I shake my head. “No. You don’t get it. I love being with you, and living in the desert and mountains. But being me? Not so much. I’m only here because once upon a time, I let way too much go wrong on my watch. I figure if I keep mostly to myself, nobody else will get hurt.”
“Possum didn’t die because of you.”
“I’m talking about before Possum saved my sorry ass.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
I wave a hand. “Nothing. It all happened a long time ago...”
My voice trails off and she doesn’t say anything. She just stands there looking at me, the stars wheeling slowly above us, the desert night deep on the foothills.
“So you being here,” she finally says, “is some kind of penance?”
“Maybe it was at the start, but I gave up that idea a long time ago. My living here is all about staying out of my own head and appreciating what’s around me without leaving too much of an impact on it. I can’t make up for what happened before I came here, but now I can at least do my best to interact with people on a positive level, and hopefully leave them better than they were before they ran into me, instead of worse.”
“So you do think you’re doing penance for your sins. You’re an asshole.”
“Hey, you don’t know the first thing about what—”
“I know you’re an asshole. I don’t need to know anything else. You’re who you are now, not whoever you once were, or thought you were. Yeah, you keep to yourself, but ask anybody on the rez—they all like you, Steve. You, here and now. They don’t care who you were before, just like I don’t.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“That’s because it is simple.”
“Except you’re not in my head,” I tell her. “I let people down. Some of them died.”
“And I haven’t got enough fingers to count the number of people you’ve helped around here over the years.”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s enough.”
“I’m going to let you in on a secret,” she says. “It’s never enough. Nothing any of us does is ever enough. We just do what we can every day. That’s all anybody should ask of someone, right?”
“I guess.”
“Then why ask more of yourself?”
She starts walking again and I fall into step beside her.
I love a desert night. It’s quiet and full of sound at the same time. All the critters are going about their business, and we’re just two more of them as we continue along the trail.
* * *
As we near Aggie’s studio, Calico puts out an arm and stops me in my tracks. I think she’s got something more to say, except a moment later I hear someone rise from the bench on the studio’s little porch. I’m trying to figure out what’s up, but then Morago comes around the side of the building. So much for keeping our relationship secret.
“Ohla, Calico,” he says. He turns to me and nods. “Walks Where the Wolves Run.”
“Seriously?” I say. “I know you’ve tried that one before.”
“I prefer Beans for Brains,” Calico says and gives me an innocent smile when I turn in her direction.
Morago laughs, but then his features become serious. There’s been some trouble,” he says.
I glance past him at Aggie’s house. “With Sadie?”
Morago shakes his head. “No, but I knew you’d be coming to check on her, so I figured I’d wait here and save myself a trip out to the canyon.”
“So what’s up?”
“It’s Derek Two Trees. Sammy Swift Grass took some hunters up into the mountains to bag a bighorn and they got one, too. The trouble is, it was Derek in his bighorn shape.”
Calico’s hand goes to her mouth.
Crap. I liked Derek. He was a guy you could count on. Didn’t know he was a bighorn cousin, but life’s just full of surprises all of a sudden.
“So can everybody around here change into animals?” I finally say.
“No,” Morago tells me, “but most of us have cousin blood to some degree, or can talk to the spirits. Like you can, for instance,” he adds, raising an eyebrow and glancing back and forth between me and Calico.
I see where he’s going with this, but I change tack. “And you were going to explain this cousin stuff to me…when?”
Morago looks at me. “Seems to me, you’re the one who’s been keeping secrets,” he says. “As far as I knew, you never seemed to want—”
“Forget it,” I say. “You said you came looking for me. What do you need?”
“Sammy’s hunters are planning to bring their trophy home,” Morago says, “so Reuben’s gathered up a pack of his dog boys to go and stop that from happening.”
“Doesn’t Sammy realize his mistake?” Calico asks. “He’s got to understand why the hunters can’t take Derek’s body away.”
Morago shakes his head. “Sammy doesn’t believe in the animal spirits.”
“I thought all you guys believed,” I say.
“The traditionalists do, but you could change shape right in front of Sammy or any of his supporters, and they’ll find a hundred explanations for what they’ve just seen—anything but what actually happened.”
“I’ll help if I can,” I tell him, “but I don’t understand what you want from me. Do you want me to talk to Sammy?” Which I can’t see helping because I only know him to see him, and why the hell would he listen to me?
Morago shakes his head. “I need you to talk to Reuben.”
“Like he’s going to take my advice.”
“He respects you.”
I don’t know how to respond to that.
“Right now,” Morago goes on, “he’s on his way to Sammy’s hunting lodge with a pack of his dog boys. He says he’s going to take the head of the man who killed Derek and put it on his own wall as a trophy.”
“Jesus.”
“You’re the impartial third party,” Morago says.
“I don’t know about that.”
Except if I think about it, I can see how it might seem that way.
* * *
When I first got here, the rez wasn’t divided the way it is now. But then Sammy Swift Grass came back from university full of big plans and, depending on how you looked at it, you either thought the good times had finally arrived, or everything went to hell.
