Wild Indigo

by Sandi Ault

  Hunter spoke next. “I wasn’t going to say anything, Jamaica, but that looks like it might be getting infected. You should maybe see someone about that, you know?”

  I touched my fingers to the claw marks, which seemed to set the skin ablaze. It felt like small rivers of fire crossing my cheek.

  Bone Man emerged from his trancelike state. He stuffed the necklace back into his shirt and made a peace sign at me with his fingers. Then he turned to Hunter: “Hey, if you see your buddy and mine, Ismael Wolfskin, tell him I have some great stuff for him: another bear skull, some good teeth and claws, some pretty nice hides, too.”

  Hunter acknowledged him with a scant nod. Then, turning to me, he said, “Jamaica, tomorrow the journey is over for Anna’s son. The family is gathering at Grandma Bird’s on Thursday night for a feast. They want you to come. Because it’s a ceremony for one who passed, we will be allowed to have a small bonfire, too, even though it’s Quiet Time. Will you be there?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not exactly welcome at the pueblo these days. I don’t even know how I’d get in, and if I did, someone would spy my Jeep and usher me off the reservation.”

  Bone Man had been listening as if he belonged in this discourse. “That’s easy!” he said. “I always have my buddy meet me at the back gate on Rattlesnake Road. He picks me up in his car and drives me in. I go in and out all the time, even when it’s Quiet Time.”

  “I could have Serena pick you up there at the gas station,” Hunter said.

  “I’m not so sure I’d be welcome,” I said. “Even Momma Anna has been acting strange with me lately.”

  “Oh, come on.” Hunter smiled. “You need to be patient with her. Our customs are different. When someone passes, it’s a lot of work. Someone in the family has to stay with the body constantly until the spirit makes its journey. We have to go through a four-day cleansing process. Even the home has to be properly cleaned and prepared so the spirit will feel free to leave it. Anna’s been through a lot, almost no sleep, very little to eat for days. But it’s mostly over now. Just a few family things. I know everyone expects to see you. And maybe you and I can talk then.”

  Bone Man continued to grin at us, nodding his head as Hunter spoke.

  Before I could answer Contreras, Diane came out of the gym and up to our gathering. Mountain wagged his tail affectionately, and she reached down to rub his neck. “What’s going on?” she asked, scanning the two men.

  “Let me introduce you to these gentlemen,” I said. “Diane Langstrom, this is Hunter Contreras, the Tiwa language teacher at Tanoah Pueblo.”

  Diane extended her hand, shook Hunter’s, and said, “Hello. Pleased to meet you.”

  “And this”—I held out my hand in a gesture of resignation—“is Bone Man.”

  Langstrom looked at the filthy hippie and tilted her head to one side. “I’m not shaking your hand,” she said flatly. “You the guy who runs that roadside bone pile on the way to Santa Fe?”

  “I do, yes,” Bone Man said, nodding his head. “Me and some friends of mine.”

  Diane put her hands on her hips. “Do people actually buy that nasty old crap?”

  Bone Man grinned, his teeth still rimmed with rotting vegetation. “They do,” he said. “One man’s crap is another man’s treasure!”

  “You got a license to sell merchandise there?” Diane pressed.

  “A license? What are you, a cop?”

  “Better still.” She smiled. “FBI. And I’m keeping my eye on that sorry pile of refuse you call a business. I’ve heard you sell some illegal stuff there—eagle feathers, whole birds of prey. Is that true?”

  “Not true,” Bone Man said. “Not true, man. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a shower.” He turned and walked toward the gym door.

  “Good damn thing, too,” Diane called after him.

  Hunter spoke up then. “Listen, Jamaica, I’ve got to run. Why don’t you give me that boy’s name and I’ll see if I can find him, maybe talk to him?”

  Diane bristled at this. She spoke in a warning tone. “We’re taking care of that, thank you.” I smiled at this proprietary defensiveness of Diane’s, something we at the BLM found so typical of the FBI.

