Kiss of the Bees (6 page)

“Diana signed it for you,” Wanda said.

Gabe fumbled the book open to the title page and read the words that were written there in vivid red ink. “Gabe,” the inscription said. “Happy Birthday. Here’s a piece of our mutual history. I hope you enjoy it. Diana Ladd Walker.”

“Do you like it?” Wanda asked.

“Yes.” Gabe managed a weak smile, but as soon as possible, he put the book down. When the party was over and as he and Wanda were getting ready to leave, the grandkids had gathered up the presents and what was left of the birthday cake for Wanda and Gabe to take back home to Sells with them. Five-year-old Rita, the baby, had come racing to the door carrying the book. Afraid that whatever evil lurked in the book might somehow infect her, Gabe had reached down and snatched it from her hand.

Tears welled in her eyes. “I only wanted to carry it,” she pouted. “I wouldn’t drop it or anything. I like books.”

“I know, baby,” he said, bending over and giving the child a hug. “But this one is very special. Let me carry it, okay?”

“Okay,” she sniffed. “Can I carry your hat then?”

For an answer, Gabe had put his huge black Stetson on her head. It had engulfed the child, falling down over her eyes, covering everything down to her lips, which suddenly burst into a wide grin.

“I can’t see anything,” she said.

“That’s all right,” Gabe had said, reaching out and taking her hand. “I’ll lead you to the car.”

“What’s wrong?” Wanda asked, once they were in the Ford. “You got mad at Rita for just touching the book.”

“I wasn’t mad,” Gabe returned, although his protest was useless. After all their years together, Wanda knew him far too well for him to be able to get away with lying.

“It’s the book,” he said. “It’s dangerous. I didn’t want her near it.”

“How can a book be dangerous?” Wanda asked. “Rita’s just a little girl. She can’t even read.”

Gabe did not want to argue. “It just is,” he said.

“So what are you going to do?” Wanda asked. “Take the book to some other medicine man and have him shake a few feathers at it?”

With that, Wanda had squeezed her broad form against the door on the far side of the car. She had sat there with her arms crossed, staring out the window in moody silence as they started the sixty-mile drive back to Sells. It wasn’t a good way to end a birthday party.

Looks At Nothing had taught Gabe Ortiz the importance of understanding something before taking any action. And so, in the week following the party, he had read the book,
Shadow of Death,
from cover to cover. It was slow going. In order to read it he had to hold it, and doing that necessitated overcoming his own revulsion. It reminded him of that long-ago day, when, as a curious child, he had reached into his Aunt Rita’s medicine basket and touched the ancient scalp bundle she kept there.

Ni-thahth
Rita 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.

During those two hours, doing mindless work, she was able to watch the animals from time to time and simply to be there with them. Working by herself, without the necessity of talking with anyone else, she remembered the times she had come here with Nana
Dahd
and with her brother Davy.

Nana
Dahd
.
Dahd
itself implies nothing more than the somewhat distant relationship of godmother, but for Davy and Lani both, Rita Antone had been much more than that. Diana Ladd Walker may have owned the official title of “Mother” in the family, but she had come in only a distant second behind the Indian woman who had actually filled the role.

Ambitious and forever concentrating on her work, there was a part of Diana Ladd Walker that was always separate from both her children. While Diana labored over first a typewriter and later a computer, the child-rearing joys and responsibilities had fallen mainly on Rita’s capable and loving shoulders.

By the time Lani appeared on the scene, Davy was already eleven years old and Rita’s health was becoming precarious. Had Davy not been there to pitch in and help out, no doubt it would have been impossible for Nana
Dahd
to look after a busily curious toddler. In a symbiotic relationship that made outsiders wonder, the three of them—the old woman, the boy, and the baby—had made do.

Long after most males his age would have forsaken the company of women, Davy stayed around. He, more than anyone, understood what it was Nana
Dahd
was trying to do, and he was willing to help. Whenever he wasn’t in school, he spent most of his waking hours helping the woman who had once been his baby-sitter care for his little sister.

When the three of them were alone together in Rita’s apartment—with the old woman in her wheelchair and with Lani on her lap while Davy did his homework at the kitchen table—it seemed as though they existed in a carefully preserved bubble that was somehow outside the confines of regular time and space.

In that room they had spoken, laughed, and joked together, speaking solely in the softly guttural language of the
Tohono O’othham
. It was there Lani learned that Nana
Dahd’s
childhood name had been
E Waila Kakaichu,
which means Dancing Quail. Rita Antone’s dancing days were long since over, but Lani’s were only beginning. The child danced constantly. Her favorite game consisted of standing in the middle of the room, twirling and pretending to be
siwuliki
—whirlwind. She would spin around and around until finally, losing her balance, she would fall laughing to the floor.

Just as Rita had given Davy his Indian name of
Olhoni
—Little Orphaned Calf—Nana
Dahd
gave Lani a special Indian name as well, one that was known only to the three of them. In the privacy of Rita’s apartment, the
Tohono O’othham
child with the
Mil-gahn
name of Dolores Lanita Walker became
Mualig Siakam
. Rita told Lani that the words
mualig siakam
meant Forever Spinning.

There in Nana
Dahd’
s room, working one stitch at a time, Rita taught Davy and Lani how to make baskets. Davy had been at it much longer, but Lani’s tiny and surprisingly agile fingers soon surpassed her elder brother’s clumsier efforts. When that happened, Davy Ladd gave up and stopped making baskets altogether.