, Torres saw in that single moment the decline of his entire Cahuilla nation. The indications had been all around him for decades. Important activities of their ancestors, like cultivating desert plants, or traveling to the oak groves to gather acorns, were now considered a waste of time. The tribe rarely prayed together or celebrated the most blessed Cahuilla traditions. Puul, net, and ngengewish were words rarely spoken. His clan of Cahuilla people drove foreign cars, ate cheeseburgers and worked for the tribe’s gambling casinos.
He slipped the hunting knife from his belt and showed the blade to the taller boy, the one who cursed and called him culo, or ass in Spanish. Torres clenched the knife so hard, muscles in his right arm trembled. In his heart, he believed that unless he acted right then and with every effort and all means available, Cahuilla culture would be lost forever. To do nothing would be the same as acknowledging his people never existed. All in that moment. All in the way these boys ridiculed and cursed him. Young braves from his own reservation.
He had to do something.
The blasphemous teenager laughed, his teeth wide and white. “What do you think you’re going to do with that knife, old man? Give yourself a haircut?”
His younger friend yapped like a small dog, and the laughter set off an explosion inside Torres. Perhaps the fierce spirit of the elephant tree seized him through toloaches he had ingested over the years. Or maybe the failures of his personal life piled up all at once. For certain, he remembered his jaw rattled when he tried to speak again to the boys; also, that the trembling in his arm spread throughout his body. When the earthquake reached his toes, he lunged at the boys like a hungry spider, his long knife slashing.
After praying for the dead boys, cleaning up, acquiring his bark, and thanking the elephant tree for a piece of its skin, Torres hiked north to a secret trail in the tall pink mountains. The hidden path wound across valleys, up rocky canyons, and through half an acre of jumping silver cholla cactus, eventually reaching a boulder only visible after navigating the maze of white spines.
He would find no drunken teenagers here.
On the sacred rock, which was taller than himse
lf and wider by a factor of ten than anything he could embrace, an ancient Cahuilla artist had pecked and scratched intricate designs—a tangled pattern of lines, plus seven stickmen riding four-legged beasts and carrying long knives. These petroglyphs could have been chipped into the rock as late as 1774 when the first white man, Spanish explorer Juan Batista de Anza, traveled through this pass on his way to Los Angeles. But, of course, who really knew? The Spanish had been exploring the land east of the Colorado River for two centuries before that, and the idea of men with long knives riding animals could have been a tale passed across the desert for generations before de Anza.
He sat cross-legged in his traditional place of power beside the sacred art. In preparation for drinking the hallucinatory toloache and his quest, he prayed as he traced the ancient stone lines with his fingertips.
Oh, Great Spirit, thank you for letting me be part of this mysterious world today. Thank you for all the people, plants, animals, creatures, and spirits I share this life with. Know that my heart is grateful. Should you grant me yet another day on this earth, I pray your love and wisdom will guide me.
Despite his decades-long hope the spirits would show him a solution to his people’s decline, Torres never specifically prayed for such a gift. His mother had taught him not to ask for favors. If you wanted things, she said, you must search inside. Ask the Great Spirit only for guidance. His mother had taught him that daily prayer to thank the Creator for another day of life was every human’s duty.
Though he did not ask for direct help, Torres sensed that day would be different, that the spirits had already intervened in his life and would further enlighten a path for him. An idea or a plan would come. The day had been special from the beginning, and surely the two boys had been a sign, perhaps a sacrifice that would somehow show Torres how to guide his people away from the white man’s world of greed and conquest.
He crushed a tiny bit of elephant tree bark with his thumb and forefinger, then placed this non-deadly amount into his mother’s stone bowl with a quantity of dried datura root and other ingredients, some preserved and a few collected that day. He mixed and drank the toloache, then closed his eyes and began to chant, a call to the animal spirits who lived nearby.
In time, they all came to see him, too. First the mouse, who told him not to leave his place of power. Then the rabbit, who explained it was safe to travel, but not slowly, and not in the direction Torres had planned. And the coyote, who urged him to charge and bite if he was hungry enough.
Little sound accompanied Torres’s hike up the pile of pink rocks white men called the Santa Rosa Mountains, nothing but wind across his ears and the talking of crows and hawks. The black-feathered birds chattered more than necessary, but Torres had learned to take comfort in their nervous vigilance. Mountain trails could be dangerous, particularly under the spell of a toloache.
Reaching a prominent western cliff overlooking the Salton Sea and the Coachella and Imperial valleys, the view was like standing on the rim of a giant serving dish, the Salton Sea but a tiny patch of blue at the very center of the dish’s bottom. North and south of the distant blue lake, two green quilts of farmland stretched the length of both valleys. Once the site of a great inland sea named for his people, now the white man’s cities sprouted inside this green slime like poisonous mushrooms.
He gazed at the imprint of ancient Lake Cahuilla that marked the mountains below him like a ring on a bathtub. He wished he had known the lake in those days, perhaps 1492 when the first white man, Christopher Columbus, sailed to America. The fresh waters of Lake Cahuilla then were full of fish, and the surrounding reeds and grasses teemed with life. Torres’s people would have expected the water to last forever, like the moon and the stars.
