Trinity Sight

by Jennifer Givhan

  Eyes still glued on Calliope, the second Suuke sprang up, bounded through the broken window, and Chance yelled, “Now!”

  Calliope didn’t think. As he fired shot after shot, she held the girl wrapped around her as tightly as she could and threw her whole body shoulder-first toward the bedroom door, changing the plan. If the first Suuke had been there, it would have shown itself by now. She had a gut feeling the front door wasn’t the way out.

  Her muscles strained as she flung open Tía’s bedroom and ran toward the opposite side of the room where Tía’s side door was dead bolted.

  She turned the lock, her hands steady with adrenaline, and the door opened to an icy blast of night air. She hoped Amy was following, along with Chance and the others. But she couldn’t care about anything except the girl and the babies inside her. To Eunjoo she whispered, groaning with effort, “No te preocupes, chica. I have you.”

  The gunfire rang on. Did bullets inflict any harm on a Suuke? Or were they just noise to the demons?

  She squinted into the blackness, willing her eyes to adjust to starlight, the bright strip of Milky Way that Chance had called the Great Snowdrift of the Skies, now clearly visible. Her boots crunched the ice-mud as she plowed through the scrub; she’d run this way countless times as a girl in hide-and-seek and knew the knotted landscape by heart. She darted over the rutted ground past the curandera’s garden Tía had planted, now shocked with freeze, yerba mansa, arnica, pigweed, and datura, all used for healing by peoples of the past, now tangling in her path, crackling beneath her boots as she ran, Eunjoo’s head pressed close to her chest. Yucca and black walnut branches scratched her face and neck.

  Footsteps behind her.

  She couldn’t look to see if it was Amy or Chance or …

  Her heart thrummed.

  She couldn’t feel bad for leaving Mara and Buick to fend for themselves. It wasn’t them the Suuke was after. She wasn’t sure why she believed that was true but felt it as surely as she felt the ice-wind tearing at her cheeks and neck, the cold light of the stars.

  The mothers were warned not to let the children go, though they had transformed. Chance’s words rang through her ears as she plunged forward through the brambles, her gut throbbing, lungs ripping as snow-heavy branches clawed at her and Eunjoo. She gasped for breath as she came to a clearing, the gravel driveway, across which lay the path to Loren’s house and Mara’s truck. She was scared to cross the clearing, stagnant and tar-black as night water.

  Some mothers were frightened and let go.

  The children were lost to us.

  The Suuke would come and rip the babies out. Is that what it wanted of her? Her belly sinking, she clutched Eunjoo tighter through the frozen horehound marking the gravel’s edge, the prickling globe mallow. The footsteps behind her grew louder.

  She’d have to sprint across the driveway.

  If she could have cried out in pain she would have. It took every ounce of strength to put one foot in front of the other and not collapse. They did not die but joined the ko’ko in the sacred lake, gateway to Kothluwala’wa.

  Eunjoo’s bird whisper, “It’s coming, Phoenix’s mama. Hurry.”

  The girl’s face was buried in Calliope’s sweater. How could she see the monster?

  Calliope turned.

  On the porch outside the front door a hundred feet away a massive figure towered; it was the first Suuke, the one with snakes around its neck, glinting knife in hand.

  It turned.

  It had spotted her.

  Like its feathered partner, the Suuke locked its swollen eyes on her.

  She gasped for breath, clamped her arms tighter still around Eunjoo, and kept running.

  The Suuke leapt from the banister to the snow below.

  Something grabbed Calliope. A knobby hand unrooted from the ground, grasping her tightly. Her ankle twisted and she fell forward, keeled her body to the side so she wouldn’t land on Eunjoo or the babies. She kicked furiously at whatever had grabbed her, the Suuke’s claw? She was throbbing in pain, scrambling as quickly as she could toward Eunjoo, barefoot and half dressed, sprawling on the gravel.

  The girl pulled Calliope’s hand, motioning her to stand.

  The Suuke was gamboling toward them.

  Calliope loosened her foot from her boot, caught in the grooved tree root that had tripped her. Freed and shoeless, she heaved herself up, and, Eunjoo’s hand in hers, they clambered forward. She could see the truck parked in the gravel in front of Loren’s cabin.

  They wouldn’t make it.

