J. Jance - Kiss the Bees

Ni-thahthRita had warned him then about the dangers of Enemy Sickness. Told him that by not showing proper respect for a scalp bundle he could bring down a curse on her-as the scalp bundle's owner-or on some member of her family. She had told him how Enemy Sickness caused terrible pains in the belly or blood in the urine, and how only a medicine man trained in the art of war chants could cure a patient suffering from that kind of illness.

It was late when Fat Crack finally finished reading. Wanda had long since fallen asleep but Gabe knew sleep would be impossible for him. He had stolen outside, and sat there on a chair in their ocotillo-walled, dirt-floored ramada. It was early summer. June. The month the Tohono O'othham call Hahshani Bahithag Mashath — saguaro-ripening month. Although daytime temperatures in the parched Arizona desert had already spiraled into triple digits, the nighttime air was chilly. But that long Thursday night, it was more than temperature that made Gabe Ortiz shiver.

It was true, he had known much of the story. In the late sixties, his cousin, Gina Antone, his Aunt Rita's only grandchild, had been murdered by a man named Andrew Carlisle. Diana Ladd, then a teacher on the reservation, had been instrumental in seeing that the killer, a once well-respected professor of creative writing at the university, had been sent to prison for the murder. Six years later, when the killer got out and came back to Tucson seeking revenge, he had come within minutes of killing both women-Diana Ladd and Rita Antone-and Diana's son, Davy, as well.

That much of the story Gabe already knew. The rest of it-Andrew Carlisle's childhood and Diana's, the various twists of fate that had put their two separate lives on a collision course-were things Fat Crack Ortiz learned only as he read Diana's book. Knowing those details as well as the background on Andrew Carlisle's other victims made Fat Crack feel worse instead of better. Nothing he read, including the knowledge that Andrew Carlisle had died of AIDS in the state penitentiary at Florence a few months earlier, did anything to dispel his terrible sense of foreboding about the book and the pain and suffering connected with it.

Gabe Ortiz was a practical man, given to down-to-earth logic. For an hour or more he approached the problem of the book's danger through the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. When, at the end of several hours of consideration, he had made no progress, he walked back into the house. Careful not to disturb Wanda, he opened the bottom drawer of an old wooden teacher's desk he had salvaged from the school district trash heap. Inside one of the drawers he found Looks At Nothing's buckskin medicine pouch-the fringed huashomi — the old medicine man had worn until the day he died.

In the years since a frail Looks At Nothing had bequeathed the pouch to Gabe, he had kept it stocked with sacred tobacco, picking it at the proper time, drying, storing, and rolling it in the proper way. Gabe had carefully followed the sacred traditions of the Peace Smoke, using it sparingly but to good effect, all the while hoping that one or the other of his two sons would show some interest in learning what the medicine man had left in Gabe's care and keeping. Unfortunately, his two boys, Richard and Leo, nearly middle-aged now, were far more interested in running their tow-truck/auto repair business and playing the guitar than they were in anything else.

Back outside, seated on a white plastic chair rather than on the ground, as the wiry Looks At Nothing would have done, Gabe examined the contents of the bag-the medicine man's World War II vintage Zippo lighter and the cigarettes themselves. He had thought that he would light one of them and blow the smoke over the book, performing as he did so the sacred act of wustana, of blowing smoke with the hope of illuminating something. But sitting there, he realized that what was needed for wustana was a living, breathing patient. Here he had only an object, the book itself.

Rather than waste the sacred smoke, Fat Crack Ortiz decided to try blowing from his heart instead. He remembered Looks At Nothing telling him once that the process was so simple that even an old woman could do it.

Holding the book in his hands, he began the chant, repeating the verses four times just as he had been taught.

I am blowing now to see what it is that lives here,

What breathing thing lies hidden in this book.

There is a spirit in here that sickens those around it,

That is a danger to those around it.

I want to see this strength so I will know what kind of thing it is.

So I will know how to draw it out of where it is hiding

And how to send it away to that other place,

The place where the strength belongs.

As Gabe did so, as he sang the words of the kuadk — observing the form and rhythms of the age-old chant of discernment-he began to figure it out. As time passed, he began to see the pattern. Without quite knowing how, he suddenly understood.

The evil Ohb — Fat Crack's Aunt Rita's enemy-was back. The wicked Mil-gahn man who, twenty-one years earlier, had somehow become a modern-day reincarnation of an ancient tribal enemy, was coming once again. Somehow the dreaded Apache was about to step out of the pages of Diana Ladd Walker's book and reenter their lives.

Gabe remembered reading in a newspaper article several months earlier that Andrew Carlisle was dead. That meant that if he was not coming in person, certainly the strength of the Ohb was coming, bringing danger to all of those people still alive who had once been connected with Diana Ladd and with Rita Antone-the woman Gabe called Ni-thahth, his mother's elder sister-in that other, long-ago battle. The fact that Carlisle was dead meant nothing. His spirit was still alive, still restless, and still bent on revenge.

Time passed. When Gabe at last emerged from his self-induced trance, the stars were growing pale in a slowly graying sky. Stiffly, Gabe Ortiz eased his cramped body out of the uncomfortable plastic chair. Before going back into the house to grab a few hours of sleep, he limped out to where the cars were parked and put both Looks At Nothing's deerskin pouch and Diana Ladd's offending book in the glove compartment of the tribal chairman's Ford sedan.

Once, long ago, when Looks At Nothing had first told him that Gabe had the power to be a great shaman, Gabe had teased the Gohhim O'othham — Old Man. He had laughed off the medicine man's prediction that one day Fat Crack, too, would be a great mahkai — a medicine man with a tow truck. That idea had struck him as too funny, especially since it came from a man who clung stubbornly to the old ways and who looked down on all things Anglo-with the single notable exception of that aging Zippo lighter.

Looks At Nothing had much preferred walking to riding in a truck. Gabe wondered now what the old shaman would say if he knew his deerskin pouch and sacred tobacco would be riding to town the next day in a two-year-old Crown Victoria. Looks At Nothing would probably think it was funny, Gabe thought, and so did he.

A few minutes later, still chuckling, he eased himself into bed. As he did so, Wanda stirred beside him.

"It's late," she complained. "You've been up all night."

"Yes," Gabe said, rolling his heavy body next to hers, and resting one of his hands on her shoulder. "But at least now I can sleep."

The sentence ended with a contented snore. Within minutes, Wanda fell asleep once more as well.

Lani had told the man that she would be late for work if she arrived any later than seven. That wasn't entirely true. The first two hours she spent at the museum each day, from seven to nine, were strictly voluntary. She went around on the meandering paths, armed with a trash bag and sharp-pronged stick, picking up the garbage that had been left behind by the previous day's visitors.