  Contreras held up his hands in resignation. “Okay, just trying to help.” He turned to leave, walked a few steps, then turned back. “Anyway, Jamaica, I’ll have Serena meet you at the gas station Thursday night about seven thirty, okay? The family will want you there.” He looked at Diane and made a little nod. “It was nice to meet you, miss.” Without waiting for a reply, he spun and walked toward his truck, which was parked alongside the road about twenty yards away.

  “That guy’s a teacher?” Di said.

  “Yeah, he keeps the Tiwa language going at the pueblo. A lot of parents don’t teach their children their traditional tongue anymore. He got the program going through a piggyback grant onto Jerome Santana’s computer lab for pueblo youths.”

  “So one of them was working to get the kids ready for the future, and the other was trying to keep them in touch with the past, huh?”

  “Yeah, that’s about how it was. You should see Hunter with kids. He’s so good with the little ones.”

  “Why’d he want the Dreams Eagle kid’s name?”

  “He said he’d try to smooth things over with the tribe for me, take my story in again himself as one of them, a voice of reason against all this trumped-up crap about how I started the stampede. His brother’s the tribal governor this year.”

  Diane didn’t respond to this, but turned to fuss over the wolf. “You don’t like the big Indian man?” she said, cooing to Mountain and rubbing his ruff.

  “No, I don’t think he does,” I said. “And that’s the second one this week.”

  21

  The Carving

  When Mountain and I pulled up in front of my cabin, Kerry was already waiting outside, sitting on the porch, ruggedly good-looking in jeans and a denim shirt. He rose and smiled as we approached, but he winced when he saw my face, then kissed me delicately on the lips so as not to brush my wounds. “That’s getting worse,” he said.

  I could smell his skin, warm from the sun, his hair. He reached one hand up and tenderly brushed my cheek with the backs of his fingers, his green-flecked eyes gazing into mine. “Did you see a doctor?”

  “I will. I’ll make an appointment.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You promise?”

  “I’ll do something if it’s not better tomorrow,” I said, and slipped out of his embrace and into the cabin. I put my hat and my big elk hide bag on the table, picked up Mountain’s water dish and filled it at the sink, then put it back on the floor.

  Kerry moved to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. “You got out of that pretty neatly.”

  “I don’t like to promise in case I can’t follow through.” I moved to the table, straddled his lap, and sat down, my face right in front of his.

  He laughed, nuzzled my neck, nibbled at my ear. “I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. You’re too damn stubborn.”

  “You love it.” I ran one hand through the irresistible little cowlick at the hairline over his forehead.

  “I do.” He grinned. “I love it.” He reached one arm around my back and slid the other hand along my thigh. We kissed. And kissed again.

  The baking heat of the day was beginning to relent as cool, downslope breezes fanned through the pines outside the cabin. Gentle gusts brought the sweet, woodsy fragrance of pine sap in through the windows. Clouds shadowed the sun, leaving the one large room in a delicate, soft gray light. A raven croaked in a branch somewhere outdoors, the porch roof creaked in a puff of wind. Mountain began to snore softly, lying on the cool floor.

  Kerry stood upright, lifting me under my bottom so that we rose together. I wrapped my legs around his waist as he carried me to the log canopy bed, setting me down on the large, round aspen timber at the top of the footboard. I grabbe
d the corner pole with one hand to keep from falling backward. He never let his eyes leave mine as he unbuttoned my shirt, then pulled it off of me, carefully balancing me so that I wouldn’t fall back. His eyes moved south to enjoy what he had revealed. His hands followed, one of them moving around to my back, where he expertly unhooked my bra with a gentle flick of his fingers.

  He unzipped my jeans, then picked me up again, this time with one arm around my waist, as he used his free hand to tug the jeans down over my hips, dragging my panties in tow. I liked this! I helped out by clutching my arms around his neck, wiggling so he could get my pants off.

  Then the laughable part where we had to remove my boots so the jeans could come all the way off, me clinging to the bedpost for balance as Kerry gave up grace and began tugging at the heels of my boots and the tight wads of denim around my ankles. “Damn it!” he said, grinning.