The Kikimi are a matriarchal society. The Women’s Council, whom everybody calls the Aunts, runs things and they’re pretty traditional. They could have put a stop to Sammy’s plans for a casino/hotel, the ski slopes and the hunting lodge up in the mountains, but I guess they saw how the issue was dividing the tribe to the point where family members weren’t talking to one another. Instead of pushing to have their own way, they came up with a set of compromises.
So now the south part of the rez is Sammy’s little Disneyland, with a ridge of National Park mountains dividing it from the north side, where people stick to their traditional ways. The National Park also bookends the rez on either side, with the unclaimed heights of the Hierro Maderas marching off into the east.
When all these divisive arguments first started up, Possum’s advice was to stay out of it, and that’s what we did. We didn’t take a side in the argument and treated everybody the same. That got easier after the business complex was built, and anyway, nobody in the casino crowd wanted anything to do with a pair of desert rats.
Now, almost ten years on, it’s just the way things are. Sammy’s business ventures pay a tithe to the tribe’s coffers, the traditionalists and casino crowd mostly ignore each other, and things are usually relatively calm.
Until something like this comes up.
But honestly? Twenty-four hours ago I would never have seen tensions flare up because of an incident like this. If anything of the sort has happened before, I haven’t been privy to it.
Except for Calico, I’ve barely thought about ma’inawo, and now I know that I’ve deliberately skirted the subject. Mostly, I’ve only known them as part of a story that the old aunts and uncl
es talk about around a campfire, like the stories they tell about Jimmy Cholla, the Kikimi trickster. Finding out Derek was a cousin is further proof I’ve been living in my own narrow idea of the world, and I’m not proud of how obtuse I’ve been.
I shake my head. “I don’t know what I can do,” I tell Morago, “but I’ll talk to Reuben.”
“Be persuasive,” he says.
“You say he’s already on his way to the lodge?”
Morago nods.
“I know a shortcut,” Calico says.
I take a deep breath. “Of course you do.”
I turn to Morago, “We’ll do what we can.”
“Thank you,” Morago says. “Ohla.”
Calico says something to him in Kikimi. His lip twitches before he heads for the jeep parked in Aggie’s driveway.
“What did you say to him?” I ask Calico.
“What do you think I said?”
“If I knew, would I be asking?”
“I told him everybody is a dancer, but some of us need to learn the steps.”
“What’s that—”
“It’s not important. Come on.” She catches my hand. “We’ve got work to do.”
She takes a step. I follow suit without really thinking about it, and my stomach lurches into my throat. The next thing I know, we’re high on a ridge overlooking the Swift Grass Corporation’s hunting lodge, and I’m trying to regain my equilibrium.
“What the fu—”
“Shhh,” she says.
She’s staring down at the forested slopes surrounding the lodge. I’ve only been up here a couple of times, but I always find it weird how you can be hiking up from the desert and then, just a few hours later, you’re in an evergreen forest.
“There,” she says, pointing.
I follow the direction of her finger. It takes me a moment to see them. A pack of dogs moving up through the forest. They’re hard to see with the forest canopy, but every time they come into view for a few moments, it’s clear where they’re headed.
Straight for the lodge.
“I see dogs,” I tell her.
She nods. “And I see Reuben and his dog boys. Come on.”
She reaches for my hand again.
“Do we have to travel like this?” I ask.
“We do if we want to get down there in time to stop them.”
13
Sadie
Sadie had never cooked before. Back home, everything they ate either came from a can or was takeout. The neighbourhood taquería was cheap, so they ate a lot of Mexican, but Sadie liked nothing better than the special occasions when Reggie would come home with a bag of burgers and fries from McDonald’s, or a deep dish pie from Pedro’s Pizza, smothered in cheese.
It didn’t make sense to her that anyone would spend so much time making a meal when you could just open a can or have your food delivered.
But she didn’t say anything like that to Aggie as they chopped squash, celery, carrots and peppers for a vegetable and bean stew. But she had to speak up when Aggie kept telling her all these stories about bean boys and squash girls, and the feud between the spirits of the chilies and the jalapeños.
“I’m not a little kid,” she finally said, putting her paring knife down on the counter.
Aggie’s eyebrows went up.
“You know,” Sadie continued. “You don’t have to tell me little kid stories while we’re doing this.”
“Is that what you think they are?”
“Aren’t they?”
Aggie shook her head. “We have a tradition in my family that when we prepare a meal we tell the stories of the spirits that have gifted us with their bounty. It’s a way of celebrating the sacrifice they make so that we are nourished.”
“Get real.” The words popped out of Sadie’s mouth before she could stop them.
But Aggie ignored them. “It’s my reality,” she said, “if not yours.”
“Okay, I get that,” Sadie said. “And I didn’t mean to diss you, but it’s kind of hard to believe. And it doesn’t even make sense. If vegetables really had spirits, why would they want us to eat them?”
“Because that is their position on the wheel of life.”
