To Leah’s surprise, the dogs were far more gentle than she’d expected. One in particular, a female with a red coat, looked up at her with big brown eyes, her tongue lolling from the corner of her mouth with what seemed to be pure goofy amusement.
“No, I’m fine,” Leah said. She reached down to give the red dog a tentative pat and the animal leaned into her, pressing against her leg.
“I don’t get many visitors,” Aggie said, by which Leah assumed she meant she didn’t often have a pair of white girls drive up to her house. “How can I help you?”
“We were interested in your art,” Marisa said.
Aggie smiled. “You’re welcome to have a look—especially considering that you drove all the way out here—but you should know in advance that none of it’s for sale.”
“We know that,” Marisa said.
“I hope we haven’t come by too early,” Leah added.
“I’m usually up early, if not this early,” Aggie told them. “But today I just got back from a memorial service for a friend of mine. We had a dawn ceremony for him back in the canyons.”
“Oh, we’re so sorry for your loss,” Marisa said.
Leah nodded. “We can stop by some other time.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Aggie said. “That’s not how it works around here. Our brother’s dead but that doesn’t mean he’s gone. He’s just got himself a new place on the wheel. It’s not as if we won’t see him again.”
Leah and Marisa exchanged glances.
Aggie smiled. “That only sounds woo-woo if you don’t already live a spiritual life. Round here, the borders between this world and the otherworld aren’t as solid as you might be familiar with. Come on. I’ll show you my studio.”
Leah blinked at the sudden switch in subject. She and Marisa exchanged another look, then hurried after Aggie, who had already set off up the hill to the smaller building. The dogs trailed along on either side of them.
“I mostly do portraiture,” Aggie said when they joined her on the porch of the studio. She ushered them inside. “Right now I’m working on one of my friend Hector, but I think I’ll stop and see if I can capture a good memory of Derek while the ceremony’s still fresh in my mind. I haven’t done a painting of one of the Bighorn Clan for a while, and I can already feel the sweep of those horns as they take shape under my brush.”
The dogs sprawled on the porch while Leah and Marisa stopped just inside the doorway to look around. The smell of turps was pungent, and skylights let the sun splash light into every corner. Standing on a large easel was Aggie’s current work in progress—a striking profile of a hawk’s head on the shoulders of a man. The bird had a band of leather around his head. Strips of leather festooned with shells, beads and feathers trailed from the band down his back.
Leah looked from it to the other paintings. They were all similar to the one on the easel or those Alan had found in his Google search back at the Art’s Court in Newford—curious combinations of humans mixed with animals, birds or reptiles.
“So…portraits?” Marisa said.
Aggie nodded. “I’m no good at making things up.”
“I mean, are you saying these aren’t…symbolic?”
“Heaven’s no. I can only paint what I see.”
“But…”
“I think I already mentioned that the borders between the worlds are awfully thin around here.”
Marisa looked around, eyes wide, then walked over to an old battered sofa under the window. She moved some books to the floor and sat down where they’d been.
Leah drifted deeper into the studio, studying the paintings on the walls, others in stacks leaning against the walls. She had the same feeling looking at them as she’d gotten sitting outside the motel room last night and driving through the hills to get to Aggie’s place. That everything was different, but familiar as well. That she was a stranger, but she had come home.
She could have stood there and soaked it all in for hours, except she suddenly realized that no one had spoken for some time. She turned to see Marisa still on the sofa looking a little shell-shocked, while Aggie leaned against a long table crammed with paint tubes and glass jars with the handles of paint brushes sticking up out of them.
Leah cleared her throat. “These are beautiful,” she said. “Thank you so much for letting us see them.”
“But that’s not why you’re here.”
Leah shook her head. “No, but just getting to see your art would be more than enough reason for the whole trip.”
“Hmm,” Aggie said. She pushed away from the long table. “I think this calls for some tea.”
She gestured for Leah to sit by Marisa, then fetched three clay handleless mugs from a stack on the table behind her. She put them and a thermos on the crate in front of where Leah and Marisa were sitting. Pulling a chair over for herself, she poured them each a mug from the thermos and sat down across from her two visitors.
“Usually,” she said, “people I don’t know come here for one of two reasons: they either think I have some special knowledge that will set them on a spiritual path, or they want to buy one of my paintings. More rarely, they hope to study under me or have come to invite me to speak at some conference or workshop. But what’s interesting here is that I always know they’re coming.”
“I’m sorry,” Leah said. “We should have called ahead.”
“That’s not what I mean. When I say I know they’re coming, the local gossips tell me. Crows. Hawks. Sparrows. Sometimes it’s one of the javelina boys, or perhaps one of Cody’s younger cousins—Cody being the original Coyote.”
Marisa looked at the old woman over the rim of her mug. “When you say these names, do you mean tribes or—”
“No,” Aggie cut in. “I’m being quite literal.”
“You can talk to birds,” Leah said. “And wild boars and coyotes.”
Aggie shook her head. “I talk to spirits. I’m one of the tribal elders, but where most of us consult with human members to help them deal with the world of the spirits, my time is spent with spirits helping them adjust to the world of the five-fingered beings.”
