Santana tilted her head and regarded their aunt. “Because…” Her voice trailed off and she made a small grimace. “Ew. With a bird?”
“He’s not a bird when we—”
Santana put her hands over her ears. “Too much information!”
That made Auntie laugh again. “I wasn’t always so old,” she said. “And Jorge is still a handsome man when he’s not wearing his jacket of feathers.”
The crow rattled his beak and puffed out his chest.
“If a little vain,” Auntie added. The bird gave a cry of mock protest and flew off to join his companions perched in the mesquite tree.
Auntie turned to Thomas, her features serious now. “Wherever you go,” she said, “stay clear of the ghost roads. In life, as well as in death. She may not have intended it, but Consuela Mara led you into a curse as black as any skinwalker’s. The salvagers have marked you as theirs, and they will never forget or let you go.”
“I have no intention of ever going near a ghost road again,” Thomas assured her.
“See that you don’t.” She pushed herself out of her chair. “Ohla. I’m glad you’re home. This old woman’s going to bed now.”
She ruffled his hair as she went by. Santana jumped up and gave her a kiss on the cheek, then held the door open for her as she went inside.
When Santana returned to her seat, Thomas was staring off into the dawn light. “It’s funny,” he said. “Now that I’m no longer scared of Morago, and I’m actually interested in learning from him, another part of me wants to get away from the rez even more than I did before.”
“Maybe it’s not so weird,” Santana told him. “You’ve just seen and done all kinds of crazy stuff, but in the end, it’s still tied to your being trapped here, taking up shaman ways.”
Thomas nodded. “I feel if I put it off for much longer, I’ll never get away.”
“Yeah,” Santana said. “I can totally see that. First chance I get, I’m out of here too—and I love all the stuff that seems to scare you to death.”
“It’s not that I’m scared.”
Santana smiled. “I know. It’s the not having the chance to see if there’s anything better out there, or at least different.”
“Do you think you’ll come back?” Thomas asked.
“Oh, sure. Doesn’t everybody eventually drift back?”
“I suppose most do.”
But Thomas wasn’t sure that he’d be one of them. Back to visit? Maybe. Back to stay didn’t seem as likely.
He was still thinking about that when Santana went off to bed and he remained alone on the porch watching the sunrise. Even the crows had headed back to their roost in Yellowrock Canyon.
66
Steve
Reuben offered to drive me all the way over to Painted Cloud Canyon, but I got out at Thomas’s house and hiked up to the ridge trail instead. I said I needed some time to think, and walking’s how I do it best. Both are true, but I’m hoping that being out here on my own will give me a chance to talk to Calico.
I wait until I’m a mile or so down the trail from Thomas’s place before I start calling her name. My voice seems to fall off the ridge trail and disappear into the desert and scrub. The only response I get is this hour before dawn, the quiet all around me. I keep on calling for a mile or so until I give it up.
Yeah, she’s seriously pissed off with me.
I don’t actually feel like going back to the empty trailer, but I don’t have any gear with me and I’m too old to sleep rough without a bedroll. At least that’s what I tell myself. But what I’m really hoping is that I’ll come around the side of the trailer and she’ll be lounging by the picnic table, asking, “What took you so long?”
Instead, I get Morago.
The shaman’s sitting on the table, feet on the seat, staring out across the canyon while he drinks a beer he probably helped himself to from my fridge. Morago turns as I come out of the arch and walk past the trailer, but I’m sure he heard my approach while I was still up on the ridge trail.
Beside him on the table, a lit candle sitting in a puddle of hot wax in its dish tells me he’s been waiting for a while. There’s the faintest hint of pink on the horizon and enough light that everything is shades of grey.
“Ohla, Swallows Spirits,” Morago says.
“That’s not funny,” I tell him.
“No kidding. What the hell were you thinking?”
“You say that like I knew what was going on and had a choice.”
“Point.”
He has a swig of his beer. “I hear you’re not big in Calico’s books these days.”
I ignore that to get myself a bottle. I come back with three, pass one to Morago and pop the cap on one of the others. I down half of it before I sit down beside him on the table.
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Cousins talk, I keep my ear to the ground.”
He doesn’t mean people he’s related to, he means ma’inawo. A few days ago I would have rolled my eyes. Now I just nod in understanding. “They’ve got nothing better to do than gossip about an old desert rat who only wants to keep to himself?”
“They find you interesting, always have. Some little cousin is always telling a story about something you’ve done.”
“Until the past few days, I haven’t done a damn thing except walk the desert, hang out with my girlfriend, play my guitar, eat, and sleep. What’s so interesting about that?”
“You know you’re different, right?”
This time I do roll my eyes. “Jesus. Now you going to tell me some bullshit story about how I’ve actually got a lizard or a rabbit or something living under my skin.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “No. It’s two things, actually. You’ve been living a long time in the otherworld, and that changes a man.”
“Calico said something about that.”
“The other thing is, you’ve built up a lot of goodwill—not just on the rez, but with the ma’inawo as well.”
“Besides my girlfriend, I don’t know any other…” I start, then let my voice trail off.
