Malice

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  That she understood what she was thinking came as no surprise. She was a hyper-polyglot, a term used by linguists for someone capable of speaking six or more languages fluently. In Lucy’s case, she was a hyper-polyglot times ten, having learned nearly sixty unique languages in her twenty-one years, plus a number of variations. In fact, her “gift” qualified her more as a language savant; unlike someone who studied and practiced languages to become fluent, she could pick them up simply by listening to others speak, sometimes in an afternoon.

  But why Euskara? Maybe I got hit on the head?

  Lucy didn’t dwell on her mind’s choice of language for long. She had a more serious predicament and needed to think clearly, but her heart was pounding like a drum. Taking a cleansing breath as she’d been taught by John Jojola, a Pueblo Indian police officer from Taos who had become something of a spiritual advisor to Lucy and her mother, she calmed herself and concentrated on noting details that she hoped might somehow help her situation. She could tell it was a big car from the size of the trunk and the heavy, solid ride. American-made…probably a Cadillac or Lincoln.

  Lucy couldn’t recall how she got in the trunk. In fact, there seemed to be several lapses in her short-term memory. She knew that she was living in New Mexico with her boyfriend, Ned Blanchet, after returning from Manhattan, where they’d helped foil a plot to kill the Pope.

  No, wait, my dad got shot, she thought. Then Ned went back to Taos because the ranch needed him…. And he’s probably grown a little tired of “vacations” with the Karps…. But I stayed until Dad was going to be okay, then I went back to New Mexico.

  After that, her mind was drawing a blank. She wondered how long she’d been in the trunk. Hours, anyway.

  The road apparently had a lot of curves, judging from the way she was jostled back and forth. And the sound of the tires was a monotonous whine broken only by the occasional growl of a car passing in the other direction. It all added up to the conclusion that she was being transported along a rural two-lane highway in the mountains of New Mexico.

  Suddenly, the monotony of the road noise was broken by a thunderous rumbling, as if the car were passing through a storm. She was trying to identify the sound when a whistle shrieked, making her jump and bump her head on the trunk lid. A train. We’re driving next to a train.

  Soon thereafter the car slowed and turned left onto a gravel road, judging by the crunching sound beneath the tires. They didn’t go far, however, before stopping, apparently to allow the train to pass. She could hear it thundering just in front of the car.

  Remember all of this, she told herself in Euskara, it will be important later.

  The train passed and the car moved forward again on the gravel road, but again, only for a few more feet before it stopped. Someone got out of the car and she could hear voices. Then someone got back in, a gate creaked open, and the car drove forward again.

  After what she assumed to be a mile or so—given the time and her approximation of speed—the car swerved to the right and continued on for another mile or so. When it stopped, all four doors opened and she heard footsteps approaching the rear of the car.

  Need to escape, she thought. Get to a telephone and tell the cops to drive several hours along a two-lane rural highway that at some point runs parallel to a train track. Then turn on the gravel road…

  Lucy stopped, overcome by the realization that it was all useless. What she’d just described could have been anywhere, a thousand country highways, a million gravel roads. And her captors weren’t about to just let her go.

  She could hear men outside laughing and talking; their speech was slurred, as if they’d been drinking. Suddenly, the trunk opened, revealing that it was not nighttime as she had supposed. Instead, an intense afternoon sun blinded her, making it difficult to see the faces of the two men who leaned over and reached for her. Her eyes struggled to adjust, but everything seemed too bright, out of focus, and surreal. I must have a concussion, she thought.

  All she knew for sure was that her tormentors were bald, which was odd, as they were obviously young. There’s a reason, she thought, but it wouldn’t quite come to her. The only other details that stood out were their cruel, smirking eyes and the smell of alcohol on their breath.

  Lucy lashed out at the taller of the two men as he pulled her from the trunk, scratching at his face and kicking. Her knee caught him in the groin, and he fell to the ground, which made his comrades laugh and jeer. When he got up, his eyes were red with rage, and he began striking her in the face with his fist. The odd thing was that Lucy knew she was being hit but didn’t feel any pain.