“Man, they got the lousy deal.”
“I think the opposite is true,” Aggie told her. “They are the very foundation of life. Without them, the plant eaters would starve. Without the plant eaters, the predators would have no sustenance. Without them, the wheel is unbalanced, and who knows how the world would be?”
“So they offer themselves up to be eaten, you say thanks, and then everything’s okay?”
“It’s a matter of respect.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
And then she started telling Sadie a story related to the beans that had been soaking in water all day.
Sadie stifled a sigh, picked up the knife, and went back to chopping carrots.
* * *
The stew, served with flatbread on the side, was actually pretty good, and Sadie told Aggie so. It was spicy and full of flavours she didn’t recognize. She had two bowls full, and didn’t even miss having meat.
After they’d cleaned up, Aggie sat down with a mug of tea and a book. Sadie asked for permission to use the laptop again, then checked her email. No response from Leah Hardin. Sadie thought the woman would be jumping all over it, but no. Nada. Still, Sadie wasn’t ready to give up. Hardin probably just hadn’t checked her email yet.
She surfed the Net for a while, but it was hard to focus on anything. She went back to her email. This time there was a message from Aylissa, one of the foster kids her parents had taken in.
R u ok? Reggie says u ran away but I saw him take u somewhere in the car + he came back alone. Worried for u.
Like Sadie, Aylissa had a Gmail account she only checked at school or the library, so it would be safe to tell her the big news. Sadie wrote back:
Reggie took me out to the desert and dumped me, but it’s cool. I ended up at the rez and I’m going to come into a shitload of money. Can’t give you the deets right now but it’s seriously sweet.
She thought for a moment, then added:
Let me know if you want out of that place and I’ll swing by and pick you up when I get out of this town for good.
If she had someone with her, it wouldn’t feel so much like she was running away. Maybe they could both get emancipated and then nobody could tell them what to do anymore.
She pressed “Send.” There was still no response from Leah Hardin, so she opened a search engine, but before she could enter a single word into the search bar there was a knock at the door.
A tall Native man waltzed in without waiting for Aggie to open the door. He had a different look from the Native people Sadie knew—the ones who came to town from the rez, or attended her school. For one thing, he seemed to be all angles, and his hair had a dark reddish tinge, and his eyes were different, too—a pale amber rather than brown. They seemed to be filled with light. She wondered if he had some other race in him along with Kikimi.
“Ohla, Aggie,” he said, then he looked in her direction. “Ohla. You must be Sadie. I’m Ramon Morago.”
Sadie nodded. She wanted to turn away, but he held her gaze and she couldn’t break the lock his eyes had on her. It was so creepy. He seemed to look right into her head as though he knew everything she was thinking, everything she’d ever done.
“Ohla,” Aggie said, and the man finally looked away. “There’s stew cooling on the stove. Do you want me to warm up a bowl for you?”
“No, thanks. I already ate. Can I talk to you outside for a moment?” He gave Sadie a shrug that she assumed was supposed to be apologetic. “Tribal business,” he said.
She gave him a casual wave of her hand. Like she cared about old people’s drama.
They weren’t gone long, but when the door opened again, only Aggie came in.
“So who’s he?” Sadie asked.
“A friend. Steve went to see him ab
out you—he’s the one that’ll decide if you can go to the school at the community center.” She waited a beat, then added, “And he’s the tribal shaman.”
“Like, a for real shaman?”
“Of course.”
Crap. He probably could read her mind. Worse, he was Steve’s friend.
“So, uh, what kinds of powers does he have?” she asked.
Aggie smiled. “Powers? He is the tribe’s intermediary to the spirits. Is that what you mean?”
“Well, like, can he fly, or is he super strong, or can he, you know, read minds?”
“You play too many video games,” Aggie said. “He’s a spiritual leader.”
While they had video games in her house, only Reggie was allowed to play them. But Sadie didn’t bother to correct her.
“Okay then,” she said. “That’s cool. So he’s like a priest or something—not a, you know, wizard.”
Aggie gave her an exasperated look.
“If you’re lucky enough to get into the tribal school,” she said, “make sure to take a course in Kikimi traditions and history.”
Sadie didn’t expect to be here that long, but she nodded in agreement.
“Sure,” she said.
14
Leah
It wasn’t until they left the bright neon of Las Vegas behind and the rental car was heading south through the city’s outlying suburbs that Leah was finally able to relax. She was a city girl, but the Vegas Strip was like mainlining all the worst excesses of downtown anywhere, without even a hint of actual culture. A full-tilt carnival without respite. They hadn’t even meant to go downtown, but they’d gotten turned around leaving the airport and it had seemed to take forever to get back on track.
Leah was just happy she didn’t drive because even being a passenger had her completely on edge.
Finally they caught the 95, which would take them to the junction with the 93. From there they’d bypass Boulder City and then be on their way to the Hoover Dam, with badlands and mountains on either side of the highway and an eight-hour drive ahead of them.
The Wind in His Heart Page 8
