His flannel blended with the patterns made by the swirling feathers around the Suuke’s neck, Chance’s arrow and the Suuke arrows becoming one, fuzzy in the gray-black snow on rock. But the Suuke knew Chance was coming, or its reflexes were quicker than its partner’s. It spun at Chance, knocked him to the ground before he could latch onto its back, before the arrow could break Suuke skin. Its foot stamped into Chance’s torso, pinning him to the ground; the Suuke strung its arrow to its bow. Calliope unlatched her door, ignoring the jolts of pain shockwaving her own torso, and screamed “No!” It couldn’t kill Chance. She couldn’t let it.
Still lying across the back seat, Mara gurgled, “Under the passenger seat. There’s another gun.” There wasn’t enough time. Why hadn’t the woman said so before? Calliope grabbed the gun and the mason jar rolling beside it. Gun in one hand, glass in the other. She cocked the gun.
From her crouched position under the dashboard, Eunjoo said, “Throw it.”
Amy was climbing the rock wall toward the Suuke, unarmed. What was she thinking?
Calliope aimed for the Suuke’s face. But she couldn’t get a clean shot. She had to hit it somewhere that would distract it more than a wasp sting to its rhinoceros-thick skin. She needed somewhere soft.
The Suuke shot its bow, straight ahead. The arrow struck Amy’s neck, blood spilling down her body as she fell to the snow beyond the truck.
Calliope heaved the glass with all her strength. It hit the rock, shattered.
The Suuke turned, its face a snarl. Calliope shot it in the eye. It howled, stumbled back, blood seeping from the blackened socket. Chance wasted no time. He sprang, arrow still in hand, and jabbed it into the Suuke’s throat. Like an oak felled, the monster tumbled from the ledge, landing beside Amy in the snow.
Amy.
While Chance climbed down the rock face, Calliope stumbled forward, unbelieving.
She dropped to her knees at Amy’s side. Chance grabbed every arrow from the Suuke’s clutch, pulled the bow from the monster’s grasp, and shot one after the other in a row of arrows from his eyes to his groin. Then, not even bothering with a prayer, as if he’d gone too far this time for prayer, he kicked the corpse, rolling it through the snow, and shoved it off the ravine ledge.
Calliope grasped the arrow that had killed her young friend. And as a stinger burrowed deep in a child’s skin, as any mother would, she yanked it out.
TWENTY-SIX
OLD LADY SALT
Calliope, a small ponytailed girl standing in a windstorm on the mesa above Chaco Canyon with her bisabuela, shivered despite the autumn heat. They’d hiked the steep black basalt carrying a picnic basket filled with chile verde fry bread, sweet potato empanadas, and cold glass bottles of orange soda. They’d hiked the mesa even though Bisabuela was in her seventies, her silver hair covered with a knitted rebozo. She had to show her great-granddaughter the sun spirals. The mesa had been closed to hikers and tourists for many years, but back then it was still open. On the flat top behind three great slabs of sandstone, a spiral carving, just as a dagger of light pierced its center, a ray channeled by the rocks, capturing the sun’s cycle. It could be no accident. There’s a language written in the architecture, mija. You have to find it. The large spirals marked the solstices, and the small spirals, the equinoxes. These specific markings of the sun’s cycle repeated on the mesa. In the center, a double spiral, like a pair of curved spectacles. Bisabuela had brought Calliope to the opening of the world not for a mere September lunchtime picnic but to show her this: at noon equinox the double spiral marked the middle of the day in the middle of the year.
She said it was the middle of time.
* * * *
Calliope thought of this as she knelt in the snow, a gush of hot amniotic fluid rushing between her thighs. She held Amy’s limp body to her chest, rocking back and forth, blood smearing her own clothes. She was conscious of the middle place: between death and life. The young woman in her arms, the children in her body.
And that she had failed.
Chance peeled Amy’s body away from Calliope, who clutched her tightly, still rocking back and forth, Chance pulling her away, saying, “We’ll pray properly, mujer. Bury her. But we have to get you to the rez.” He carried the dead woman’s body to the truck. Then he came back for Calliope, still kneeling in shock, the snow beneath her melted with birthwater, tinged pink with blood.
