by J. A. Jance
“Have you ever seen divining crystals?” she asked, emptying the shards of rock into her hand. When she held them up, one at a time, they winked in the firelight.
“So this is what, like reading tea leaves or something?” Gabe asked, his voice dripping with contempt. “You look into them somehow and see the future?”
“It’s not exactly like reading tea leaves,” Lani said. “Do you remember back when you were in third grade? I went with you on a nighttime school field trip to Kitt Peak, and they let us take turns looking through the telescopes.”
“Sure, I remember,” Gabe said with a laugh. “For a long time, I thought I’d be an astronomer someday when I grew up. I’m over that, too, by the way.”
Ignoring his sarcasm, Lani continued. “When the scientists up there . . .” She paused and motioned with her head toward the collection of invisible buildings on top of the mountain that made up the Kitt Peak National Observatory. “When they look through their telescopes, they use powerful lenses to focus on things that eyes alone could never see. These crystals work the same way. They allow your mind to focus on things that you can’t necessarily see. Here, try it.”
She passed the crystals over to Gabe. For a long time, he stared down at them. Finally, reluctantly, he held the first one up to his eye, peering through it at Lani.
“What do you see?” she prompted.
“You, of course.”
“Be honest now,” she said. “Tell the truth. Tell me what you really see. Don’t you see someone who’s a friend of your parents? Someone who won’t mind her own business and keeps telling you what to do?”
Gabe looked crestfallen. “I guess,” he admitted.
“Try again. Look at the fire this time,” she suggested. “What do you see there?”
He held up the second crystal and peered through it.
“I see a fire,” he answered, “a fire and nothing else.”
“But what is your mind focusing on as you look at the fire? Are you grateful to be sitting by it, glad of its warmth, or are you thinking something else? Maybe, instead of watching the fire burn, you’d rather be at home, playing with your Xbox or watching TV.”
The startled expression on the boy’s face told Lani that she had hit the nail on the head. Gabe immediately passed the crystals back to Lani.
“Obviously I’m no good at this,” he said.
“All right,” Lani agreed. “Let me try.” She held one of the crystals up to her eye. “I see a boy who was born in the backseat of a car the night his grandfather was buried. Fat Crack knew before you were born that you would be a boy. He hoped you’d follow in his footsteps.”
“And be what, a medicine man?” Gabe asked with a derisive snort. “Right. How much money do medicine men make these days? Where do they go to school?”
“Medicine men go to school in places just like this,” Lani said quietly. “They sit around fires and listen to stories—the stories their ancestors used to explain why the world around them—their particular world—was the way it was. Those stories don’t have to be scientifically accurate to be true, to contain elements of truth.”
Gabe remained unconvinced. “Whatever,” he said dismissively, shaking his head.
Lani held up the second crystal. Looking through it, she frowned as she spoke. “I see something strange here—a woman, a white-haired Milgahn woman. I don’t understand it, but she’s dangerous somehow. You need to stay away from her.”
Lani found the idea of an Anglo woman being a Dangerous Object both worrisome and puzzling. Dangerous Objects were an essential part of the Tohono O’odham tradition of Staying Sickness. According to ancient customs, there were two kinds of sicknesses abroad in the world. Traveling Sicknesses, the kinds caused by germs, were the ones Dr. Walker-Pardee routinely treated with antibiotics. Those affected everybody, Indian and Anglo alike. Staying Sicknesses, on the other hand, a kind of Spirit Sickness, were caused by Dangerous Objects and affected Indians only. A Spirit Sickness was usually diagnosed and treated by a Tohono O’odham healer—a medicine man or medicine woman—by means of a combination of traditional chants—kuadk—and related devices.
Coyote Sickness, for example, was caused by someone eating a Dangerous Object—perhaps a melon that a coyote had bitten into. Someone suffering from Coyote Sickness could be treated with coyote feces—boiled and turned into a paste, and then rubbed on the patient’s body. People with Coyote Sickness could also be treated by a medicine man rubbing the patient’s body with a coyote’s tail.