That was the old me. Apparently, I’ve met plenty of others while I was out walking in the mountains. Hell, maybe even right in town or on the rez. I just can’t tell them apart from people unless they shift to their animal shapes.
“So,” I say. “That and a quarter gets me what?”
“You were never about getting anything,” Morago says. “That’s what they find so intriguing. Even the most charitable person wants something. It’s human nature.” He smiles. “Ma’inawo nature, too.”
“So?”
“So you never have, and they couldn’t figure it out. They kept waiting for you to show your true face—you know, reveal the long con you’re playing—except the face you show is your true face and in time, they’ve come to know that too.”
This Mr. Nice Guy stuff is making me feel a little squirrelly. I take a swig of beer. “Do you have a point to all of this?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer me. Instead, he just goes on. “You ever notice how often random people come up to you, lay out some situation, and ask you what you think? You might be a couple of days into the mountains and then there’s some old man sitting on an outcrop, says how-do, gets to talking?”
I give a slow nod. “It’s just being neighbourly, passing the time of day.”
“That’s what you’re doing. Around here, you’re known as the Arbitrator. Those random people are treating you like you’re their own personal King Solomon. You’ve settled more disputes in the Painted Lands than Aunt Nora’s gone through bingo cards.”
“The Arbitrator,” I repeat, rolling the unfamiliar term on my tongue.
“That’s you,” Morago says.
I shake my head. “Sounds like some big-ass boots that don’t fit,” I say. “But anyway, so what?”
“So, just like Calico, other ma’inawo are confused as to why you, of all people, would want to protect a man who makes a
business out of killing them and destroying their homes.”
“What?”
Morago ignores my reaction and keeps on talking. “You’ve been to the hunting lodge,” he says. “Seen the size of it, the helipad, all the trails. You think all that crap doesn’t have an impact on how the ma’inawo live? I’ve been talking to them since Consuela Mara showed up. They really did put out a call to Night Woman for help.”
“But Consuela isn’t actually Night Woman.”
He waves a loose hand in the air. “It doesn’t matter. If she says she is, and if she helps them the way Night Woman would, then what difference does it make?”
“Are you saying you agree with them? That we should’ve let Consuela kill Sammy? Or that maybe we should have just dropped him off the mountain ourselves?”
Before he can answer, I give him a quick run through of what happened when I met Si’tala—what she said about how the rez was going to need Sammy’s expertise in a few years.
“I get it,” Morago says. “And at the rate new housing tracts are going up on the outskirts of the city, anyone should know that water rights are going to be a problem in the near future. And though I don’t doubt that the Women’s Council will do a bang-up job dealing with the city’s negotiators, she’s right: having Sammy’s help would be a big plus for our side. He’s got inside connections that the rest of us don’t.”
I tap my beer against his and smile. “So you’d have done the same thing as me?”
Morago looks out toward the desert for a long moment before answering. “I’m not disagreeing with you,” he says cautiously before meeting my gaze. “I’m explaining why Calico believes she should’ve had a say about how to deal with Sammy.”
I breathe a sigh of frustration. “Look, she was talking about killing Sammy, and that would only have made everything worse.”
“Have you ever known Calico to kill anyone? Didn’t she have the right to express her anger about what’s been happening? Why shouldn’t she get to blow off a little steam?”
“But if Sammy’s lodge is having all this impact on how they live their lives, how are they going to feel when some big-ass reservoir gets built on their lands?”
Morago wags a finger at me. “You’re talking and not listening, just like you did with Calico. From what I’m hearing, the only ma’inawo you listened to was Consuela’s ghost sister, Si’tala.” He pauses and gazes out into the desert. “It seems strange that she was on such a different page than Consuela.”
“Actually,” I say, “her flying into me was about something else, and our conversation about Sammy was secondary.” I tell him about how Si’tala asked me to make her a body—which, supposedly, will let her separate from Consuela. “I can’t really blame her,” I add. “Have you ever spent time around that bitch?”
Morago rubs his chin. “Okay,” he says. “So let me get this straight. You pretty much disappear with this ma’inawo ghost woman, who has a whole other agenda, but she just happens to weigh in on the Sammy thing. And you buy her opinion to the exclusion of anyone else’s, including your girlfriend’s.”
He looks at me and continues. “After all your years with Calico, I’m pretty sure that would rankle. Don’t you think she’d want a sense that you value her opinion? That you’d at least talk it over with her first?”
“Fuck,” I say. “I screwed that up.”
I scratch my head, thinking back. “You know what? I didn’t even let Calico argue with Consuela. I stepped right in between them. That’s when Si’tala flew into me.”
I drain my beer and pop open the cap on the other. “Man, I was only trying to do the right thing, but I can see how I’ve been a dick.”
“Talk to her.”
“I’ve been trying, but she’s not making it easy. I haven’t seen her since she disappeared back in the otherworld.”
“You know this is still the otherworld that you’re in, right here?”
I sigh. “Doesn’t matter. I have no idea where to go look for her.”
“Well,” Morago says, “there’s a reason they’re called ‘the hidden people’ in some stories.”
