Aztec Odyssey

by Jay C. LaBarge

  Nick gave her a light squeeze around her shoulder. “Hey, I want to get to know you, I hope you don’t mind, but I have so many questions.”

  Soba sat a little more upright, still leaning into him, and said, “I know, me too. How about we play a game, we each ask one question, back and forth. By morning, if we don’t fall asleep first, both our curiosities should be filled.” Nick smiled inwardly, this vexing creature always seemed to be one step in front of him.

  “I’ll go first,” Soba said as she sat straight up, pulled the blanket down, playfully unbuttoned his shirt, and spread it apart to reveal the undershirt. The gray t-shirt had a “Life’s Good” cartoon caricature on it of a man with a pickax and a rock, which said, “I dig, therefore I am.”

  She looked at it quizzically and then at him. “So, what exactly is it you do for a living?” Nick gave her the long version answer, how he and his brother grew up on a lake in the woods in northern Michigan, how their dad loved travel and exploration, how they spent so much time in the Southwest, and how it led to him working on his PhD on Mesoamerican Migration Patterns.

  “Publish or perish, that’s the mantra in academia. But I found it is the field work I really enjoy. The one thing I knew was I didn’t want to just be an armchair historian. I didn’t just want to read about history, I wanted to be in it, to live it, to decipher it. Don’t you want to know how you, how your people, came to be here, to this very place of all places?” he asked excitedly, his obvious passion bubbling to the surface.

  Not waiting for an answer he continued. “I am interested not just in how things were, but on how things came to be, and what undercurrents in time influenced them. I am driven by the pursuit of knowledge, the hunt to uncover something complex and incomplete and hidden by time, to shed light on it, to unravel the unknown.”

  Nick noticed Soba perked up when he revealed his passion for solving mysteries of the past, and his love of the blurring lines between history, anthropology, and archeology. But he didn’t tell her about the family mystery, at least not yet.

  “OK Altsoba, Miss ‘At War,’ my turn. You said you were a shaman to your Navajo people. Is that your full time calling, or what exactly is it that you do?”

  Soba buttoned his shirt, patted his chest and sighed, “You want the long answer too?” Nick nodded and took a sip of the mezcal, he had all night and no place he’d rather be. Looking off into the distance with her dark, luminous eyes, Soba took a deep breath and then slowly released it. “I belong to the tribe, and yet I don’t. I am a shaman, yet I am an outcast. I am the last of what you might call a tribe within a tribe. My parents have passed, and I try to preserve the knowledge they handed down to me, especially by my father, as best I can.”

  Soba sat up, and pulled her knees tightly to her chest, as if to gird herself. “But even we Indians have our own caste system. My father, and his father before him, and many more going back in time, were of another decimated tribe that the Navajo sort of adopted. It wasn’t unusual for tribes, as they fought off unknown disease and encroachment by the white man, to band together and consolidate. What else can you do when you have no one to mate with, no warriors to protect you? After the wars all Indians were herded onto reservations, often side by side with their traditional enemies. When you face extermination as a people, you do desperate things, and so long ago we became part of the Navajo nation. But we were never completely accepted, that’s what I mean by a tribe within a tribe. Somehow, we always managed to carry on our blood line, never quite dying out, but in our tradition that always meant a male of ours mating with a female of the Navajo. The women like me were considered valueless offspring, they always wanted a male heir to carry on the blood line, to be the shaman. And now there is no male heir, my father was the last. Bidzii is my brother in spirit only, my Navajo guardian. I am the last of my line, and that is why I am now the shaman, as my forefathers were before me.”

  Nick saw her face reflected in the moonlight, tears steadily streaming down it. “Valueless. Let’s be truthful, that translates to infanticide. The tribes themselves were facing genocide from the outside, and within it practiced infanticide. Frankly I was only allowed to live because there was no son. Up until now my little tribe never had a girl that was allowed to survive. Well, that changed with me. My father wasn’t an educated man, not by your standards. But he was very knowledgeable in the traditional ways of his tribe and of the Navajo, and he passed that all on to me. He said he would die before he let anything happen to me, and that’s exactly what he did, when I was just sixteen. By the hand of his supposed ‘own’ people, for letting me live. After he was killed, the tribal elders finally realized the error of their ways, and decreed that anyone who touched me, including their families, would be shunned and banished. That was when Bidzii and a few of the others befriended me. They became my protectors on the reservation.”

  An outcast looking for her roots, a parent killed too early, these were things Nick could relate to on a personal level. He ached for her sorrow, and yet barely even knew her. But somehow he felt completely connected to her, two very different people from very different worlds, yet with so many common threads.

  “I guess I am starting to get the ‘At War’ meaning of your name,” Nick gently said. “Healers sometimes need healing too. Some day you will be stronger in all the broken places.”

  Soba hugged his arm and leaned deeper into him. “I’m telling you things even Bidzii doesn’t know, but for some reason I feel I can trust you. You are removed from it, you have no agenda. You are a kind sounding board. I think you have what my grandmother would have called a pure soul.”