  Chance sprinted out the front door, yelling, jumped onto the banister, and like the Suuke, leapt. Onto the Suuke’s back.

  He held it in a chokehold, struggling, shouting, “Go, mujer. Go without me.”

  Amy was at Calliope’s heels, aiming her gun at the Suuke.

  Calliope knocked her friend’s hand down, panted through choked breath, “No, you’ll hit Chance.” She closed her eyes a moment to think. She should have been running to the truck, turning the ignition, driving Eunjoo and herself away.

  Bullets had done nothing to the Suuke but slow it down, momentarily distracting it like wasps stinging a bear.

  Its curved knife reflected starlight, inches from Chance’s face, his neck. Chance swerved side to side, squeezing the monster’s throat. The Suuke didn’t flinch.

  Calliope glanced at Eunjoo, who seemed impervious to the snow though she was nearly naked as a wild animal. Wild as a coyote.

  Coyote’s story.

  Eunjoo had said Coyote told it to her for a reason.

  Susana’s letter—turned to stone. The Suuke, come alive from stone.

  The stories were real.

  “Chance!” she screamed. “It’s like Coyote’s story!”

  Chance’s gaze shifted momentarily away from the Suuke and toward Calliope, and in that split second the Suuke slashed his knife upward before Chance could dart away. The blade grazed his face, which bled down the Suuke’s white hair, staining it red.

  Calliope winced.

  “With his own rock.”

  Chance nodded, let go of the Suuke and dropped to his feet on the snow, tensely circling the Suuke, his arms extended, his eyes on the Suuke’s knife.

  Calliope told Amy, “Get the girl to the truck, then come get me and Chance.”

  Amy’s expression said you trust me after I abandoned you?

  Calliope said, “And give me your gun.”

  “You got it, momma. You’re crazy, but you got it.”

  Amy handed over the gun, scooped up the barefoot girl with her tortoise-­shell backpack, and sprinted toward Loren’s house.

  Calliope breathed deeply, yelled, “Chance, move.”

  He darted sideways, toward the frozen hedgerow, as Calliope steadied her hand, aimed at the Suuke’s hand, and shot. Over and over. Wasp stings.

  The Suuke dropped the knife.

  Chance sprang forward, grabbing it, and thrust it into the Suuke’s neck.

  The Suuke clutched at Chance, still holding the knife, by his neck, wrapping its large hands easily around Chance’s throat, strangling him.

  Chance pulled the knife out and thrust it in again and again despite his own choking, his own gasping for breath.

  Blood poured from the Suuke’s neck, but it didn’t release its grasp.

  Chance sawed back and forth several more times until one last thrust, he sliced clean through the Suuke’s neck.

  Its head lobbed to its shoulder, then fell, its white hair billowing across the now-bloodred snow. Its hands released, and Chance pulled away from the grotesque body as it too fell to the ground.

  Chance knelt and began praying in Zuni over the Suuke’s body.

  Calliope came closer, in shock. A week ago, she couldn’t even stand listening to Andres’s stories of emergency response calls. N
ow, she’d just helped decapitate a monster.

  Chance continued praying even as red welts sprang up around his neck like a noose, thick rope burns. “I don’t know what happens to a person who kills a god,” he said. He washed his hands in the snow.

  “That was a god? I thought it was a monster … a demon.”

  “There’s no difference in Zuni cosmology, mujer. It’s represented as a ko’ko. No distinction. As I said before, there is knowledge not intended for us. I don’t know what the punishment is.”

  “Seems to me we’re already living in the punishment.” She ignored the pain searing her pelvic floor and thighs. Braxton Hicks, she told herself, false labor. From the stress.

  He nodded, continued chanting, brought the severed head back to the body, then stood.

  Amy pulled the truck through the gravel beside them, tires kicking up icy sludge. She pushed open the passenger door, looked at the dead Suuke, said, “Holy fuck, you two are hardcore.”

  Calliope’s stomach roiled; a strong premonition that the worst was yet to come. She realized what she’d missed, turned back to Chance, “Where’s the other Suuke?”

  “Tied up. The others are guarding it. I didn’t know how to kill it until you showed me.”

  “The other one has a bow and arrow. Did you take it?”

  “Mara’s holding it.”