Her vision blurred. Penumbras around every object. Sun splotches. Inkblots distorted with tears. She felt cold. Chance lifted her, carried her to the truck, as the thorned flowers in her belly swelled and shrank, needling her with each blossoming and dying.
Amy was dead.
Calliope sat shuddering on the front seat, as Eunjoo clutched her tightly, tears rolling freely down the girl’s cheeks. Even if Calliope had been able to speak, she wouldn’t have needed to sugarcoat anything for the little girl, who seemed to understand more than any of them. She rubbed Calliope’s belly as she cried, and though the little hands offered no relief, felt like nothing more than cat’s paws vaguely kneading at her skin, Calliope didn’t brush her away.
Mara gurgled something about how sad it was. Calliope didn’t answer.
Chance must’ve fixed the truck. Calliope didn’t ask how, just leaned against the seat, her head tilted toward the window, and stared at the blurring rock wall as they careened down the mountain. Wet snow sloshed under the tires until they reached the mountain’s eventual end, when the snow gave way to mud-wet roads, mossy-brown, edged with new growth.
No one said a word.
Eunjoo had worn herself out crying and was snoring against Calliope, who’d been clenching her teeth until her jaw ached and gripping the armrest until her knuckles went white. She felt as if she’d grown a tail, her spinal cord exposed and frayed and searing. Her ass ached. Her thighs throbbed. She squirmed uncomfortably, pressing her feet against the floorboard, bearing down in the seat. Resisting the urge to push. It wasn’t time. She wasn’t ready.
She steadied her breathing.
Blood streaming down her friend’s neck, siphoning out of her onto the snow.
She felt the blood rushing between her thighs, a thick pulse in her pelvis.
Amy was dead. But she had to think about her babies.
She breathed in: uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco. Breathed out.
Chance said, “Sé fuerte, mujer. We’re almost to Old Lady Salt.” His voice, a pillar, but beneath the stone, slight fissures. “I’ll ask her for a blessing for you and your babies.”
Eunjoo woke, patted Calliope again. “Who’s Old Lady Salt?”
“I thought you knew everything about Indian ways?” Chance said.
The girl shook her head.
“She is our mother. Ma’l Oyattsik’i, Salt Lady. She is sacred and we must treat her with respect. In the old days, she used to live near Black Rock, beside the rez, but people grew selfish, took her for granted, removed her sacred flesh without so much as a prayer stick or jeweled cornmeal offering, and she became angry and moved south so we would have to make a pilgrimage to see her and treat her better.”
Calliope knew the controversy surrounding the sacred site, center of a decades-long battle over mineral and water rights. The nation’s second largest electrical company, little brother to the one devastating the North, planned a coal strip mine twelve miles from the lake, along with a railroad line that would intersect with pilgrimage trails, documented graves, and other sacred sites nearby. The company would build wells to pump water eighty-five gallons per minute from underground aquifers near Zuni Salt Lake for use in settling coal dust. The aquifer and surrounding springs supplied the lake, and without this water source, the lake would dry up, the ecosystem irreparably damaged, obliterating Old Salt Woman and the ceremonies surrounding her.
The protests at Zuni hadn’t turned as bloody as in the North, where the camps had burned and the
Ancients with them. But Calliope had a feeling the battle wasn’t over. Bisabuela’s voice in her ear as she watched on the news, When they live for greed, what will burn in the end is them.
Now she felt ashen. Grief as bitter as salt in her mouth, swollen with it and feeling cursed with it, Calliope said, “What blessing could she give me?”
“That’s what we’ll find out, mujer. You know, Zuni women aren’t allowed to visit Old Lady Salt. But you’re a different tribe. It should be all right. I don’t have cornmeal with me. I’ll offer her my turquoise.”
His jewelry. It was so beautiful. And he would give it up for a miracle.
He wouldn’t call it a miracle. But it amounted to the same. She was about to give birth to two premature babies without a hospital or Western medicine. She needed a miracle.
