by Sarah Dreher
The woman sipped her coffee. Her face was unreadable.
"All I have to go on," Stoner said, "is what Siyamtiwa told me. And she sure didn't tell me much."
''Who?'' Laura asked sharply.
"Siyamtiwa. An old Hopi woman."
“My God," Laura whispered, "I thought she was dead."
"You know her?"
"She and my grandmother walked around together."
''Walked around together?" Gwen asked.
"They were friends. Close. Like sisters. But I haven't seen her since I was a kid, and she was old then."
"She's very old now," Stoner said.
"She's always been very, very old." Laura Yazzie began to look a little frightened. ''What did she tell you?"
“To keep Stell away from the reservation, or she'd die."
Laura crumpled her paper cup and hurled it angrily into the wastebasket. "Damn it!"
''What's wrong?"
Laura rubbed at her forehead. "Leave me out of this, okay? That's behind me."
"I don't..." Stoner began.
"Look. I grew up on that reservation. Grew up afraid to close my eyes at night, or leave the hogan after dark because there might be ghosts or sorcerers out there. Grew up believing in nature spirits, and healing with chants and sings. Then they sent me to the white schools, and they taught me to laugh at that stuff. Half the time I was afraid, and half the time I was ashamed. Jerked around between the white world and the reservation. They really know how to mess up a kid's head."
She was silent for a moment, gazing out the window to where the desert stretched on forever.
"I knew I had to get out," she said at last. "Get out or go under. Mary Beale had gotten out, back when it was a lot harder than it is now. I thought, if I could walk in Mary Beale's path..."
"Excuse me," Gwen said, "but who's Mary Beale?"
Laura Yazzie shrugged. "Just a reservation Indian. Just another poor, miserable redskin trying to make it in the world. But Mary Beale did it. She got her nursing certificate, and her college degree, and she made it through graduate school. And now she has respect, and she doesn't worry about ghosts and sorcerers." She turned back to the window. "Mary Beale says you can get away from it," she said in a low voice. "But it comes back. It always comes back."
''What comes back? Stoner asked.
"I don't want to be involved in this," Laura said, ignoring her question. "I don't know anything about Ya Ya sickness. I don't live here any more. I don't belong here any more. This is a summer job, that's all."
''Where do you live, then?" Gwen asked.
"Montreal. I'm working on my doctoral dissertation. At McGill.”
"I see," Gwen said. "And you take this job for tuition money; am I right?"
"Right. I have a marketable skill. Big deal."
Gwen got up and poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Laura Yazzie. "Are you a good nurse?"
"Damn right I am."
''Well,'' Gwen said. She sat on the edge of the sill and looked out at what Laura Yazzie was looking at. "Funny, isn't it?"
''What's funny?" Laura asked.
"That you couldn't get a single job anywhere between here and Montreal."
Laura didn't answer.
"I grew up in Georgia," Gwen said. ''We didn't have ghosts or spirits or healing chants. But we did have prejudice, and bigotry, and all the other things that make small-town life such fun. I certainly was glad to get out of there. And you know what? I think about that town at least once every day. Sometimes it's thank-God-I’m-not there. But most of the time it's little memories—like walking through my neighborhood on summer nights, with the sound of the sycamore leaves moving in the breeze, and dark shadows on porch swings. Or the silence at three o'clock in the morning. Or seeing a light on in a farm house on the other side of the valley, and wondering if there's someone sick in there, to be burning the lights so late." She paused for a moment. "It stays with you."
Laura sighed. "Yeah, it's the old story. Can't wait to get away, then feel like you left half of yourself behind." She looked over at Stoner. "So I might as well tell you what I can. Old Siyamtiwa'd come and get me if I didn't, anyway."
Stoner sat on the couch and folded her hands between her knees. ''What do you know about her?"
"There was talk when I was a kid... sorcery talk." She got up and got another packet of Sweet'n Low. "Some folks swore they'd see her disappear over a hill and the next thing you knew, there was a lizard or something sitting on a rock, and old Siyamtiwa nowhere around. So they'd figure the lizard was her and the stories'd start about sorcery."