  “Maybe you should let someone else do it, Chance.” She could see the psychic toll killing a ko’ko had taken on him. His eyes glazed over, his face furrowed with worry lines. The slash across his cheek clotted with dried blood.

  “I’ve already gone this far,” he said. “Get in the truck. I’ll get the others.”

  “Keep the engine running,” she called to Amy, then grabbed her boot from the tree root and followed Chance up the porch steps.

  “You’re too pregnant for this danger, mujer.” He glanced at her belly, which she was supporting with her free hand. “You keep trying to hide it, but I know you’re worried about those twins.”

  She ignored him, cocked Susana’s gun.

  The house was too quiet, fireplace lighting shadows on the walls. Broken glass crunched under Calliope’s boots, the only sound. “Where are they?” she whispered.

  Chance nodded toward Tía’s bedroom.

  The Suuke had come after her. And they’d stopped it.

  Chance kicked open the door.

  Right inside the room, Calliope saw where the Suuke should have been, from the coiled ropes knotted on the floorboards.

  A few feet away, butcher knife dangling from his flaccid hand, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle, Buick lay on his stomach. Chance knelt down, checked his neck for a pulse then shook his head, murmuring words in Zuni over Buick’s lifeless body.

  Calliope felt sick. The stranger who’d called himself a friend. She wished she’d been kinder to him. Wished he’d never come to Tía’s house. This wasn’t a sanctuary but a snare; it was a fucking wasp’s nest.

  Beside Buick on the ground, Mara’s rifle, split in two like a toy gun.

  Mara slumped in the corner near the door Calliope had opened minutes before, her breath shallow and raspy, an arrow pitted into her left side, well below her heart. Her shirt was blood-soaked. She cupped her palms where the arrow protruded from her body. Her eyes fluttered. She opened her mouth to speak, no words formed, only a gurgling sound.

  Calliope let out a sob, scanned the rest of the room.

  Where was the Suuke?

  Chance lifted Mara, motioned Calliope, “Let’s go.”

  The arrow had punctured her lung, Calliope could tell by the rattling sounds of the old woman’s breathing. If they pulled the arrow out, she’d bleed to death. They needed a doctor.

  “The Suuke?” She imagined it crouched under the bed, a true bogeyman. Or woman. Chance had said they were both male and female. Which had they killed, husband or wife?

  “Could be anywhere,” Chance said, grunting, as he repositioned Mara so he could carry her through the bedroom doorway.

  Why hadn’t the other Suuke shown itself? Why hadn’t it attacked in the front yard while they stood over its dead partner?

  Chance crossed the threshold, turned back to Calliope as if reading her mind, said, “Hurry, mujer. I can’t fight and take care of you.”

  She nodded, grabbed a blanket from the couch on the way out.

  From the snow-covered gravel, Amy picked up the Suuke’s machete-like knife. She wiped the blood in the snow. “This thing slayed a monster. It could come in handy.” Amy dropped the knife into the back of Mara’s truck, then climbed back into the driver’s seat. “You coming, momma?”

  Calliope nodded.

  Before she climbed into the seat with Amy and Eunjoo, she turned toward the crow-covered piñon in the distance. In the starlight, she thought she could make out the silhouette of a coyote, howling up at the sky. But if anything was howling, the truck’s engine drowned it out.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  DEADFALL

  All the roads were dirt.

  As Amy drove over the rutted road, Calliope dressed Eunjoo in Phoenix’s clothes, though she didn’t have shoes. They’d left those in Tía’s bathroom. She put two pairs of socks on the girl’s feet and cranked the heater up, then massaged her own belly from the painful jolting.

  Chance whispered into Calliope’s ear, “Why didn’t you leave me? I told you to go.”

  “I couldn’t leave my guide.”

  “You never listen to anything I say.”

  “You’re my guide, not my husband.”

  “Do you listen to your husband?”

  “No.” She did not listen to Andres. She pictured his body lifeless as Buick’s, that stranger-friend who’d said all the cities from Las Vegas to Silver City had disappeared, the world reverting to precivilization, the time of the Ancients. It wasn’t possible, but there it was. She turned toward Mara in the back seat, who lay under a blanket Calliope had spread across her body, her head on Chance’s lap. The arrow jutted from the woman’s chest. Anything was possible in this world. This world. The thought hadn’t crossed her mind until now.