He sets his empty bottle on the table beside his first one. “This other thing,” he says. “Providing Consuela’s shadow sister with a body. You sure you want to go through with that?”
“Do you think it’s a bad idea?”
He shrugged. “Does the world really need a second Consuela Mara?”
“Si’tala’s not the same person. They’re total opposites. It’s not right that she’s stuck with that evil twin.”
“I guess I’ll have to trust your judgment. When are you planning to do it?”
“As soon as possible. She said to just make a figure out of clay or sticks or something—it doesn’t matter what size. After that, the only clue she gave was that she said my intent mattered. Does that make sense to you?”
Morago nods. “Medicine is everywhere. It sleeps inside us and fills the world. But it requires a focused will to make it anything other than aimless energy.”
“So I should really concentrate on the purpose of what I’m doing.”
Morago nods again. “And it will help if you do it in a sacred place.” He closes his eyes for a moment, thinking. When he looks at me again he says, “The medicine wheel at Aggie’s place would be best. It’s got good red dirt with a thousand years of ceremonies lying deep in its memory.”
“I’ve never seen a medicine wheel at Aggie’s,” I say.
“It’s just back of her place, where she has the big fires.”
I know the spot he’s talking about. I’ve been out there for some of Aggie’s campfires.
“But don’t all medicine wheels have circles of stones?” I ask.
“They do,” Morago says. “Most of the stones at Aggie’s place have sunk so deep that the ground’s swallowed them up.”
“That would take forever.”
“It’s an ancient circle that predates the Kikimi,” he says.
We fall silent then. The birdsong’s started up in the canyon and we watch the morning light creep along its length.
“Si’tala didn’t just talk to me about the future,” I say after a while.
Morago gives me a questioning look.
“She talked about the past as well. Or at least, she said I have nothing to regret.”
“Sounds like she’s got some things right,” Morago says. “I’ve been telling you that for years.”
“Except my regrets aren’t something I can just forget. I think about them all the time: Sully, Martin. And especially Steve. All their deaths are on me.”
“I was there,” Morago says. “You had nothing to do with Sully becoming a junkie, or Martin taking off the way he did. It’s not like you were breaking up the band forever.”
“Maybe. But it was my band. I was the guy in charge. I should’ve been looking out for them. And Steve… Don’t tell me that swapping places with him didn’t cause his death.”
“I’m telling you exactly that. What caused his death was whatever malfunction caused that plane to go down.”
“But—”
Morago cuts me off. “He made the offer. He was thrilled that you said yes. None of us ever dreamed it would play out the way it did.”
“Because we were young and stupid and stoned.”
“Yeah, we were all of that. But we also had free will, Steve included.”
Morago leans over, blows the candle out, and looks up at the pink sky. “We’re all beings of power. Some of us are strong, some weak. Every mistake that we learn something from, makes us stronger. As does every sacrifice, every good deed. That’s how we learn. Our power is the sum of all we have been and all we are. When you take responsibility for somebody else’s decisions, or actions, you take away their power. And when you take away somebody’s power, you leave them spinning wheels when they could be moving forward.”
I feel a little sick. “You think Steve’s spinning wheels wherever he is because I feel responsible for w
hat happened to him?”
“No, I think it’s your wheels that are spinning. When you take away somebody’s power, you lose some of your own as well.”
I shake my head. “Well, fuck. You really believe that?”
“After all you’ve experienced,” Morago says, “how can you still not accept that there’s more to the world than what you can see?”
“I believe that. I just don’t believe that it’s got anything to do with me. Once I was Jackson Cole, rock star. Now I’m just his ghost.”
“What you whites call ghosts, we Kikimi think of as spirit guides.”
I know exactly where he’s going with this: the notion that I’m some arbitrator for the ma’inawo around here.
“I’m too messed up to be anybody’s guide,” I tell him. “Everybody’s way better off if I just stick to the desert and the mountains, and leave the rest of the world to carry on without my interference.”
“You can’t really believe that.”
Before I can respond he goes on. “Without your ‘interference,’ as you put it, Sammy would be dead, Si’tala wouldn’t be getting herself a body, and many of the cousins around here would be at odds with one another.”
He shakes his head, then continues. “So long as you hide from the world and hold on to misplaced guilt, you will continue to lose the power that would allow you to become who you are meant to be.”
I don’t know what to say. We’ve skirted around these guilt issues plenty of times before, but this is the first time Morago has been so blunt about it. The thing is, intellectually, I’ve always known he’s right. I just can’t get my heart to accept it.
“There’s humble,” Morago says, “and then there’s stupid.”
I want to keep on arguing. I want to tell him that he’s been wrong about me all along. But I’m tired of carrying all this weight around. I don’t want to be that guy. Not anymore. Hell, I never wanted to be him. But the guilt just laid itself on me and I’ve never been able to shake it.
“I don’t know what to do,” I say, speaking aloud the words I’ve never been able to admit before, not even to myself. “I don’t know that I ever did—not since Steve died.”
The Wind in His Heart Page 40
