J. Jance - Day of the Dead

“My daughter-in-law and your daughter,” Fat Crack replied. “Delia and Lani. They’re both smart. They’ll do good things for The People, and eventually they’ll be friends.”

“I thought they were friends already,” Brandon said.

Fat Crack sighed, shook his head, and said nothing. For a moment or two he fumbled around with the blanket on his lap until he once again located the lighter. He gathered it up, along with the few remaining pieces of paper, and stuffed all of them into the huashomi. Then he picked up the bag and held it out toward Brandon.

“What’s this?” Brandon asked. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Take it,” Fat Crack said. “I don’t need it anymore. When Lani comes home, give it to her. Tell her Looks at Nothing and I-two old blind siwanis-both wanted her to have it.”

“All right,” Brandon said. “I will.” He stood up. He knew what Fat Crack was saying, knew what this meant. “Thank you,” Brandon added.

“You’re welcome,” Fat Crack said. “Now go find Wanda, and see if those tortillas are ready.”

J. A. Jance

Day of the Dead

Eleven

After a time the children and the butterflies came back to I’itoi, and the children were singing a new song. The children ran and danced as they sang, while the butterflies circled high above them.

This is the song the children sang as they danced with the butterflies:

They are so bright, they are so gay,

They run in the air and hide, and we

Cannot catch them.

I’itoi listened for the song of the butterflies, but the butterflies did not sing.

There were some birds resting in the cottonwood tree above where I’itoi was sitting. When the butterflies did not sing, u’uwhig-the birds-began to laugh.

The birds had been very jealous when they first saw hohokimal-the butterflies-come out of I’itoi’s bag. The butterflies were so beautiful. But now, when the butterflies had no song, u’uwhig laughed and sang and laughed.

Then I’itoi began to laugh, too. So did all the children.

For, you see, nawoj-my friend, when Elder Brother made the butterflies, he fell asleep. And all the children went to sleep, too. And so the poor butterflies were given no song. Their beauty is always bright. They do not change as they grow old, but the butterflies have no song.

Erik had just started back down the mountain when it happened. A piece of loose rock gave way under his foot. His right ankle twisted inside his boot, and down he went. On the steep mountain-side the fall might have been disastrous. Fortunately, he slid face-first into a clump of mesquite. The roots of that hardy desert-dwelling shrub were strong enough to hold his weight. He ended up with his face, hands, and arms scratched and bloody, but at least he wasn’t dead. It was still a hell of a long way down the mountain, but it could have been much worse.

As the injured ankle began to swell, he loosened the laces, but he didn’t dare remove the boot altogether. He could probably hobble down the trail but only with the boot on. Going barefoot wasn’t an option. Neither was using his cell phone to call for help. That was one of the lessons in self-reliance Grandma had drilled into Erik’s head as a boy: “Don’t call for help too soon. Wait until you really need it.”

Not that she had squandered any time lecturing him about it. Gladys Johnson had taught her grandson self-reliance the old-fashioned way-by example. When her husband, Harold, returned from the Battle of the Bulge a crippled and broken man, Gladys did what had to be done. She found a job as a grocery-store clerk and supported both her husband and her daughter. When the doctor said that the VA hospital in Tucson, Arizona, offered Harold the best chance of recovery, she’d packed up her family and driven there in a ’53 pickup truck, hauling her family’s worldly possessions in the back of the pickup and in the flimsy trailer she’d hitched on behind the truck.

When Gladys and Harold’s daughter died of cancer at age twenty-five and their grieving son-in-law had dropped six-month-old Erik off on Gladys’s doorstep shortly thereafter, saying he couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it, Gladys had handled that as well. And she had done it all without complaint.

So get yourself up off your butt and start down the damned mountain, Erik told himself that sunny April morning. As Grandma would say: “If it is to be, it is up to me.”

Wanda Ortiz came out to the ramada a few minutes after Brandon Walker drove away with two dozen each of tamales and flour tortillas packed in a foam ice chest.

“It’s getting hot out here,” she said to her husband. “Don’t you want to come inside?”

“No,” Fat Crack replied. “I’m fine.”

Shrugging and more than a little exasperated, Wanda returned to the house, leaving Fat Crack where he was. The chill Gabe Ortiz felt in his bones right then had little to do with the weather. He and Brandon had smoked the Peace Smoke many times over the years. Doing so today had been Fat Crack’s own friendly gift, a way of saying thank you and good-bye. But now that it was over-now that he had given away the medicine pouch and the sacred tobacco, he was left with a terrible sense of neijig-of foreboding.

Fat Crack had grown accustomed to having glimpses into the future. For instance, when Leo and Delia had come to the house to tell them Delia was pregnant, Fat Crack had known at once that the baby would shrivel and die in his mother’s womb. Fat Crack hadn’t told Leo and Delia that dreadful news. He had kept it to himself, just as he also had not betrayed his knowledge that this new baby, another little boy, would thrive and grow up to be tall and strong.

With his old friend Brandon Walker, Fat Crack knew something wasn’t right. Had the medicine man still possessed Looks at Nothing’s precious crystals, even without his eyesight they might have helped him clarify in his own mind exactly what was happening. As it was, he was cursed with a sense that something was wrong without any means of preventing whatever it was from happening.

Fat Crack wondered if his disquiet could have something to do with the very thing he had spoken with Brandon about-the coming conflict between two powerful women, between Delia and Lani. Closing his eyes, Fat Crack remembered the first time he had seen them both, these two women whose power struggle might well divide the Desert People. With Lani it had been the day he and Wanda had picked the little Ant-Bit Child up from the hospital and taken her to the Walkers’ place in Gates Pass. And even as they did it-even as they delivered the little Indian baby into the hands of the Anglos who would be her parents-Fat Crack had been blessed with the unerring sense that he was doing the right thing. With Delia Chavez Cachora Ortiz, things weren’t nearly so clear-cut.

Sister Justine had summoned Gabe Ortiz to Topawa early that long-ago Wednesday morning. He had driven there in the old blue-and-white tow truck that had come with the business when he’d purchased it years earlier. The truck was disturbingly unreliable. There was always a chance the tow truck would need to be towed back to Sells, along with whatever vehicle Fat Crack had been summoned to aid.

Under the Mother Superior’s watchful eyes Fat Crack examined a derelict 1960 Falcon that was gathering dust in the garage behind the convent. When he emerged from under the hood and self-consciously pulled his sagging Levi’s back up, he realized that someone else had joined them. Even in the shadows, he recognized Ellie Chavez and could see the ugly bruises and cuts that marred her otherwise smooth skin. Beyond Ellie, peering out from behind her mother’s skirt, stood a little girl with enormous brown eyes-Delia. The child observed the proceedings with more than childlike interest, as though she understood that this discussion would impact her life in ways she could not yet fathom.