  “So I took what my father taught me, and I took what the Navajo taught me, and I decided to go outside the reservation and do something useful for my people. I took advantage of an education grant and went to college, majoring as a linguist, focused on the preservation of native languages and traditions. The traditions are dying, the elders who remember those who knew the old ways are passing. If nothing is done, in another generation we will lose many of the languages and tribal history of the lesser tribes. I have devoted my life to capturing the stories of the elders wherever I can, videotaping the conversations, building the archive, documenting and learning the language, before they are all no more than just dust in the wind. That is how I ended up with that big hunk of wolf above us. The Tribal Councils appreciated what I had been doing, and gifted Nanook to me for those efforts.”

  Nick stroked her hair and leaned his head against hers. “That is no easy calling, helping those who rejected you. And from what it sounds like, condoned the killing of your father. We share similar lives in different worlds somehow.”

  Soba leaned back into him, drying her tears. “All I know is it is the right thing to do. If I am not of one tribe, then I am of all tribes. And I will not let our history fade into oblivion.” She suddenly sat upright and turned to him. “I think that is why we connect, because you peer into the past, want to understand it, want to preserve it. You have no ulterior motives, you just want to get the truth out.”

  Nick laughed softly to himself and passed her the bottle of mezcal. “How can someone who really doesn’t know me at all, know me so very well?”

  Soba took a drink from the bottle, a little trickling down her lip. “That’s because I am a shaman and can see into your soul Nick LaBounty.” Nick leaned over and kissed her deeply, the sweet taste of mezcal on her lips, the intoxicating smell of her hair, the radiance of the moonlight almost overwhelming him.

  Suddenly without warning Nanook sat upright on the top of the boulder and let out a long, deep and hauntingly lonely howl at the moon. Nick was startled and started to pull away, but Soba pulled him closer, not allowing him to break the kiss. “Does he always do that?” Nick mumbled, a hint of wonder in his voice.

  “I don’t know, he’s never really had to share me with anyone before,” Soba softly replied. After a lingering moment she pulled away and looked deep into his eyes, their foreheads still
touching.

  Nick smiled at her and then sighed, “Well get comfortable then, I’ve got more I need to tell you.”

  With that he stood up, looked at Nanook, and let loose a long howl of his own. Nanook gave a confused look and tilted his head to the side, then wagged his tail like he was in on the joke and looked back at the moon and joined in the chorus. Off in the distance a few scattered replies echoed off the canyon walls, slowly joined by more even farther away. Truly, primal spirits were loose this night, drifting in the ether.

  Chapter 18 – Early Morning, June 22

  I am no longer going to call you the wolf whisperer. I think from now on you will be known by the Navajo name of wolf howler, mąʼiitsoh nahałʼin,” Soba said with a laugh, in her sing song accent. Nick grinned and stood listening to the far away wolf cries carried on the breeze, cascading farther and farther away until they couldn’t be heard.

  “If that doesn’t tug at the soul of your being, I don’t know what will,” he said, looking off into the distance. Soba got up, threw a blanket around his shoulders and used it to pull him closer until they were face to face, then nose to nose.

  “I think you will,” she purred, and rewarded him another mezcal-flavored kiss.

  The moon was just starting to fade, the slightest hint of dawn on the horizon to the east. The air was cool, they had become stiff from sitting, and decided to walk and talk to warm up. Nick thought it was time to finally take a chance with completely trusting someone other than family, and if he couldn’t do it with Soba, he knew he never would, and be a social cripple for life.

  “I’ve got a couple of things to disclose to you too. Like my parents said, if you want a real relationship, it comes with warts and all.” Soba leaned into him and clasped his hand a little tighter.

  “I could never claim to have been an outcast like you, but I have at times felt like an outsider. I was adopted, by the best two parents anyone could have ever asked for. But maybe that’s why I’m always searching for something, why I always have this undecipherable longing, and it seems to go deeper than just wanderlust. They had Charlie first, and tried for years to have another. It wasn’t in the cosmic cards, and frankly I won the embryonic lottery when they adopted me. My dad used to say ‘Blood is a tie, but it’s not the only one. Look at me and your Mother, we’re not blood, but we couldn’t be closer. There are some who use blood ties as an entitlement, as a right, and don’t invest in it. But then there are those who choose one another, whether with their spouse or their closest friends, their intimate inner circle, and really invest in it. The common denominator is they share a restlessness of the soul, a common yearning, a want of bettering one another and their world, a reason for being.’” Soba listened intently, she knew this was new ground for Nick, that it was cathartic for him, that it was drawing them closer.

  “I believe in that, that we make our own tribes by who we choose to invest ourselves emotionally with, by who we choose to let in. The clock is always ticking, we only have so much time to spread around to everything we want to fit into our very finite lives. So why live an ordinary life? Everyone’s got one of those. I yearn to do extraordinary things with extraordinary people. I want to learn everything I can about my passions. I want to leave this world a better place than I found it. And, I think most of all, I yearn for unraveling the past, because I have yet to unravel my own.”

  Soba nodded, reflecting, “Nietzsche felt that it takes self-realization for the exemplary person to craft their own identity. I’m no philosopher, but I think you’ve got the self-realization thing down pat.”