“The, uh…?” Leah began.
Aggie held up a hand and wiggled her fingers. “It’s what the ma’inawo—the spirits—call men and women because they only have the one, five-fingered shape.”
“Ma’in…” Leah tried.
“Ma’inawo. It’s what they call themselves, at least they do so here in the Painted Lands. It means ‘cousin.’”
“So you help spirits who look like animals.”
“No, they are animals, but they can wear human shapes as well. They’ve been here since the long ago, when Raven pulled the world out of that old pot of his and set the wheels of our lives in motion.”
“This is…weird,” Leah said. “You know it’s weird, right?”
Aggie regarded her steadily with no change in her expression, so Leah turned to Marisa for backup, but Marisa only shrugged.
“This last day or so seems full of portents,” Aggie went on. “There was a child whose parents threw her away. A friend of mine who finally learned to actually see the world in which he lives. Another friend shot by a hunter. The appearance of Night Woman at the dawn ceremony. And now you two showing up on my doorstep without the gossip of even one cousin preceding your arrival.”
Leah didn’t know what to say.
On the sofa beside her Marisa stirred. “Why are you telling us this?” she asked Aggie.
The old woman shrugged. “Sometimes when you speak riddles aloud they begin to make sense.”
“But not today,” Marisa said.
“Not today,” Aggie agreed.
Leah looked from one woman to the other, then settled her gaze on Marisa. While her friend had seemed taken aback when they first came into the studio, she now appeared to be completely at ease. “You don’t seem too freaked out by any of this,” Leah said to her.
“I suppose I’m not,” Marisa said.
Leah didn
’t consider that any real answer at all. But before she could ask Marisa to elaborate, Marisa turned to Aggie.
“Have you ever heard of numena?” she asked.
Aggie shook her head.
“Maybe you have another name for it,” Marisa said. “It’s when an artist paints a picture that speaks so clearly to…” She looked lost for a moment. “To its spirit in the otherworld, I guess. The painting speaks so clearly that the spirit crosses over and becomes real. No matter how outlandish the subject’s appearance, they show up exactly as depicted in the painting.”
She glanced at Leah, then returned her attention to Aggie before going on. “It’s only special artists that can do it. Make this pathway, I mean.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Aggie said.
“So you didn’t call the spirits to you through your paintings? And the reason you won’t sell any isn’t because their lives are tied to the physical safety of their paintings?”
“No, they’re simply portraits of beings who already exist.”
“Marisa—” Leah said. “You’ve seen this before?”
Marisa nodded. “You know Isabelle’s daughter Izzy? And her girlfriend Kathy? Izzy’s not Isabelle’s daughter. She’s Isabelle when she was twenty-something and her best friend was Kathryn Mully—the writer who killed herself. Both these girls are numena that Isabelle painted into existence. So’s John Sweetwater and about half the people living on Wren Island.”
“What?” Leah said. “You’re saying they’re all…all…”
“Numena. But now that they’ve crossed over, they’re just people. Well, except for some of the faerie creatures she paints.”
Leah bent over with her face in her hands. “I’m going crazy,” she muttered.
“I’d like to meet your friend Isabelle,” Aggie said. “And perhaps some of her friends, too.”
“Isabelle doesn’t travel much,” Marisa said. “Maybe I can put the two of you together on Skype.”
“I don’t know how—”
Marisa didn’t let her finish. “Don’t worry. I can set you up. But the point of all of this is, I thought you were like Isabelle.”
“You came here to have me bring someone across through a painting? But why? Couldn’t your friend Isabelle do it for you?”
“No, no. I thought you’d already done it with someone. Leah, show her the picture.”
Leah pulled out a printed copy of the image that had been emailed to her, and passed it over to Aggie.
“That’s one of your paintings, isn’t it?” she said.
Aggie nodded. “Where did you get this?”
“Somebody emailed it to me yesterday.” She paused before adding, “It wasn’t you?”
Aggie shook her head.
“Because the thing is,” Marisa said, “the man in that painting looks just like a musician named Jackson Cole, who’s been presumed dead. He disappeared after a plane crash around forty years ago. Or rather, the painting looks like Cole might if he’d been alive all these years.”
“I don’t know anyone named Jackson Cole.”
“Used to play in the Diesel Rats?” Marisa tried. “They were huge back then.”
“I don’t really follow popular music—never have.”
“But it is your painting?”
Aggie glanced at the picture again and nodded.
“Then, if you didn’t send it to Leah, who did?”
Aggie lifted her gaze. She looked past them, out the window to her house.
“I think I have an idea,” she said.
27
Thomas
For the first time at a medicine ceremony, Thomas paid attention to what the singers around the drum were actually singing. He let his pulse be set by the heartbeat rhythm of the drumming, shifting his feet in time where he stood, echoing the steps of the dancers who moved in a shuffling line around the drummers.