  The tall man dragged her to the driver’s-side door and shoved her down on the seat behind the steering wheel, to which her bound hands were lashed. She glanced at the steering column and noted the Cadillac symbol. Small consolation for being right, she thought.

  Looking out of the side window, she saw that her abductors were standing in a line with their backs to her. They seemed to be posing; one was raising a beer and shouted something. Oh my God, they’re taking pictures, like this is some sort of show!

  The pounding of her heart sounded as loud as a drum. She peered between two of the men and saw the photographer standing on the little hill. “Pikutara joan,” she cursed the men. It meant “Go to hell,” but they only laughed.

  When they finished, the tall one she kicked in the balls walked back and leaned in the window past her and turned the keys in the ignition. The car roared to life. As he started to withdraw, he turned his face to her and tried to kiss her. But she spit on him and struck him with her forehead; her fingers wrapped around the chain that dangled from his neck and yanked hard enough to break it.

  The man swore and grabbed her around her throat with his left hand while he punched with his right. He struck her again, and the fight left Lucy, who slumped in her seat, resigned to her fate. The man called her a name and reached back in and put the car’s transmission into Drive.

  The car crept forward but didn’t have far to go. Immediately in front, the earth opened up into a six-foot-deep pit that had apparently been dug in the rust-red soil by the earthmover that sat belching black smoke off to one side. The car pitched forward and then rolled down a steep dirt ramp to the bottom, where it splashed through a shallow puddle of water before crashing into the far wall and coming to rest.

  When it hit the wall, Lucy was propelled forward, striking her head on the steering wheel. Dazed, she tried to grasp what was happening. Then she realized she was in a car-sized grave; even the dirt walls around her wept groundwater as if in sympathy for her plight. Above her, the earthmover roared and a few moments later dropped the first massive shovelful of dirt and gravel on the car. She screamed in terror while the men on the edge of the pit looked down and laughed.

  Lucy must have blacked out then because the next thing she knew, the pit and car were filled so that only her hands, shoulders, and head were above the gravel, dirt, and sand. The weight against her chest made it difficult to breathe. She opened her hand, the one that had torn the chain from the tall man’s chest, and saw that along with the chain, she was holding a medallion made of three interlocking triangles. She turned her head to look up at the men taunting her from the edge of the pit.

  “Sasikumea,” she shouted, but the Basque word for bastard only provoked more hoots of derision.

  She locked her eyes on the tall one to get his attention, then looked back at her hand. He stopped laughing when he saw the medallion; his hand went to his neck and he blanched, his face contorted by rage. He turned toward the earthmover as if to get it to stop, but then another scooperful of gravel crashed down through the broken windshield and flooded the interior of the car.

  Entombed, Lucy tried to scream but her efforts were muffled, choked by the earth that clogged her throat, nostrils, and ears. Soon her body began to spasm from lack of air. My baby, she thought, my poor baby!

  As she died, she could hear Jojola singing in Tiwa, the native language of th
e Pueblo Indians. “May the gods bless me, help me, and give me power and understanding,” he chanted as the drum kept time with the thumping of her heart.

  The singing stopped and Jojola’s voice commanded, “Lucy! Lucy Karp! Listen to me. It’s John Jojola. It is time to come back from the spirit world.” Then he was shaking her roughly and patting her face. But she was dead and couldn’t open her eyes.

  “Inhale, Lucy, breathe deep and return,” the voice of John Jojola continued. She smelled the fragrant sweetness of burning sage and took a deep breath despite the fear that she would inhale the rocks that filled her mouth. But when she did, the only thing that flooded her lungs was fresh air with a hint of sage.

  Lucy felt Jojola’s strong hands on her shoulders and wondered how he could have found his way into the car in time to save her. She forced her eyes open and discovered that she was not buried inside a car at all. In fact, she sat next to Jojola on a cliff of a mesa high above the New Mexican desert, wrapped in a Navajo blanket. It was daylight, but not the burning sun of a summer afternoon, just the setting sun of a chilly evening in late October.

