For that whole time, Lani had stayed on the mountain by herself, with Fat Crack Ortiz, tribal chairman and medicine man, as her only companion. Each day he would bring her that day’s single meal of salt-free food. It was to Fat Crack, and only to him, that Lani had confided the full extent of her injuries.
Fat Crack had been a reluctant joiner of the medicine-man circle. Before being tapped to assume that mantle by an old blind medicine man named Looks at Nothing, Fat Crack Ortiz had been blithely living his life as a practicing Christian Scientist. Although he still believed in the tenets of Mary Baker Eddy, he had not inflicted his own beliefs on Lani. Instead, Fat Crack had driven into Tucson, stopped at the nearest Walgreens, and purchased salves and ointments to soothe the burns on her breast.
By the time the sixteen days were up, the wound had healed enough that Lani hadn’t bothered to mention it to either of her parents. She had spent the rest of her high school and college years assiduously avoiding naked showers in PE or dormitories. Her roommates in North Dakota had teased her about being a prude, but the scar, faded now with the help of a scar reducer, was Lani’s secret. Fat Crack had been dead for years. She had told no one else, but now her mother was asking her about it. Why?
They pulled into the driveway outside Brandon and Diana’s home. A motion-activated floodlight came on, illuminating the whole area. Moments later, the porch light came on as well. Lani’s father opened the door.
The silence between mother and daughter had gone on far longer than it should have.
“Well?” Diana insisted.
“Mitch Johnson tried to kill me and he failed,” Lani said. “End of story.”
Except Lani knew that wasn’t the end of the story at all. Something else was going on here. She wished she could sit down with her father and talk to him about it. Between them they might be able to figure out what was happening with Lani’s mother, but that wasn’t possible, not tonight.
Brandon walked over to the passenger side of the Passat, opened the door, and helped his wife out of the vehicle.
“It’s about time you brought her home,” he said, smiling across the now-empty seat in Lani’s direction. “I was about to come looking for you or send out a posse.”
Lani was grateful for his teasing. It gave her exactly what she needed just then-a change of subject.
In the backseat, Gabe’s eyes opened and he sat up straight. “Where are we?” he asked.
“Dropping my mother off,” Lani answered.
“I’m going to sit up front then,” he said.
Lani waited until he had clambered into the front seat and buckled himself in.
“Oi g hihm,” he said, smiling at her. “Let’s go.”
“By all means,” Lani said, grateful to escape. “Let’s.”
Seven
Highway 86, West of Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 p.m.
73º Fahrenheit
Lani drove toward Sells with the full moon rising behind the fast-moving Passat. Once she entered the open-range part of the highway, she slowed down in order to keep an eye out for wandering livestock that might be crossing the road in the moon-bright semidarkness. As she passed the turnoff for Little Tucson, she saw flashing lights in her rearview mirror. She pulled over and let the police vehicle speed past.
She recognized the Pima County logo painted on the side of the vehicle. That probably meant that there was a wrecked car somewhere out here in the night. She didn’t doubt that she’d know the details soon enough when ambulances brought the dead and dying into her ER at the hospital in Sells.
Back on the road, Lani kept going over her mother’s strange question. She also continued thinking about what Gabe had told her much earlier in the day about an old man with strangely puckered skin sitting by her parents’ swimming pool, a man whose presence Diana had absolutely denied. Now Lani wondered if Gabe had been right and if Andrew Carlisle had, against all odds, made an unwelcome ghostly appearance in the house at Gates Pass.
Lani more than anyone understood that Gabe Ortiz was a spooky kid. He often seemed to know things he wasn’t supposed to know, but that wasn’t surprising, because Lani still did that occasionally, too.
Fat Crack Ortiz had suffered from diabetes, an ailment so common on the reservation that it was sometimes referred to as the Papago Plague. He had refused all treatment for the disease, both medicinal and traditional, and eventually the disease had killed him.
The feast held at Ban Thak, Coyote Sitting, the night of his funeral was one of the biggest ones in recent memory. The women in Fat Crack’s life-his widow, Wanda, their daughters-in-law, Christen and Delia, along with the women from the village-had worked long into the night. Lani Walker and Diana Ladd had been there, too. Later, after cleaning up and as they were getting ready to leave, Delia’s water had broken. When it became apparent that there was no time to get the mother to a hospital in time for the delivery of her baby, Lani had stepped in to assist. Thus Gabe Ortiz had been born on the Tampico red leatherette of Diana Ladd’s prized Invicta convertible.
Holding the newborn child in those first few moments of life, looking down at a wrinkled new face that resembled a wrinkled old face, Lani had also understood that Gabe would be more than just his grandfather’s namesake. He would be a medicine man, a siwani, like the others who had gone before him-like Fat Crack, Looks at Nothing, Understanding Woman, and Lani Walker herself.
That knowledge about Gabe’s real destiny, like the scar on her own breast, was another of Lani Walker’s treasured secrets. It was why she spent so much time with the boy-why she made such a concerted effort to teach him fully all the things he needed to know.
On this night, though, she needed to tell him something else, and in telling it she couched the tale in the old traditional language. Part of it was one of the old legends, the story of Rattlesnake Skull village and the people who haunted that bad place. That portion of the story had been handed down in legend from that time in the far distant past when I’itoi, Elder Brother, first emerged from the center of the earth. But part of it was much newer than the rest. It was Lani’s own story, and she wanted Gabe to hear that as well.
After all, if he was going to be a medicine man in the twenty-first century, Gabe would need to know both.
They say it happened long ago that some Bad People, PaDaj O’odham, people who followed the Spirit of Evil, lived in a village called Ko’oi Koshwa, Rattlesnake Skull. One day marauding Apaches, the ohb, came to Rattlesnake Skull. They killed all the people there except for one young girl who went to live with them.
Later the Tohono O’odham learned that this girl loved one of the Apache warriors. They believed that she had betrayed her people to impress him, and it was because of her that the people of Rattlesnake Skull village died.
This made the Tohono O’odham very angry, so they asked I’itoi to help them find Oks Gagdathag, Betraying Woman. I’itoi, the Spirit of Goodness, led them to the place where she was hiding. They brought her back to the land of the Tohono O’odham and shut her in one of I’itoi’s sacred caves on Ioligam, the mountain the Milgahn, the whites, call Kitt Peak. There were many ways in and out of the cave. Betraying Woman could have escaped, but she knew that she deserved to be punished, so she stayed there alone until she died.
After that no one went back to live in Rattlesnake Skull because everyone knew it was a Bad Place. One day two Milgahn, white men, were wandering in the desert. They came upon Rattlesnake Skull. While they were there, the men were infected by the spirits of the Bad People. After that, even though they were not ohb, they were s-ohbsgam, Apache-like, and they went around killing people and doing bad things. One of the people they killed was a Tohono O’odham girl named Gina.