  I fell back into the bed giggling, relishing the fun, eager to start the passion in earnest.

  But Kerry pulled up and looked at me. “Wait! Don’t move!” He bolted toward the door.

  “What are you doing?” I said, raising up on one arm, feeling abandoned.

  “I want to take your picture, just like that, with the scar and everything. You look wild and beautiful,” he said. “My camera’s in the car, just let me get it.”

  I shook my head with disbelief. I was primed for passion, and instead of consummating this, my lover had gone for his camera. An avid photographer, Kerry’s specialty was not portraits, but landscapes—the beautiful places he patrolled as a forest ranger, rare and wonderful glimpses of unspoiled natural beauty. He had sold some of these in galleries, published a few in magazines. But he had also photographed me many times over, especially with the wolf, just for his own pleasure.

  Never before, though, in the nude.

  I thought about this, decided it was kind of sexy that he wanted a snapshot of me in the altogether, and was trying to think of the best pose when Kerry came back through the door.

  But he wasn’t bearing a camera. In one arm, he clasped a large bundle of rags nearly two feet high; in the other hand, his rifle.

  “Get dressed, babe,” he said, his face suddenly sober. “This was on the porch. A few feet from the door.”

  I got up, pulled the bedsheet around me, and went to the table where he’d set the bundle. Kerry went back through the door, Mountain trailing him.

  I reached in my big bag and pulled out my handgun, then started for the pile of clothes on the floor at the end of the bed.

  But Kerry was back instantly. He had his camera bag with him this time. He checked the safety on his rifle, then set it on the kitchen counter. Mountain wandered back inside and slumped down onto the floor. Kerry closed the door and locked it. Then he turned to me. “It’s okay. Whoever left it is gone. There’s no one in sight. Now, get back in the bed.”

  “But what’s that?” I asked, pointing to the bundle. “I didn’t hear anyone drive up. I didn’t even hear footsteps on the porch. You’d think we would have heard something. Even if we didn’t, Mountain should have. Do you think someone was watching us, through the window?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I looked all the way around the cabin. I can see down the road. There’s no one out there.”

  “I have to see what that is,” I said, standing there draped in the sheet.

  “It’s some sort of statue or something,” he said. “I could feel it through the cloth. It’s not going to explode, it’s not going to leak, and it’s not going to go anywhere. So leave it for now and get back in the bed. Please?”

  I thought a moment. “I can’t. I have to see what it is.”

  He sighed. I started to unwrap the bundle. It was swathed in some kind of rough cotton cloth, like old feed bags. I unrolled several layers of this covering, revealing a crudely carved wooden santo, a statue of a saint like those sculpted by local villagers here in the northern mountains of New Mexico. The figure was that of a man in a long robe holding a heart-shaped totem to his chest with one hand, the other arm outstretched with the palm outward as if to push something away. His expression was stern and fearsome. Beneath his sandaled feet was a carpet of what looked like cactus thorns. The carver had inscribed the underside of the pedestal: San Cirilio.

  As I held the carving up to look at it, a burst of light swept through the room. Kerry had snapped a photograph of me, the statue in my outstretched arm like Liberty’s torch, the scars on my face toward the lens of the camera, the flash illuminating the whole scene.

  22

  The Professor

  Wiley Mason was an antique living treasure in New Mexico, especially in the Taos Valley. Still going strong at ninety years of age, he was known throughout the northern central mountains. People spoke with great reverence of this leathery, white-haired, wiry character whose body had shrunk from its former, formidable size until his head looked almost comically large, as if he were a cartoon of himself. Legend claimed that his eyesight was still sharp enough to spot arrowheads in the deep silt of desert arroyos, his bony legs still strong enough to carry him on arduous hikes, and his constitution still spry enough to sustain him through baking hot days on archaeological digs and bone-chilling nights on mountainsides, accompanying the local tribes on vision quests and ceremonial rituals.