  “Nietzsche? When the heck did you pick up on his musings?” Nick inquired.

  “We all had our pre-req’s to kill in college,” Soba smiled. “I thought it would be good to expand my horizon’s a little.”

  They continued walking back the way they came, Nanook happily bounding around them, flushing rabbits and the occasional armadillo, batting about those that had rolled into a protective ball. Nick put his arm around Soba and pulled her in a little closer.

  “An outcast and an adoptee, both looking for greater meaning and a deeper sense of something to belong to. Strange happenstance, that in all the cosmos, we happen to stumble on each other right here, right now.”

  “Maybe not so strange. Maybe the fates preordained it,” she replied, batting her lustrous eyes.

  They wandered in silence for a while, Soba absentmindedly kicking a stone out of the path. “Did you ever seek out any information on your birth parents? Did you ever want to know where you came from, what you are made of?”

  Nick paused before answering, his thoughts on this were deeply held, not even Charlie dared go there. “Of course I was curious, any adopted kid is. But I held the parents who raised me as sacred, sacrosanct. I never wanted to insult or demean their memory by seeking roots that didn’t tie to them. Maybe someday, when old wounds heal. But I’m satisfied for now, and I know what I’m made of. The same stardust as you.”

  They reached a slight rise overlooking the desert and threw down the blankets to watch one last sunrise together. “So what about your parents, you always talk of them in the past tense,” Soba asked, almost afraid to broach the subject.

  “Ah, now that’s a long sad story, almost like yours.” Nick told her how his Mother had died too young of cancer, how he believed his dad had been killed recently, and the series of clues that had aroused his suspicions. And he went into great detail about the necklace and clues Alexandre had left, how they had been handed down generation to generation, and that he was now on a quest to unravel or disprove the family mystery, once and for all.

  Soba turned the pendant of Nick’s necklace in her hand, holding it up to the dawning sunlight. “It’s beautiful, the craftsmanship is stunning. So, what do you do now?” Nick had been thinking about that, had been completely focused on his next steps, when Soba had so care freely drifted into his life. Now things were not quite so clear, maybe even a little complicated. Or so he hoped.

  “I left it with Chuck that if I really wanted to get serious about doing this correctly, forensically and archeologically speaking, then I needed access to better information, and not just go out on a wild goose chase. I need to go down to Mexico City, to the main archeological museum there, and do my research. I have contacts who work there, deep access shouldn’t be a problem. And that might in turn dictate referencing some original Spanish archives, but I won’t know until I get there and dig deeper. But I’m not so sure I want to leave here, not now. What about you, what’s next for this beautiful woman who always seems to be at war, and who has so vexed me?”

  Soba sat there serenely smiling, peering into the sunrise, her long black hair drifting over her shoulder. “Your personal shaman wants to know if you believe in kismet. Do you think our fate is really written in the stars? Otherwise why would we both be in the same small town, at the same bar, at the exact same time? A linguist trying to save obscure Native American languages and traditions, an aspiring archeologist trying to solve a mystery between the white and the native worlds. One of us arrives at that bar a couple of hours earlier or later, we’re not having this conversation. Our lives would have gone on, unknowing.”

  Nick nodded, chance was a dicey proposition at best. Chance had already taken two people he loved away from him too soon. He didn’t believe in chance, he believed in choices made and direct consequences, actions and reactions. No gray areas.

  Soba stood and rolled up the blanket. “It just so happens I have a First Nations Tribal Council coming up that I am to make a presentation at. That is why I came down here with Bidzii, to this gathering in Chaco Canyon on the summer solstice. It was on the way to my ultimate destination, Cuernavaca, which is about 90 minutes south of Mexico City. Maybe there is something in the stars.”

  She turned to Nick with an impish grin, showed a little leg and stuck her thumb out. “Think I could catch a ride?”

  The campsite was slowly waking up, tents unzipping, kids stirring
, a few early souls up making coffee for the rest. The smell drifting in the air was a strange mélange of stale beer, sweaty bodies, fresh coffee and campfire smoke.

  Bidzii, the rest of the band, and their friends, were showing no signs of life yet. It must have been a late night for them too. With the adrenaline of the night finally wearing off and all the raw emotions drained, Soba led Nick by the hand to her tent. They were not feeling quite as frisky as when they had wandered off the prior evening. Nanook followed and lay down protectively outside the tent door. Nick crawled into the sleeping bag behind Soba and extended one arm under her head, the other across her chest. He looked at the dream catcher twirling lazily above him, casting dull, early morning shadows. He touched his necklace and smiled inwardly at the irony. Soba burrowed backwards into him, interlocked her fingers with his and released a contented breath, as they both fell into a deep, cozy, peaceful sleep.

  Nick awoke and carefully pulled his arm out from under Soba’s head, feeling the pins and needles of it being asleep. As he made a fist and released it to get the blood flowing, he looked at her, sleeping angelically beside him. He was falling hard and knew it. Glancing at his watch he saw they had slept for over four hours, despite the bright sun and rambunctious noises reverberating around the campsites. He shook his head to get the cobwebs out, amazed at all that had transpired since he picked up his brother just four days ago. Already it seemed like a lifetime ago.