Lani knew that as a baby she herself had once been considered a Dangerous Object due to the ant bites that had covered her body. What was disturbing in this instance, however, was that the dangerous object in question was an Anglo. How was that even possible?
Gabe, however, found none of this the least bit mystifying.
“I know who that is,” he said, “white hair and all. It’s got to be Mrs. Travers, the school principal. She hates my guts.”
Without further comment, Lani held up the third crystal. “This one says that you’re walking a difficult path right now,” she said, “traveling it with some friends. You’re about to come to a fork in that path. One fork leads to the PaDaj O’odham—the Bad People—who came out of the South to do battle with I’itoi. If you go the same way your friends do, you’ll end up being bad, too.”
Gabe turned on her accusingly. “Now you’re talking about my friends, the Josés. You probably know about them from talking to my parents and not from looking in that stupid crystal. But you know what else?” he demanded, standing up suddenly and wrapping one of Fat Crack’s blankets tightly around his shoulders. “My parents don’t get to dictate who my friends are, and neither do you.”
With that, he stalked away from the fire and back toward the path.
“Wait a minute,” Lani called after him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Home,” he said.
“It’s dark, and home is a long way from here,” she argued.
“Home may be, but the road isn’t. It’s Friday night. Someone coming back from town will give me a ride.”
“What if you trip and fall?”
“The moon’s up now,” he told her over his shoulder. “My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and I can see better than I would have thought possible. And just for safety’s sake, on my way down maybe I’ll ask for some help from that precious I’itoi guy of yours in hopes he’ll look out for me.”
CHAPTER 7
IN THE EVENING WHEN BRAIDING Woman awakened, she found a tiny baby, a girl, crawling on a mat—the same mat she had been weaving when the dust ball appeared, the dust ball that belonged to Tash.
The baby girl who had once been a dust ball grew very fast. Every four days she was bigger and bigger, until finally she was as large as any of the other children in the village. She had very long, sharp fingernails. When she played with the other children, she scratched them. She would make them bleed by tearing their skin. This happened many times. At last the mothers in the village grew angry. They took their sticks and beat the girl until she lay senseless.
That night, when Braiding Woman went to look for the girl, she could not find her, although she had been told exactly where the child lay.
The next day, this strange girl-child had grown to be a giantess. She went away from the village and into the mountains. There she moved some great rocks and made herself a house. She lived in the house all alone. She killed deer and lions and rabbits and other animals for food. She used their skins to make clothes. The bones and claws of the animals she killed she used for ornaments.
She came to be called Ho’ok O’oks, which means Evil Giantess. She came to be feared by all the Tohono O’odham, and that, nawoj, my friend, is still true, even to this day.
A WAVE OF DESPAIR WASHED over Lani as the stubborn boy turned his back an
d walked away. She knew then that she had failed. Gabe was beyond her reach—too angry and arrogant to listen. Hot tears stung her cheeks. For a moment she was tempted to call and beg him to come back, but she didn’t. She simply let him go, reaching instead for the comfort of her medicine basket.
She slipped the crystals back into their pouch and dropped that into the basket. Then, in the flickering firelight, she examined the basket’s other contents. First out were two separate shards of pottery—a reddish one with an almost invisible tortoise drawn on it and the other one coal black. The red one had once belonged to Nana Dahd’s grandmother, S’Amichuda O’oks—Understanding Woman—while the black one had come from Betraying Woman’s cave, deep in this very mountain.
Tradition dictated that a woman’s pots must always be broken upon her death in order to release the pot maker’s spirit. Lani was sure that Understanding Woman’s pots had been broken by her grieving relatives in just that way upon the old woman’s death. Betraying Woman, however, had died alone in the cavern, abandoned and unmourned. Her spirit had remained trapped in her long-unbroken pots until Lani herself had smashed them. And these two pieces of pottery, one red and one black, were the only reminders of either of those two long-ago elders.
