Eight
Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:30 p.m.
71º Fahrenheit
Gabe fell asleep again soon after Lani finished telling him the story. Even though she believed Gabe hadn’t lied when he told her about seeing the image of Andrew Carlisle sitting with her mother, she knew it wasn’t true, not in any real physical sense. The man was dead, after all-he had died in prison years earlier. But she also understood that something about his brooding spirit-his dangerous, ohb -like presence-was once again intruding into the lives of Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. Lani also understood why her mother had vehemently denied seeing him. That was clear enough. Adults who were known to speak to people who weren’t there were usually thought to be crazy.
On the other hand, children who conducted conversations with imaginary friends were often considered to be bright and creative. Little Gabe Ortiz certainly qualified as bright and creative, but Lani feared there was far more to this than simply an overly active imagination on his part.
Gabe hadn’t made up the burned and puckered skin on the ghostly apparition’s face. Lani knew about the panful of hot grease her mother had flung at Andrew Carlisle when he had broken into the house in Gates Pass and attacked her. Lani had seen photos of Carlisle’s face both before and after their life-and-death encounter. The two photos sat side by side in the photo section of Lani’s mother’s prizewinning book, Shadow of Death. One featured a head shot of a handsome but arrogant young man whose smug expression had spoken volumes about his contempt for others. The second pictured the grotesque features of that same face wrecked by mounds of scar tissue and with a pair of sightless eyes staring out at nothing.
Yes, they were both photos of the same man-the same one Gabe had evidently seen as well, but for Lani the most worrisome part in all of this was something he must have told her mother that had resulted in Diana’s pointed question about Mitch Johnson and what he had done to Lani when he had kidnapped her and held her hostage years earlier.
Once Mitch Johnson was dead, Lani had gone to great lengths to keep her mother from knowing all of what had happened during that dreadful time, and especially about the welt of puckered scar tissue his red-hot tongs had seared into the flesh of her breast. Now, though, her mother’s question seemed to indicate that she had been given some hints about what had happened that night and about Lani’s carefully guarded secret.
Lani was convinced that something else was at work here, something sinister. She felt as though she’d been given a warning of some kind-a glimpse into the future that told her something dangerous was coming. She wished once again that there had been time tonight to sit down and discuss it with her father. Or with Fat Crack. The old medicine man would have known what these evil forebodings meant and how one should deal with them.
The full moon was shining high overhead, and it was close to eleven thirty when Lani and Gabe finally arrived in Sells, sixty miles from Tucson. She drove straight to the hospital housing compound and stumble-walked Gabe into her house and down the hall to her second guest bedroom. Once he was tucked into bed, Lani showered and dressed in a pair of scrubs.
By then it was only a matter of minutes before her shift was due to start at midnight. There was no sense in trying to grab a quick nap. Besides, Lani wasn’t sleepy. Her body was still accustomed to the sleep-deprived schedule she had maintained as both an intern and as a resident. Tomorrow, after she got off shift, there would be plenty of time to sleep.
She fixed a cup of instant coffee-plastic coffee, as her father called it-and then sat at her small kitchen table to drink it. She didn’t worry about leaving Gabe alone. He spent the night with her often enough. He knew that, if there was a problem-any kind of problem-all he had to do was walk across the parking lot to the hospital to find her.
Lani wished she could take Fat Crack’s deerskin pouch, his huashomi, out of her medicine basket and put it to good use, but there wasn’t enough time for one of the old medicine man’s discerning ceremonies. She needed uninterrupted time to smoke the sacred tobacco, the wiw, or to examine whatever images might be hidden in Fat Crack’s collection of crystals. Those were things that could be done only on Indian time. The hospital ran on Anglo time, with a time clock for punching in and punching out.
Lani had lived in both the Anglo and Indian worlds all her life, and she was accustomed to the accompanying dichotomy. She was also used to being more than one person at one time. That, too, had been part of her lifelong reality.
Before her adoption by Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd, Lani had been known as Clemencia Escalante from the village of Nolic. Her biological mother, a teenager more interested in partying than in raising a child, had left her baby in the care of an aging grandmother. Once the older kids in the village had gone off to school, Clemencia, still a toddler, had wandered into an ant bed and had almost died of multiple ant bites. The superstitious Escalantes had regarded Clemencia as a dangerous object and had refused to take her back. Fat Crack’s wife, Wanda, a social worker, had brought the abandoned baby to the attention of her husband’s aunt Rita Antone. It was at Rita’s instigation that Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd had adopted her.
Lani knew that people on the reservation who knew the story still sometimes referred to her as Kuadagi Ke’d Al, the Ant-Bit Child. Her adoptive parents had given her the name Lanita Dolores after Kulani O’oks, the Tohono O’odham’s greatest medicine woman, the Woman Who Had Been Kissed by the Bees. Nana Dahd, her godmother, had called her Mualig Siakam, Forever Spinning, because, like Whirlwind, Lani had loved to dance. And after she had used Bat Strength in her fatal encounter with Mitch Johnson in the cave under Ioligam-after she had been saved by the timely intervention of bat wings in the darkness of I’itoi’s cave-Lani often called herself Nanakumal Namkam, Bat Meeter.
But tonight, in the Indian Health Center at Sells, Lani couldn’t be anyone else but Lanita Dolores Walker, M.D.
Putting her dirty cup in the dishwasher, she left her housing compound apartment and headed for the ER.
Vamori, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 12:00 a.m.
67º Fahrenheit
Tribal chairman Delia Ortiz’s feet hurt-like crazy. She had been on them all day long. Even though it was Saturday, she had spent most of the day at work in her office at Sells. Now here she was at the dance at Vamori.
Delia’s husband, Leo, loved the dances for good reason. He and his brother, Richard, played in a chicken-scratch band, and the summer dance at Vamori was one of their favorite gigs, but they had grown up on the reservation. Delia had not.
She had spent most of her early years as an “in town” Indian, most notably in Tempe and later on the East Coast. Fat Crack Ortiz, a previous tribal chairman, had wooed her back to the Tohono O’odham reservation from Washington, D.C., by offering her the job of tribal attorney. The fact that Fat Crack later became her father-in-law in addition to being her boss was one of the unintended consequences of her acceptance of that position.
Not long after Fat Crack’s death, Delia herself had been elected tribal chairman. In terms of what was going on at the time, an “in town” Indian was exactly what had been and still was required for the job.
The U.S. government has a long ignoble history of cheating Indians and disregarding treaty arrangements. That was still happening. Tribes, including the Tohono O’odham, were still having to file suit against the BIA in order to get monies that were lawfully due them. Now, however, with casino operations changing reservation economics, there was a new wrinkle in Anglo cheating. The casinos belonged to the tribes, but the mostly Anglo operators were slick and accustomed to winning at every game. They were more than prepared to take the tribes to the cleaners the same way they did ordinary gamblers.