These stories were different from those he’d heard in powwow songs. They celebrated specific aspects of Derek’s life, but they also ran through the complete lineage of the Bighorn Clan, going further back than Thomas had ever imagined anyone could remember. As he listened to the songs, he found that he could hold every word and name in his own memory as well, the genealogy unwinding inside his mind like a golden rope that had no beginning and no end. Except there were always beginnings and endings, and the songs talked about them, too, of journeys already taken and others that lay ahead on the ghost roads of the otherworld where Derek would soon be travelling.
Sometimes Morago led the singing, other times it was one or another of the Aunts, the women elders of the tribe, holding smudge sticks that Thomas could smell even where he stood. His mother was there among them. The dog boys were part of the dance, as were the deer women dancers. Among the latter he could see his sisters. Santana looked around herself as she moved—she could see everything, just as Thomas could, while Naya simply danced. He even saw Auntie standing off on her own, holding his little brother William by the hand. She mouthed the words to the songs, though she didn’t let any actual sound escape her lips.
Most of the tribe was participating the way he was: shuffling their feet in time to the drumbeat. Ma’inawo were everywhere, some no more than ghostly apparitions moving with the dancers, others standing in a loose circle around the tribe.
And then there was Night Woman and her enormous dog. Whenever he looked in their direction, the woman was watching Morago, but the dog would turn dark eyes on Thomas and hold his gaze until Thomas felt uncomfortable and had to look away. The dog’s eyes carried knowledge of something Thomas was pretty sure he’d rather know nothing about. He couldn’t tell if it was some private history, or a promise of something still to come. All he knew was that if he let that secret knowledge pass from the dog to him, he’d never be the same again.
But even the presence of the dog and its mistress couldn’t make Thomas leave. His desire to be a part of this, triggered back in the community center parking lot, was still strong—so much so that he found himself wondering if someone had slipped a fetish into his pocket and put a spell on him to make him feel this way. He had to stop himself from checking his pockets.
He paid more attention as Morago and the Aunts invoked the blessings of the four directions. They stood in a circle, turning in each direction, the Aunts lifting their smudge sticks so that the pungent smoke rose up to meet the morning sun, while Morago took a pinch of tobacco from his medicine bag and tossed it into the air.
Thomas’s gaze went to where Derek lay on a platform of old saguaro ribs tied together with leather rope. The platform was about six feet from the ground and the bighorn’s head and body had been placed together as though they had never been severed. But unlike the head, which had been stored in the freezer at Sammy’s hunting lodge, the body had been out in the sun all day and the smell of decay carried even to where Thomas was standing, not quite masked by the Aunts’ smudge sticks.
Other platforms dotted the Ancestors Canyon, but only the bones of longer departed tribe members remained. Scavengers worked quickly. Vultures, ravens and the sacred crows of Yellowrock Canyon.
Thomas wasn’t sure he cared for the idea—neither becoming feed for the canyon’s carrion eaters, nor being buried in the ground, as were the Catholic members of the tribe. He thought he’d prefer a Viking funeral, his last remains disappearing into ash and smoke.
When the invocation ended, the drumming stopped and the whole tribe gave a farewell cry to Derek’s spirit. For one moment, glittering in the light of the rising sun, Thomas thought he saw the vague shape of a warrior standing over Derek’s body, then the image was gone and the tribe’s cries faded into echoes down the canyon. The spirit people drifted away as though riding those echoes. Calico was the last of them to go. She gave a quick look around the canyon—searching for Steve, Thomas supposed—then vanished with the others.
Thomas backed up a little to make way as people began to leave the canyon, not quite sure why he wanted to stay. Auntie
winked at him as she went by. His mother looked solemn as she walked with the Aunts, but she had a smile for him. When Santana and Naya approached, holding hands with William, who was in between them, Santana stopped long enough to give Thomas a hug.
“Ohla, big brother,” she said. “It’s good to see you here.”
Thomas remembered driving out to Steve’s, the two of them talking about how they wanted to get away. Right now Santana seemed a million miles away from that girl in the truck.
“I’ll be home soon to take you guys into the city,” he said.
“We’ll have your breakfast ready,” Naya said.
William let go of her hand long enough to give Thomas a fist bump, then the three of them went off. Reuben stepped up in their wake, one of the last to leave the canyon.
“Are you still coming to the sweat tonight?” he asked.
Thomas nodded. “Hey, can you tell me something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know how to see an enchantment?”
His boss’s eyebrows went up. “You think somebody worked some medicine on you?”
“I don’t know what to think. It’s been a weird day and I don’t really feel myself.”
“It’s not really the kind of thing I know that much about,” Reuben said. “You should ask Morago or your mother.”
“Except what if it was one of them?”
What if it was Reuben? he was also wondering, but he could see no guile in Reuben’s face.
“They wouldn’t, Thomas. Trust me on that.”
“Yeah, I didn’t really think so. But this…whatever this compulsion is…it’s pulling me into the traditions.”
Reuben gave him a rueful look. “And you don’t like that.”
“I don’t understand it.”
Reuben nodded. “I get that. Have you checked your pockets? Somebody might have slipped a little something into one of them.”
“I thought of that, but why would anybody even bother?”
He put his hands in his pockets as he spoke, then felt the world go still as he pulled out a small black feather.
The Wind in His Heart Page 16