“Are you saying," Stoner asked, "they thought she was a sorceress?"
"I guess there were folks who thought that. Times were pretty desperate. You take desperate times, plus things maybe not going well for you personally, and maybe your sheep start dropping dead for no reason you can find—next thing you know, you're thinking about sorcerers, or aliens, or maybe seeing Jesus Christ taking a shower in your bathroom." She stirred her coffee. "So, yeah, there was talk. But then my grandmother died, and I went off to school, and when I came back she was gone. Folks even stopped talking about her, except now and then in bedtime stories to scare little kids."
''What's the situation out there now?" Gwen asked.
Laura thought it over. "Tense. But it's politics, mostly. Not the kind of thing to start sorcery talk. If there's Ya Ya sickness..." She shrugged. "The Ya Ya’s go way back. Started out as just one of the Hopi Societies, who believed they drew their power from the animal world. Some of them got too caught up in it, and started using their power in wrong ways, so the society was abolished."
"I don't understand," Stoner said, "what that has to do with sickness."
"According to some of the legends, the Ya Ya could drain the energy from women and use it for their personal benefit."
"That doesn't sound like sorcery," Gwen said. lilt sounds like marriage."
"So," Laura Yazzie went on, "if you have a debilitating illness going around, and it seems to be hitting women selectively..." She shrugged. "You see how it happens."
"From what you've observed," Stoner said carefully, "do Stell's symptoms fit the pattern?"
Laura's eyes flicked to the side again, then back to Stoner. "Could."
"Do you think Siyamtiwa could be behind it?'"
"Absolutely not. There's not a bad bone in that woman's body. Only stubborn ones."
"Have you ever known anyone who was involved with the Ya Ya?"
"Hardly," Laura Yazzie said with a laugh. "The Ya Ya were Hopi.
I'm Dineh, Navajo. Oil and water. The Dineh have sorcerers, Skin-walkers we call them. But they don't cause Ya Ya sickness. So, if you're going sorcery-hunting, my guess is you'll find what you're looking for on the Hopi Reservation." She stood up. "I better get back to work. God knows what Mrs. Perkins has done to doctor her chart by now."
"I need a favor," Stoner said. "Siyamtiwa doesn't want her to come back to the trading post right away. But Stell won't listen to me. Is there any way we can keep her here?"
Laura thought it over. "I guess I could fake her fever, but it's not exactly kosher."
"Well," Stoner said, "neither is Stell."
''We might get away with it, but the other nurses will record her normal. It might buy us a few days, though, if no one looks too closely."
Stoner grinned. "Us."
"Us." She glanced over at Gwen and shook her head. "Boy, I've met manipulators in my life, but that one takes the cake."
“Who, me?” Gwen asked, all innocence.
Laura Yazzie turned back to Stoner. "If you plan to spend much of your time with her, maybe you'd better learn a little sorcery. Otherwise she'll have you admitting stuff you didn't want to admit to get you to do stuff you swore you'd never do again."
"She already does," Stoner said.
* * *
Stoner sat on the bunkhouse steps and tried to cope with a world gone haywire.
Ya Ya sickness.
> Ya Ya sickness? Sounds like something little kids would make up. Billy's got the Ya Ya. Nyah, nyah, Nyah-nyah, nyah. Dear Ms. Jones, Please excuse Susie from gym today. She has the Ya Ya sickness.
Hey, Ern, wait'll you hear this one. I'm sittin' at the dispatch desk, right? And it's about two a.m., and this call comes through on the 911 line. And it's this old codger, yellin' how we gotta' send the wagon 'cause his wife's got the Ya Ya’s. What're they puttin' in the booze down at the Sheepherder?
Good afternoon. I'm collecting for the Mother's March on Ya Ya. The Surgeon General has determined that Ya Ya causes heart disease, emphysema, birth defects, and premature baldness. However, studies in this month's New England Journal of Medicine show that, used in moderation it may prevent varicose veins.
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw little red blobs of floating light. Ya Ya sickness.
At this moment, Stell is languishing in a hospital room in Holbrook perhaps because some Hopi sorcerer—or sorcerers—she has never met have put a curse on her.