She thought of the Upper Paleolithic shaman woman excavated from the Czech Republic, buried with mammoth tusks and a fox in her hand; it was such a remarkable discovery that spiritual healers even during the Ice Age had been women, where previous academic study had speculated it an all-male profession. Calliope had loved the idea of this woman and her ocher-painted bones, her hundreds of bake-oven, hard-clay figurines, talismans for ritual or healing. All over the world since humanity began, women were central to spirituality and medicine. Bisabuela would’ve loved the Ice Age shaman woman as Bisabuela would have loved Old Lady Salt.
Calliope wished miracles could exist alongside science.
“How about a blessing for the wounded lady back here,” Mara quipped, her voice still garbled but spitfire. The silver halo of hair around her face glistened with the sweat of fever. “I could use some hope.”
Luck already seemed on Mara’s side. She hadn’t bled out or stopped breathing yet. But she needed help as quickly as Calliope did. Maybe quicker. Calliope pictured Amy’s dead body in the back of the truck.
“Old Lady Salt is gracious to those who respect her.”
A pulling in her gut. Uterine strings twisting. Heat rushing between her thighs. She’d already released her amniotic waters. What was this?
Something was wrong.
“Pull over,” Calliope said.
He slowed. “What’s going on?”
She opened the door, vomited clear liquid onto the white earth and saltbush, the plant’s papery four-winged leaves sparkling with it.
She could see the lake in the distance. She wouldn’t make it.
She stumbled out of the truck, crawled on hands and knees across the alkaline soil, groaning. She had the urge to shit. Trailing behind her on the salted ground, bright red poppies.
Chance knelt beside her, his hands clutched around her waist, as if he couldn’t decide whether to lift her or crawl with her, and so he held her, lamely, his voice trembling, “Mujer, you’re bleeding. Is that normal? Is there supposed to be blood? If I could just get you to the lake, I could ask for help.”
Eunjoo climbed from the truck, Bisabuela’s bowl in her hand.
Calliope couldn’t remember the last time she’d had it, thought she’d left it at Tía’s.
Her vision was blurring.
She was hemorrhaging. Ruptured placenta? Stillbirth? She didn’t know what was happening, but she was in too much pain even to cry out.
“Use this,” the girl said.
She held the bowl to Calliope’s face.
It was filled with water.
“How?” Chance asked.
“Old Lady Salt gave it to me,” Eunjoo said. “It’ll help.”
He let go of Calliope’s waist, dug into the white earth with his hands, opening a small pit, unlatched his bracelet, took off the ring from his finger, pulled the necklace over his head, and dropped them all in. Buried them. He murmured words in Zuni as he repacked the earth.
He nodded to the bowl in the girl’s small hands. “Drink it, mujer. If it’s from Old Lady Salt, then she is blessing you.”
Calliope’s head throbbed with dehydration. There was no way drinking salt water was a good idea. She didn’t need an emetic.
If the water was not from Old Woman Salt, Calliope could die.
But where else would Eunjoo have gotten the water? The snowcone jar was gone, crashed against the rock wall. Calliope hadn’t seen any other water in the truck and the lake was hundreds of feet away.
She took Bisabuela’s bowl from the girl, remembering the clay water she’d drunk in the hangar, how she’d trusted Bisabuela, ghost or not. She could trust Bisabuela again, even if she didn’t believe in Old Lady Salt.
Chance must have sensed her hesitation. He said, “She’s capable of great things, great movement, mujer. She can get you to the rez unharmed. I know she can.”
This time the bowl was warm. Its contents smelled of seawater, and for a moment as she held the water to her mouth, she recalled accidentally swallowing a gulpful of the Gulf of Mexico in Boca Chica the summer after Phoenix was born. They’d still lived in Texas and she’d carried him into the warm Gulf waters as a kind of secular baptism (she’d told her mother no, she would not have him baptized in the Catholic church), every experience a new introduction to the world. But a wave had knocked her forward and they’d both gone under. She’d sputtered and pulled him from the water, sure she’d drowned her child. His eyes red and wide against the sun, he wasn’t coughing or crying. He was a sea turtle, resilient. She’d handed him back to Andres on the dry sand, watched him scoop handfuls into the air, into his hair, laughing his drool-mouthed, toddler laugh. She’d felt slogged with salt all afternoon, but he was fine.