  The beauty of her surroundings slowly shooed away the horror of the burial. Nearby, Taos Mountain reached into the sky, its deep green, pine-clad slopes splotched with canary yellow and burnt-orange stands of aspen. The sky to the west was painted gold and purple, with the colors growing stronger as the sun slipped peacefully toward the horizon.

  A strong hand gently turned her face from the sunset, and she found herself looking at the lined, bronze face of John Jojola. His dark brown eyes peered deep into her own, as if he were reading the fine print of a newspaper ad.

  Jojola took her hand and placed something into it. “Sand,” he said, “to bring you back to the reality of this earth.” He then turned over her other hand and poured water onto it. “Wash with the waters from our sacred lake and be reborn.”

  Lucy felt the sand trickle through her fingers, aware of each grain. She splashed the water on her face and felt refreshed. “Where…where have I been?” she asked.

  “Your body was here all along,” Jojola replied as he picked up a piece of smoldering sage and waved it around Lucy, chanting something under his breath. “But your spirit has been far away.”

  The sage, she knew, was for cleansing. Then she remembered that the bitter, metallic flavor in her mouth was the aftertaste of peyote, a powerful hallucinogen found in the fruit of a cactus that grew in Mexico. It all came back to her—the dreams and going to the mesa with Jojola on a spirit quest.

  Lucy had known that Jojola was a practicing member of the Native American Church, which had been organized by American Indian tribes so that the U.S. government could not stop them from taking peyote as part of their religious rights. He’d explained that peyote had been used by Indians of Mexico, where the plant grew, for thousands of years. Only in the past hundred years or so had American Indians used it as a path to the spirit world.

  As such, peyote was considered sacred—not a toy for Anglo hippies who wanted to see a kaleidoscope of colors and go “on a trip.” When Lucy broached the subject of using it herself, Jojola had at first rejected the request.

  “Why do you want it?” he demanded.

  Lucy replied that she wasn’t some college kid looking for a high. “I’m searching for answers,” she told him. She’d been having dreams in which she was suffocating and dreams in which she was burning, dreams filled with smoke and three triangular-shaped mountains. The dreams had filled her with fear and a sense that she couldn’t trust anybody outside of her family and small circle of friends. But the worst dream of all—one she’d had with increasing frequency—was the one with Ned lying on the ground and a man pointing a rifle at him as his finger pulled back on the trigger.

  “I think the answers might be important,” she’d added.

  Jojola hadn’t replied right away. He knew that Lucy was different from most people and in tune with the spirit world. A few of the Taos Pueblo people had labeled her a bruja, a witch, and wanted her banned from the pueblo because she’d learned their secret language as if by magic. But most in the tribe who knew her as he did argued that her heart was pure, as were her intentions. And so an unspoken understanding was reached that no one would teach her the language, but if she learned it simply by listening, then the spirits must have wanted it to be so.

  More than a year had passed since they’d met and Jojola found himself cast into the role of spiritual advisor to Lucy and her mother, Marlene. While it seemed an accidental meeting, he was sure it was not; the spirits had wanted it to happen and so it had. But even if he was willing to teach them his understanding of spirituality, the secret traditions of his people he would not reveal. His tribe was one of the few in the United States living on their ancestral lands instead of having been moved to a reservation. As such, they’d been able to keep most of their customs and language intact, in part because they did not allow outsiders to usurp them.

  However, he reasoned, peyote was not a Taos custom; not everyone in his tribe or the other tribes belonged to the Native American Church. He himself had come to it only out of desperation.

  After two tours in Vietnam, Jojola had returned in 1969 to the Taos Pueblo only to discover that he had not entirely found his way home from the war. He became an alcoholic and deadbeat, especially after his wife, herself an alcoholic, left him with a young son to raise. Only his love for his son had saved him from drinking himself to death. But he couldn’t overcome his addiction to alcohol by himself. Then one of the tribe’s elders, who was a member of the Native American Church, suggested that he might ask the spirits to help by participating in a peyote ceremony.