Four million years of evolution, and we come to this? But there was no getting around the fact that Stell had been sick. Desperately, dangerously sick. She had gotten sick fast, and recovered fast. And none of the doctors could say what was wrong with her. The only people who could say were an old Hopi and a Young Navajo. A young Navajo who was not at all happy about talking sorcery.
She wondered what her friends back home would say.
Aunt Hermione would believe it, of course. Aunt Hermione was quicker to believe in the occult than in the evening news.
Marylou? Marylou would probably wonder which wine was appropriate to serve with Ya Ya sickness.
Edith Kesselbaum—the eminent Dr. Edith Kesselbaum, her former therapist and Marylou's mother—might, at one time, have expounded at length on the primitive mind and superstitious thinking. But Edith was in the process of converting from Freud to Jung, and anything was possible.
Unconsciously, she reached up and touched the necklace Siyamtiwa had given her. Which was probably the only thing that was standing between her and a terminal case of the Ya Ya’s.
Siyamtiwa. Whatever was happening here, Siyamtiwa seemed to be the pivot point.
And Siyamtiwa was drawing her in.
Into what? And why me? Because I happen to look like a doll she happened to carve? That's crazy.
The whole thing is crazy. I mean, what do I have to do with sorcerers and Native Americans and mysticism and...
She looked up to see Gwen coming along the path from the trading post. Gwen stopped, studied the ground for an moment, then bent and picked something up, frowning a little in a puzzled way.
"Look at this." She handed the object to Stoner. "Have you ever seen one of these before?"
It was a lump of natural stone, embedded in a matrix of hardened clay. She rubbed off the clay to reveal a bright blue background criss-crossed with thready streaks of rust in a spider-web pattern.
"Turquoise?" Stoner asked.
"Looks like it."
"Funny markings." She turned it over in her hands. The stone had a warm, living feel to it. "I hope it isn't radioactive."
Gwen laughed. "You would think of that."
She started to hand it back. "Keep it," Gwen said. "Maybe it'll bring you luck."
Stoner winced. "That's what Siyamtiwa said when she gave me the doll. And the necklace. What am I going to need all this luck for?"
"You could put it all together and win the lottery."
"Seriously, what do you think of all the things that are happening?"
Gwen sat down beside her and hugged her knees. "I'm keeping an open mind. What's on yours?"
"Nothing that makes any sense."
''Well, considering that it's happening in three languages and as many cultures, maybe you should wait for more information."
Stoner drew meaningless pictures in the dust. "Siyamtiwa wants something from me, I can tell."
"You're worn out, Stoner," Gwen said, reaching out to massage her shoulders. "It's been a hard couple of days. Why not get some sleep before you try to figure it out?"
"You're probably right." She turned and stretched out on her back, her head propped on Gwen's legs.
Gwen stroked her hair and eyelids.
"Remember last summer," Stoner said, "when I had just met you? We took that trip to Yellowstone?"
"I remember."
"On the way back, in the bus, you fell asleep in my lap." She smiled. "You were married, and I was so in love with you. I thought I was going to explode. I'd have done anything for you then, even if you'd been straight forever. I still would."
"I know," Gwen said, "you've been a good friend, as well as a good lover."
Stoner opened her eyes a little. "No regrets?"
"None." She took Stoner's hand. "You're not very good at letting me take care of you, but that's my only complaint."
"I don't know why it's so hard. I've always been that way. The frustrating part of it is, I hate it as much as you do."
''Well,'' Gwen said, and squeezed her hand, "we have a lifetime to work on it.”
The setting sun drew heat from the air and washed the sky a pale, misty blue. Long Mesa began to lose its definition as the dust caught bits of angled light and spread a dry haze across the landscape.
Stoner sighed, feeling the touch of Gwen's hands on her face, and fell asleep.
* * *
Grandmother Eagle settled on the ruined wall and watched the sun go down over the rim of the world.
"So," Siyamtiwa said, "any news?"
"Maybe." She strutted in a self-important way.
''Well?''