She swigged the bitter saltwater now, swallowing the nausea swishing her gut. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to feel other than sick.
She was cold.
Eunjoo and Chance had been wrong. Or they’d tricked her. She would die on the salt beds in the fourwing brush, her babies drowning inside of her.
The bowl fell to the dirt.
She lay on her side, curled as a seashell. Cramping. Emptying. Drying.
This was what dying felt like.
Chance was praying in Zuni again and Eunjoo was screaming Old Lady Salt’s name as Calliope stared at the unclouded sky, New Mexico blue. Again, she thought of the middle of time, how she would soon rejoin Bisabuela, in afterlife or nothingness. She would join the lifeless matter of the universe. The sky so bright. What relief—giving in. Unloading the burden of this wasteland. This world without Phoenix. Or the rest of her family.
Salt grained against her palms. She scooped a handful and threw it above her like rice at her wedding, like sand on Boca Chica beach.
Then, whether Old Lady Salt was with her or not she couldn’t say, only that the bleeding staunched, the nausea faded away, a hurricane passing the Gulf, and she was determined to stay alive. To give these babies light—then find her son.
Eunjoo was laughing, tears streaming down her face.
Chance hoisted Calliope unsteadily back to the truck and she heaved herself in, relieved she could once again lean back without searing pain in her abdomen or tailbone.
From the back seat Mara asked, less ironic than crestfallen, “None of that miracle water for me?”
Eunjoo handed her the bowl. But it was empty.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE ONE WHO HAS ME
The rez was not what Calliope had expected. The bleeding had stopped, her contractions had eased, and her vision was less blurry, salt restoring electrolytes.
She stared out the window as Chance pulled into the village center.
When she was a senior in high school, Bisabuela had taken her to the lake—not really a lake but a dam, the ice cave only green sludge. A tarantula smashed on the doormat outside the gift shop of Clovis points and other disillusioned gimcracks. Zuni then was gas station corn dogs, cardboard pizza, and tinfoil nachos. Kivas, shacks, sheds, mattress beds, and tires in front yards, basketball hoops without
nets. Empty mouthwash bottles splayed in the parking lot because the rez was dry and there was alcohol in mouthwash. The Bureau of Vital Records & Health statistics. Mangy dogs outside the rolled-up windows. She knew they were rez dogs, and she should have been kinder. She’d worn her mother’s critical eye, tattered heart, the wind yelping with trickster coyote dogs that looked like they’d eat a stranger. She felt strange and out of place. That dry lake followed by the shock of the rez—not much different from where she lived. Poverty is poverty, anywhere.
She loved her people. But she was a teenager, spoiled by fantasies of escaping to a big-city university, wracked with false pride. She wanted to escape her own neighborhood and everything it represented: the maíz man selling cobbed corn from his cart, his yellow butter, powdered chile, and crumbled white cheese, her mother in El Paso, chasing after her father, before Calliope ever realized he’d grown another family. After the funeral, she never asked her mother if she’d known. She’d known enough. Calliope had known her mother’s penury, her WIC counters and shame, suitcases sprawled on the front lawn like surgical bodies, peritoneal cavities, here a butterflied diaphragm, there a liver spitting bile, the heat-struck grass, mother stuffing grocery bags with clothes, shoes, and overdue library books into the clunker of a car her father had left. Bisabuela had taken her to see the Ancestors all over New Mexico, and Calliope had felt lost. Disappointed. It had taken years to turn that mal de ojo away from herself and her people—to see her false shame reframed as the destruction wrought against her people.
There was more than one way of seeing, yes, but back then, she had packed in her suitcase regret mistaken for ruin. Bisabuela had warned, Don’t pick up broken pottery—shards meant for the spirits.
Calliope had left for college and, within a few short years, by the time Calliope was in grad school, Bisabuela for the Spirit world, and Calliope had been trying to get back to her ever since. It wasn’t until Chance pulled into Zuni that Calliope even realized this. But it was truth, like the light on the Río Grande bridge, like the hallucination of Bisabuela in the hangar. It wasn’t a hallucination. Somehow, she had conjured or joined the Spirit world. Or the mal de ojo had been lifted. And Zuni was her proof.
Trinity Sight Page 21