  His adobe home in a compound of buildings on forty acres in San Cristobal, north of Taos, was a mecca for seekers who came to learn of Pueblo Indian mythology, native creation stories, and southwestern mysticism.

  I had talked to his wife when I phoned to make the appointment, and she had assured me that Professor Mason would be most interested to see the santo that had appeared on my doorstep. She met me at the door and ushered me into the cool great room, shaded by a portal overlooking the San Cristobal Valley. While I waited for the professor, I perused the collections of artifacts, masks, books, and ritual objects displayed in glass cases around the inner walls of the large room.

  “What have you brought me?” a sharp, trembling voice echoed against the walls. Wiley Mason made his way carefully down the two steps into the room, but then strode toward me with an oversized, outstretched palm.

  I shifted my rag bundle to the crook of my left arm and extended my right to shake his hand. His grip was firm and strong. “It’s a santo,” I said. “It says ‘San Cirilio’ on the bottom.”

  “Aha!”

  “You know about San Cirilio?”

  “A little something. A little something. Put it over here.” He gestured toward a table and moved some books aside to make room.

  I set the bundle down and began to unwrap it.

  Professor Mason pulled eagerly at the rags, as if he couldn’t wait. When the carving was exposed, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out some spectacles and put them on. He picked up the santo and began to examine it from all angles.

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh, yes, yes. Yes.”

  I waited patiently, but he said nothing more.

  Finally he set the carving down and looked at me. “Have you been in contact with a witch?”

  I laughed, nervously. “A witch?”

  He didn’t seem amused. He tilted his head to one side and removed his glasses. “Has someone cast a spell on you?”

  I started to laugh again at the absurdity of this, but the laughter died in my throat. It sounded instead as if I had burped. Finally I said, “Why are you asking me this?”

  He pointed to my face. “How did you get that?”

  I told him about Tecolote, and the vision I’d had at her house, but I was careful not to mention Esperanza by name.

  “And this woman, you say she’s a curandera?”

  “Yes, that’s what she told me. I don’t think of her as a witch. I mean, I know she can do things, strange things. They also call her a bruja.”

  “Well, to some, witch and bruja are one and the same thing. Did she tell you she was a bruja?”

  “Yes. And maybe I also heard it from someone else as well. But I know I
heard it from her. And I know for certain that she told me she was a curandera. Why? Do you think she’s the one who left this for me?”

  “It’s possible. If she’s only a curandera, though, she cannot help us here.”

  “Help us? Help us with what?”

  “If someone has put a spell on you, then she is probably just trying to protect you. She could have left San Cirilio for your protection.”

  “But why? I mean, what is this carving going to do?”

  He took a deep breath as if to gather patience with my ignorance.

  “Curanderas cannot afford to dabble in witchcraft, or their patrons will fear them and will not seek them out for curas. Instead, they can offer some protection, but you will have to seek out an arbulario, a true brujo or bruja, a witch who can undo the spell.”

  “What spell? You mean the scars?”

  “Yes, the scars. And perhaps more than that. Have you been ill?”

  “No.”

  “Has anything strange been happening?”

  Now I laughed out loud. “Everything strange you could imagine. Strange things are the norm for me.”

  “Like what?”

  I told him of the apparition I’d seen while running on the gorge rim, the pictograph that had vanished from the face of the rock. I told him about the prayer stick, the nachi.

  “What do you know about this nachi?” Mason said.

  “Nothing. I asked my medicine teacher about it, and she said to wait a few days and she would tell me what to do with it.” I felt a pang of discomfort remembering Momma Anna’s admonitions about the object. Then, reluctantly, I added, “She told me not to tell anyone about it.”

  The professor broke into a wide, toothy grin. “Well, you failed that assignment, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “Tell me about the nachi.”

  I thought about showing it to him—it was outside in my Jeep. But I remembered Momma Anna’s warning that it could hurt someone. I described it to him instead, and he scratched a few words on a little notepad from his shirt pocket. Then he made for one of the bookshelves against the wall. He pulled down a tome and wet his fingers on his tongue, then began riffling through the pages.