  Chance had torn a piece of his shirt and packed it around Mara’s entry wound.

  “Where are we taking her?” Calliope asked.

  “Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. I’m driving away, but I’m gonna need actual directions,” Amy said. “Just like old times, right? The family back together.”

  Calliope half smiled. Amy was right; Calliope couldn’t have left them any more than she could have left her own family. Crisis brought people together that way.

  “The rez,” Chance said. “It’s the only place.”

  “What do you mean, the only place?” Calliope asked. “The only place left?”

  “The only place I know there will be healers.” He paused, added, “For Mara and for you.”

  Calliope wanted to ask how he was so sure there’d be anyone on the Zuni reservation. But she didn’t.

  Amy said, “How do we get there?”

  “Drive north. We can’t take the 180 if the roads are gone like Buick warned, so we’ll have to rely on the compass to get us there.” He pulled a compass from his pocket.

  Calliope said, “Your whole world in there.”

  He smiled. “Zuni’s northeast of here. If we just continue north through the Gila Forest, through the pass at Mogollon Mountains, I can get us there …” He paused, studying the compass then peering outside. Dawn was approaching through the pinkish gray haze staining the lower half of the sky to their right. They were on the right track. “I’ll know how far east to go by the Zuni Salt Lake, Ma:k’yayanne.” He lowered his voice, close to Calliope’s ear, whispering, “Old Lady Salt lives there, mujer. It’s a sacred lake.”

  “Can we make it there today? We didn’t bring any food or supplies,” Amy said.

 
“I should’ve planned better,” Chance said. “I knew it wasn’t safe there. We should never have stayed so long. I should’ve taken you to the rez in the first place.”

  Calliope was trembling. All the questions she’d been holding in came streaming out at once. “What aren’t you saying? Why are the Suuke alive? Why are they after us? Why are the stories real? Where is everyone? If you know, why aren’t you telling us?”

  He sighed, snapped the compass shut. “I told you, mujer. I have to talk to the Elders. Not everything is for us to know.”

  “I understand your beliefs are sacred, but we almost died. We keep almost dying. I found this in Phoenix’s backpack. Eunjoo put it there, from the table at Susana’s house.” She pulled the letter out of her shirt, handed it to Chance. “It’s a suicide note.”

  “Who’s Susana?” Amy asked.

  Calliope realized she hadn’t ever told them about Susana. She told the whole story of finding Susana in the mud, how she’d shot herself in the barn.

  Chance read the note aloud.

  When he finished, Calliope repeated, “Turned to stone. What does she mean? Literally turned to stone? Did Reina become a rock? Is that a Zuni story too? Connected to the ko’ko?”

  In the back seat, Mara’s eyes fluttered and she moaned, “It’s Lizard’s Tail. Why won’t you believe me? I need to get back to Trudy.”

  “I do believe you,” Calliope said, filled with compassion for the woman, in much worse shape than any of them. “Save your energy. We’re getting you help.” To Chance, she said, “You didn’t answer my questions.”

  “Mujer, I’m not an expert on Zuni cosmology by any stretch. But I’ll tell you what I think. We’ve been shifting a long time. We came into this fourth world, and the white man calls it evolution, but we Zuni know that there’s a metaphysical side to the story. Mother Earth, when she is fed up, will shake herself off. There are stories that Old Lady Salt did the same, and Moon Mother changed the tides after Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts tramped on her, and stuck American flags into her skin, and raided nearly fifty pounds of rock and dust from her body without so much as a cornmeal offering or prayer. I’m a physicist, yes. I believe in science. But what they did here in our Middle Place in 1945, that wasn’t science. What the white man has been doing since …” He was silent a long while. “The genocide started again when the protests were growing and the energy was crackling like static electricity. Not just up north but in Zuni and everywhere, The People were trying to protect our land and our water. I watched an elder fall at my feet, his staff clattering to the pavement of the shut-down highway. Police barraged us with smoking tear-gas canisters from grenade launchers. They put us in cages, like animals. If we’d known what was coming next … We prayed and burnt sage and sweetgrass, we held dances, supporting our brothers and sisters in the North. When they threatened round-ups and destroyed Mother Earth, we knew it couldn’t last long …”