”I find footprints where there have not been footprints in many winters. Where footprints are not supposed to be." She paused for dramatic effect.
Siyamtiwa waited.
"Deep in Hisatsinom Canyon, where Tsaveyo Mesa and Lost Brother Butte embrace one another's shadows."
Siyamtiwa sucked in her breath sharply.
Eagle gave her a cagey look. "This is interesting, is it not?"
"Maybe. Do you know whose they are?"
Eagle shook her head. "The canyon walls are high. They stayed in shadow. I would have to drop down close to see. I must try to be there when they are."
"There is more than one, then."
"Two men. One heavy, one light. Both wearing boots."
Siyamtiwa stroked her chin. "In the old days, boots would tell us something. Now everyone wears them."
"I can keep watch," Kwahu said, "now that I know what I'm looking for."
"If they go by day."
"There is plenty of sleeping time ahead," Eagle said with a shrug. "1 can watch by night."
"You know how we are," said the old woman. "At our age, we nod and don't know it."
''What do you think they're looking for?" Eagle asked, trying not to reveal her curiosity.
Siyamtiwa shrugged. "Maybe gold. Maybe the hot stones that bring gray sickness."
"Maybe something more powerful than that, eh?"
"Some things may only be known to the People," Siyamtiwa said, and turned her head away.
"Some things are maybe already known to these men who may not be of the People," Eagle said. ''We are old, you and I. We need each other. It is not a time to stand on differences.”
Siyamtiwa nodded reluctant agreement. "Here is what I think. I think these men seek the Ya Ya medicine bundle."
Eagle stared at her wide eyed. "That terrible thing was destroyed."
"No," Siyamtiwa said. “That was legend. It cannot be destroyed. The bundle has been sealed in a cave deep inside Pikyachvi Mesa."
"Hard Rock Mesa?" Kwahu said. "There are no deep caves in Hard Rock Mesa."
"There are many caves. Hidden entrances. When do you think these men will find the place?"
"They are very near. If they know about the hidden entrance, if they don't go past it... three days, maybe."
Siyamtiwa sucked in her cheeks. "So
soon?”
"They look hard, and they look carefully."
"My Green-eyes has much to learn," Siyamtiwa said. "And not much time."
"She better learn fast."
"She can learn fast, if she makes up her mind to listen."
Eagle spotted a small desert rodent hiding beneath a fallen chunk of wall. "Are you fond of that mouse?"
"Help yourself."
Eagle pounced and snapped the mouse's backbone with one sharp bite.
"I see you're as blood-thirsty as ever," Siyamtiwa said wryly.
"You never turned down meat when you could get it."
"That is no longer true. My teeth crumble. My bones crumble. Even my skin is tired."
"Lucky for you this thing will happen soon," said Eagle as she tossed away the mouse's tail.
"Lucky for me." The old woman shook her head. "Not so lucky for my pahana friend."
SEVEN
The rented Jeep bounced along the road, sounding like the advance troops of Patton's Army. Stoner gripped the wheel and thought her teeth were going to crack. The muscles of her arms were being ripped to shreds. "My God," she shouted over the wind and rattles, "this thing should have been recalled by the manufacturer."
Gwen had belted herself in, but was hanging onto the roll bar just in case. 'We should have put the top up," she shouted back. "I'm freezing."
“What top?"
"You mean this thing doesn't have a top?"
"That's right."
“What if it rains?"
Stoner glanced over at her through the darkness. “Worried about the upholstery?"
The upholstery had once been black vinyl, but now looked as if it had recently served as a trampoline for goats.
"Never mind," said Gwen.
"They only had two cars. You should have seen the Dodge station wagon. At least this one runs."
"I'm not sure that's an advantage," Gwen said. "Can you slow down?"
She lifted her foot from the accelerator, slowing to twenty, which was quieter and a little less bumpy but just as cold. Darkness transformed the experience of the desert. Night pressed close against the road, cutting off the vast, sprawling flatland. Bits of mica and the eyes of small animals flashed briefly in the headlights' glare, and disappeared just as quickly into the black. The night sky seemed to funnel down to a tube of inky air that tried to lift her toward the stars.
