J Jance: Queen of the Night

“Will there be other Indians there?” Gabe asked now.

“Probably not.”

“Only Anglos and us?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

That was by far Gabe’s favorite question-the one for all seasons and all reasons. “But why does the ocotillo turn green when it rains? But why do rattlesnakes shed their skin? But why does I’itoi live on Ioligam? But why does it thunder when it rains? But why did my grandfather have to die before I was born? But why? But why? But why?”

Although Gabe’s parents were often too preoccupied to answer the curious little boy’s constant questions, Lani never was. He reminded her of Elephant’s Child in that old Rudyard Kipling story, where the baby elephant was forever asking questions of everyone within hearing distance. Gabe, too, was full of “satiable curiosity,” just as Lani had been when she was a child. She, far more than either of Gabe’s parents, understood how and why those questions needed to be answered, just as Nana Dahd and Fat Crack Ortiz had patiently answered those same questions for her.

“Because Tohono Chul is in Tucson,” Lani said firmly. “Not that many Indians live in Tucson these days.”

“Rita used to live in Tucson,” Gabe responded wistfully. “Now she lives with us. Not with us really. She lives next door.”

For a moment Lani thought he was referring to that other Rita, to Lani’s Rita, to Rita Antone, Nana Dahd, the wrinkled old Indian woman who had been godmother to Lani in the same way Lani was godmother to Gabe. Eventually she realized Gabe was referring to his thirteen-year-old cousin Rita Gomez. That Rita, sometimes called Baby Rita, had been named after her great-aunt, Rita Antone, who was Gabe’s great-aunt as well.

There was silence in the car for the next several minutes as Lani considered how the threads of the Ortiz family had frayed, drawn apart, and then seamlessly repaired themselves.

Charlotte Ortiz Gomez, Gabe’s auntie and Baby Rita’s mother, had been estranged from Gabe’s grandparents, Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz, for a number of years. During that time Charlotte had lived in Tucson with her jerk of a husband and her daughter. When Fat Crack died, Charlotte had adamantly refused to come to the reservation, not even for her own father’s funeral.

A year or so later, however, when Charlotte ’s marriage had ended in divorce, she had come crawling back to the reservation, begging forgiveness. She and Baby Rita had moved into her widowed mother’s mobile home in the Ortiz family compound behind the gas station, where Charlotte had looked after her mother until Wanda’s death two years ago.

“Well?” Gabe prompted. “If there won’t be any Indians there, why do we have to go?”

“Because the Milgahn who are coming tonight want to hear the legend of Old White-Haired Woman,” Lani answered. “Tonight is the one night a year when the night-blooming cereus blossom all over the desert. They have a lot of those plants at Tohono Chul and a lot of people will come to see them. I promised the lady who organizes the party that I would come there to tell the story of Old White-Haired Woman.”

Gabe’s jaw dropped. “But you can’t,” he objected.

It was Lani’s turn to ask. “Can’t what?”

“You can’t tell that story,” Gabe replied. “It’s an I’itoi story,” he added earnestly, “a winter-telling tale. The snakes and lizards are already out. If you tell that story now and one of them hears you, they could hurt you.”

Lani had once asked Gabe’s grandfather, Fat Crack Ortiz, about that very same thing. The old medicine man had been invited to come to a party just like this one for the same reason-to deliver the story at Tohono Chul in honor of that year’s blooms.

“When they asked me to come, I wondered about that,” he said. “So I took the invitation they sent me, I rolled some sacred tobacco, some wiw, and I performed a wustana. By blowing the sacred smoke over the invitation, I knew what I should do.”

“And what was that?” Lani had asked.

“Some of the people have forgotten all about Old White-Haired Woman,” Fat Crack had told her. “Yes, the I’itoi stories are supposed to be winter-telling tales, but on this one night, I’itoi himself doesn’t object to having that story told.”

“The snakes and lizards won’t hurt me,” Lani told Gabe now. “I’itoi doesn’t mind if the story is told on the night the flowers bloom. It’s a good story. People need to remember.”

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:00 p.m.

93º Fahrenheit

“Your hair looks great,” Nicole said, looking up at Abigail Tennant over the bubbling pedicure bath. “Is this a special occasion?”

Abby nodded. “Our anniversary,” she said. “Jack and I met five years ago today. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Where’s he taking you?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”

“Someplace good, I hope?” Nicole asked.

“It better be,” Abby answered with a smile. “This will be the first night-blooming cereus party I’ve missed in fifteen years.”

When the manicure/pedicure appointment ended, Abby took her time leaving Hush. Not wanting to chip her polish, she waited an extra twenty minutes before making her way out to the parking lot. When she arrived two hours earlier, she had lucked out and found a bit of shade under a mesquite tree. She unlocked the old Mark VIII with its push-button door code and found the temperature inside was hot, but not nearly as hot as it would have been without the shade augmented by the fold-up reflecting sunscreen she had placed on the inside of the windshield.

The car had been beautiful and sporty when she bought it new fifteen years earlier and days before she set off for her new life in Arizona. She had lived through a brutal divorce in Ohio. After thirty years of marriage, Hank Southard had seen fit to trade Abby in on a much younger model, a woman named DeeAnn who was barely half his age and extremely pregnant by the time Hank and Abby’s divorce was finalized. Two days later Hank had trotted off to Nevada where he had made an honest woman of his mistress by way of a quickie Las Vegas wedding.

Abby had never been able to understand how her son, Jonathan, could have come to the completely illogical conclusion that the divorce was all Abby’s fault; that she had, through some action of her own, been the cause of Hank’s betrayal. Because Jonathan was an adult by then, it hadn’t been a question of custody but a question of loyalty, and Jonathan had stuck with his philandering father.

“Sounds like he was just following the money” was the uncompromising way Jack had explained it to Abby some time later. “Kids are like that. They know which side their bread is buttered on. Hank’s pockets probably looked a lot deeper to Jonathan than yours did. Maybe he’ll wise up someday.”

So far that hadn’t happened, but that ego-damaging time was far enough in the past that it no longer hurt Abby quite so much. When she thought about it now, it seemed like someone else’s ancient history.

For one thing, Abby was an entirely different person than she had been then. After being a stay-at-home mom and a dutiful corporate wife for all those years, she had been devastated by the divorce. It had been that much worse when her former husband, his new wife, and their new baby had settled down in a Columbus neighborhood not far from where she and Hank had lived for much of their married lives. In fact their love nest was close enough to Abby’s home that they had occasionally run into people who had been friends of Hank’s and Abby’s back before the divorce. Those supposedly good friends had never failed to mention to Abby that they had run into Hank and DeeAnn buying groceries at Kroger’s or flats of annuals at Lowe’s.