  Jojola was willing to try anything and begged the elder to set it up for him. But the elder said that his was a special case, and he would have to travel to Mexico and find the ancient roots of the peyote cult.

  So he had gone with a letter from the elder introducing him to the Huichol people, the original practitioners of the peyote ceremony. He was in luck: they were preparing to go on their annual trek to find peyote, which they called hikuri, and invited him along.

  Led by a mara’akame, or shaman, Jojola had to first pass through the rite of confession and purification. For each offense that he confessed, the mara’akame made a knot in a string. Some of the knots represented the guilt he felt over killing other men, even if it had been in combat, but mostly the knots represented mistakes he’d made as a husband, a father, and as a member of his tribe. Either way, his string was particularly long by Huichol standards, and filled with knots.

  At the end of the ceremony, the shaman burned the string. When he woke the next morning, Jojola felt as if a weight had been lifted, but the shaman told him that his journey was not over.

  In fact, it had only just begun. He traveled with the tribe to the sacred mountains of Wirikuta, where they prayed to the spirits and washed themselves in the waters of a holy stream. Only now, the shaman warned him, were they ready for the perilous crossing into the otherworld.

  The tribe had then searched for hikuri. When they were through harvesting and ready to partake, Jojola was given twelve pieces of the mescal fruit that contained the peyote. It was considered a light dose for the more practiced Huichol, some of whom consumed as many as fifty pieces. But it was enough.

  The journey began innocently enough with colorful lights and gentle hallucinations, as well as a general feeling of well-being. But that afternoon, the sky had grown dark, nearly as black as night, with frenetic blasts of lightning and thunder.

  Coming out of the storm, he saw a dark warrior approaching from across the desert carrying a war club. The demon ran as fast as the wind, and Jojola could tell that it was coming to do battle and that if he failed, he would literally die on that mountainside.

  Looking about for a weapon, Jojola saw the sharp-ended rib bone of a coyote and picked it up. Then the dark spirit was upon him. They struck each other with terrific blows, and then circled before striking again,
before repeating their terrible dance.

  Bloody and dazed, Jojola realized that the spirit was alcohol and it intended to devour him body and soul. Then it would take his son, and his people. Anger welled up inside of him and he raised the coyote rib, then plunged it into the demon with all of his might. The dark warrior collapsed to his knees but refused to die.

  So with his remaining strength, Jojola lifted the demon and cast it down the mountainside, where it fell a thousand feet and struck with a sound like thunder rumbling through the ground. An avalanche of stone was dislodged and swept down, burying the demon.

  Physically and emotionally drained, Jojola turned to see that the Huichol had gathered to witness the battle. Smiling, they came forward one at a time to embrace him. “You are free of the demon,” the shaman, who approached last, said, “but only as long as you do not invite him back into your life. Return to the old ways. Reject him. Save yourself, your son, and your people.”

  Returning to the Taos Pueblo, Jojola was a changed man. He stayed away from bars and liquor stores in the city of Taos, and even shunned old friends who drank alcohol. Instead, he hunted deer on the sacred Taos Mountain with a bow, swam in the holy waters of Blue Lake, and communed with the spirits of the high plains desert of New Mexico. He also taught his son the ways of his people so that he would respect the culture and draw strength from it. “We Pueblo Indians close our borders to outsiders every winter and withdraw into our ancient adobe lodges so that we may come together as a people and become stronger for being part of a whole,” he told the boy.

  His tribe had rejoiced at his return to his place in the warrior clan. When it had come time to name a new police chief, he had been the only candidate they considered. Confident now in who he was and with his past, he was a rare man who stood comfortably and easily with one foot in the modern world—running a professional, modern police force—and the other foot in the ancient, returning every year to Mexico to join the Huichol in their trek to the mountains of Wirikuta.