Standing high above today’s Salton Sea, a puddle compared to ancient Lake Cahuilla, Torres removed all thoughts from his mind, even the internal dialogue people used to soothe themselves. As he had a thousand times over, he asked the spirits for guidance.
Seconds or minutes later—the toloache made gauging time difficult—a cold wind brushed the back of his neck. He spun toward the western mountains and the forest named for the white man’s dead president, Cleveland. There, the yellow sky had grown dark. Black clouds covered the mountains and lightning fired in the cracks of the storm. Thunder rumbled as the rain and blackness raced toward him.
Were the spirits talking?
A sound startled him, and he stared again at the trail where shafts of sunlight still remained. Dream or reality, he could not say, but into this surreal brightness walked a man-sized Nataska, the black ogre kachina of Hopi legend—the kachina, or spirit, known as The Punisher of Wicked Children.
An invisible hand probed Torres’s chest. His heart seemed to pause beating. He knew of the spirit Nataska from his mother, who carried both Cahuilla and Hopi blood. But this black ogre kachina frightened him more than the doll he had seen as a child, more even than his Hopi grandmother’s terrifying stories of Nataska eating children who misbehaved. The Nataska before him now displayed long sharp horns protruding from his red scalp, and oversized eyeballs that radiated black-light purple. The rows of jagged, triangular teeth inside his long, reptilian mouth resembled those of a great white shark.
Though frightened, Torres refused to run. He understood the black ogre’s presence must be connected to his earlier misadventure at the elephant trees. Had Torres himself not punished two wicked children there? Obviously, this kachina was part of a vision the toloache and the spirits had prepared for him.
The long-toothed vision pointed his legendary saw toward a depression in the earth, a dark shadow on the trail. A clean-edged rock there caught Torres’s eye, a hand-worked piece of flint. Nataska nodded, encouraging Torres to retrieve the arrowhead or broken spear point, and as Torres reached for the hand-sharpened rock, perhaps a talisman hewn by an ancient warrior, a strange hiss stabbed his ears. As he touched the pointed flint—the very same instant—a numbing explosion of air and sound knocked him flat against the earth.
Sweat poured from his skin. He could barely draw breath. What was that earsplitting slash of air, that black, winged shape that had raced above him? He sensed some gigantic predatory bird swooping down to eat him. He cried out in panic.
Noise and the giant bird passed, yet fear so gripped him, Torres at first refused to behold the manmade nature of his imagined predator. Only when the plane was miles away, brushing a rocky mountain, did he understand. The huge military bomber had passed only a few hundred feet above him at the exact instant he touched that rock.
Oh, Great Spirit, what a sign!
In the storm-darkened sky, only lightning showed the aircraft’s downward path, and he witnessed the crash like an old, silent film—in blinking pictures that caused the aircraft to lurch and shrink and end in fire. After passing above Torres in the southern Santa Rosa Mountains, the plane had touched one Fish Creek mountain peak and exploded behind another one many miles away and off to the west.
The fire winked at him through a cloudy sky. He cried no tears for the men he assumed were inside, or their families, and yet he felt distraught. His body withered from foot to scalp as he had at his mother’s funeral. Why? Of what sadness had he been thinking before the coolness of the sudden storm touched his neck and Nataska had appeared in the shafts of light? What despair stayed with him still?
The dead Lake Cahuilla…how the white man’s slime and poisonous mushrooms now covered the bed of an old lake. Among his clan, he had listened to many stories of the abundant game and happy life their ancestors had lived around the old lake’s shores.
Could the day’s events have been coincidence? Those blasphemous teenagers. The visit of Nataska. The flint. The crash of the plane. And this overwhelming grief he still felt for the lost Lake Cahuilla. Surely, everything was connected. Surely, the spirits offered him a message.
He squatted on the mountain trail to rub his new flint. On-again, off-again showers soaked his clothes and chilled his skin. But the flin
t warmed in his hand, the rock becoming so hot he cupped his palms to catch the next rain. When his hands filled with water, taming the flint’s unnatural heat, Torres grasped the message of his visions. To heal his tribe, he must fill the valley below with water as he’d filled his hands with rain.
Torres rose to his feet and danced. What joy he would experience destroying what the white man had built. What happiness and unity he could build for all indigenous peoples by returning Lake Cahuilla to the Cahuilla.
Yes, he would need help. Much. And his dancing slowed as he considered the task’s difficulty. Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles relied heavily on Colorado River water, so the dams and waterways were strong and well protected. The world, and everyone in the Coachella and Imperial valleys, had learned a serious lesson in 1905-07 when the Salton Sea had been created. The fertile commercialized land of both valleys rested several hundred feet below sea level, and was still subject to flooding from a redirection of the Colorado River. It had happened in 1905. The white man had built many dams, canals, and reservoirs to safeguard his families and farms since then.
But did the difficulty matter? By directing his visions and tampering with nature itself, the spirits clearly had gifted him this exact responsibility. Torres need not worry how impossible his charge, or even what exactly to do next. He had been chosen. The people and answers he needed already struggled to find him.
Click here to learn more about The Black Kachina by Jack Getze.
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