Next came a tiny bone—as small as a baby’s finger. That was the tiny piece of bat wing skeleton that Lani had brought with her out of the cavern. The bone served as a reminder that Nanakumal—Bat—had helped see Lani through one terrible fight, and maybe he would do so again in this battle for Baby Fat Crack’s soul.
The next items in the basket were Nana Dahd’s basket-makng awl and the leather tobacco pouch Fat Crack the elder had given her. She had gone out in the fall and collected the green wild tobacco leaves—wiw. She had dried the leaves and broken them into small pieces just the way the legend of Little Lion and Little Bear said it must be done. She had brought the tobacco along with her today in hope that, before the night was over, she and Gabe would share the Peace Smoke.
Gabe was gone, but perhaps, Lani reasoned, the sacred smoke was still in order. She pulled some of the dried wild tobacco leaves from the pouch and rolled them into a loose cigarette. It took a moment for her fumbling fingers to locate the final item in her basket—Looks at Nothing’s ancient lighter. She had taken the old blind medicine man’s Zippo to a guy in Tucson, a man with a reputation for rehabbing aging lighters. The brass finish was worn through in spots, but refilled and with a new striking mechanism, the lighter sprang to life at the very first try.
After lighting the cigarette, Lani sat there with the sweet smoke drifting around her as she considered her connection to those two wise old men, one of whom she had never met. It was through them that she knew that the Tohono O’odham never use a pipe—that age-old custom that was part of other tribes’ traditions. Originally, the Desert People had used leaves to wrap their ceremonial smokers. Now they bought their cigarette wrappers the same place everybody else did—at either the trading post or else at Bashas’ grocery store in Sells.
Lani closed her eyes and allowed herself to be carried along in the smoke-filled air. When she opened her eyes sometime later, it was as though a ghost had arisen out of the ground. That’s when she saw a vision of the evil white-haired Milgahn woman once again.
As the hair rose on the back of Lani’s neck, she knew two things at once. Evil White-Haired Woman was not the school principal at Sells, and Baby Fat Crack Ortiz was in mortal danger.
GABE STORMED OFF DOWN THE mountain, furious with Lani, his parents, and everyone else. It wasn’t easy being the son of the tribal chairman. If it hadn’t been for the José brothers, who had befriended him early on, his life would have been hell. He and Timmy, the youngest of the brothers, had been fast friends since kindergarten. When one of the older kids, Luis Joaquin, had started picking on Gabe, Tim’s brother Paul had intervened on Gabe’s behalf.
It would be years before Gabe understood that Luis Joaquin’s father had been his mother’s opponent for chairman in a recent tribal election. The man was also a bad loser who, long after his failed bid for office, continued to bad-mouth Delia Cachora Ortiz and all her relations to anyone who would listen, including his son.
As a consequence, that first schoolyard skirmish between Gabe and Luis Joaquin and his pals was not the last. Even now, everyone at school—well, maybe not the mostly Anglo teachers—understood that Gabe Ortiz and Luis Joaquin continued to be sworn enemies. As a consequence, Timmy’s older brothers still came to Gabe’s rescue whenever rescuing was needed.
Gabe’s parents worked long, unpredictable hours. Mr. and Mrs. José worked, too, but Mrs. José’s mother, Mrs. Francisco, had lived with the family and looked after the kids after school. Early on, Gabe Ortiz had been added to the José after-school mix. On most days, once classes were finished, he would tag along with the others to the Josés’ house, where Mrs. Francisco maintained order until the parents came home and also cooked the evening meal.
Mrs. Francisco was a kind old woman who didn’t mind having an extra mouth to feed. While her boys chatted away or kicked balls out in the yard, she would pat out and stretch the dough for making the Tohono O’odham staple called popovers—o’am chu—which she would slather with red chili and beans to feed her collection of starving boys, Gabe Ortiz included.
For years, Gabe’s mother’s failed attempts at making popovers had been the topic of running jokes on the reservation. Delia Cachora Ortiz had been raised off the reservation and had the benefit of an East Coast education. When Gabe’s grandfather, Fat Crack, had sought Delia out and brought her back to the reservation to serve as tribal attorney, she may have been considered a capable lawyer in Washington, D.C., but back home on the reservation, she spent years being regarded as an outsider.
Fat Crack’s approval and unstinting support had contributed to her gradual acceptance and to her eventually being elevated to the office of tribal chairman, but no amount of feather-shaking by a medicine man could improve her pitiful cooking skills. Some people said that Chairman Ortiz suffered from Popover Sickness, and that was why her attempts at making the Tohono O’odham’s traditional dish were always such miserable failures. The basis of the dish is supposed to be a plate-sized crisply cooked disk of dough. Delia’s versions were anything but crisp, and the soggy hunks usually weren’t round, either.
For Gabe, Mrs. Francisco’s popovers were a revelation, and it was during those many shared mealtimes, sitting in the José family’s large warm kitchen, that Gabe’s friendship with Tim’s older brothers—Paul, Carlos, and Max—was cemented.
Over a period of several years, the José family had endured a run of bad luck. First their grandmother died. Then, the previous year, their father had been killed and their mother badly injured in a terrible car wreck. It had been one of those horrific multicar pileups that happens during dust storms when visibility rapidly drops to zero. With their mother still in a convalescent facility, the oldest son, Max, had ended up in some kind of trouble with the law and been sent to prison up in Florence. Now the second oldest, Carlos, had taken on the responsibility of holding the family together and keeping Tim from being placed in foster care.
So yes, Gabe thought, the José family might be having some troubles just now, but wasn’t that the time when friends were supposed to step up and lend support rather than walk away? That was what Gabe believed, and no matter what Gabe’s parents or Lani said, Gabe wasn’t going to give up on the José boys, because they were his friends.
Bright stars scattered across the black sky, and a rising moon made it possible for Gabe to see, but he was grateful when he stumbled off the narrow footpath and back onto the rutted road. Away from the warmth of the fire, the air was frigid. His breath came out in visible puffs. Shivering, he pulled the heavy blanket around his shoulders. Doing that helped keep out the biting cold, but it made it far more difficult for him to maintain his balance
and negotiate the rugged path.
Across the valley, Gabe could see occasional headlights and taillights coming and going on the highway, but to his way of thinking, the road was still very far away.
Something small and invisible brushed through his hair and then was gone, sending Gabe into a momentary panic. A bat, he realized a moment later, once his heart stopped pounding. It wasn’t fair. Why was it that Lani could sit there in the dark by herself and not be afraid, when everything about the nighttime desert made him feel lost and scared.
He was still spooked from the bat encounter when something rustled in the nearby undergrowth. He stopped cold and waited, holding his breath. Suddenly a small herd of javelina burst out of a clump of manzanita, darted across the road in front of him, and clattered noisily down the hill. The fact that the javelina were well known to be terrified of humans didn’t help. In this case, Gabe was the one who was frightened. The desert seemed to be full of scary things tonight.
If he asked Lani why the desert night didn’t spook her, no doubt she’d tell him that it was because I’itoi was with her. Right. And she’d probably say that’s why she knew things that other people didn’t. What was the big deal about that? Gabe knew things, too, and I’itoi had nothing to do with it. For instance, he doubted I’itoi had been whispering in his ear last year when he had seen two of his junior high teachers, Mrs. Cadell and Mr. Ramos, together and realized that, although married to other people at the time, they were also in love with each other. When the affair had become common knowledge, the scandal had rocked the whole school district—and especially the teachers’ compound where both families lived. None of that had come as a surprise to Gabe. He had kept his private knowledge to himself both before and after it had become public. And it was the same way now with the new principal, Mrs. Travers.
He could tell there was something wrong with her, although he didn’t know exactly what. It was a sickness of some kind, and one she didn’t want anyone else to know about. That was probably the reason she kept such a close eye on him and made his life miserable—because she suspected that he knew something he shouldn’t.
