The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (109 page)

“Use the phone in my office,” Tiny said.

“Oh, thanks, I’m just calling a cab. I need to use the ladies’ room.” Seese knew if she went back to his office, Tiny would try to kiss and fondle her. Tiny knew he had lost his opportunity and had a disappointed expression on his face. Seese smiled and winked at him as she went into the ladies’ toilet. She had outmaneuvered Tiny tonight, but she would have to be careful next time. When she came out of the rest room, Tiny was gone, and the cab honked outside. Seese got the train case with the kilo from the motel room, and the cab took her back to the ranch. No wonder Beaufrey had been so generous with Seese. The wholesale price of cocaine had probably started to slide back then. A kilo was cheaper than hiring a gunman, and nothing had to be explained because Seese was an addict. Beaufrey had really counted on Seese to OD.

Seese gave the cabdriver a big tip for driving her over the dirt road to the ranch house. Some cabdrivers were afraid to drive inside the gate because of the snarling guard dogs behind the chain-link fence on each side of the driveway. Seese shoved the train case to the back of the closet and lay down on the bed to smoke a joint. She regretted she had asked Root to help her sell the kilo. Root probably thought she had fucked him for the favor. A man with a limp and slurred speech was not likely
to have many girlfriends or get much sex unless he went to whores. Seese thought she might like another evening with Root. He seemed different from other men; he seemed more gentle. But now Root would not trust her. She had ruined her chances with him because of the cocaine. Going to Tiny at the Stage Coach had been a mistake too. Seese didn’t know Tiny anymore; she didn’t even know Cherie.

All night Seese had nightmares about losing the train case, or about how the kilo had spilled open all over the floor of Tiny’s office, but then the cocaine had congealed like white pus or sperm. Lecha might help her get rid of the cocaine, but Seese did not want to ask. Lecha had been working past midnight every night, poring over the old notebooks. Lecha said there would be old acquaintances at an upcoming convention who might have questions about Yoeme’s old notebooks.

Seese telephoned Tiny’s office at noon the next day. Her hands were perspiring as she waited for Tiny to answer. She wanted to get rid of the kilo as soon as possible; every week the wholesale price of a kilo fell lower. The whole U.S. economy had gone soft. She had nothing else to sell; no other way to hire a detective to find Monte.

ROOT HAD STILL felt sad the next day when Mosca drove up with a hail of gravel. Root could see Mosca was flying high. Mosca said he had not slept two nights running because the Barefoot Hopi had come to town. They had been chewing peyote and talking for more than forty-eight hours. “I couldn’t stand it, man,” Mosca told Root. “I got so excited I had to tell someone. “I went by Calabazas’s, but no one was home. So I came here!” Mosca had left the big Blazer idling in the driveway; he wanted Root to come with him right away.

Root was still in his bathrobe. Mosca had been complaining lately about how boring the work was. Smuggling was just another dumb job. Mosca had his truck paid for, but now he complained that he had everything he wanted. Mosca couldn’t think of what else to buy except more semiauto rifles. Calabazas had teased Mosca for buying so many firearms; Calabazas and the other Indian smugglers had not armed themselves
in the old days; but all of that had been changing. The old-timers who used remote trails still did not arm themselves, but suddenly there were more players, complete strangers. The new players were Salvadorians and Guatemalans.

Root pulled on a dirty T-shirt and some jeans he found on the floor. Mosca had started to tell his story while Root was tying his shoes, but refused to tell the good stuff until they were safely in Mosca’s truck. Root shook his head. Mosca thought the authorities might have bugged Root’s trailer, but when Root asked him about “bugs” in his truck, Mosca had been indignant. Root left his trailer for hours at a time, while Mosca seldom left his truck unattended. At night Mosca parked the truck outside his bedroom window. No one in the neighborhood dared come near Mosca’s adobe shack because they feared Mosca. Root had learned to fasten his seat belt and save his breath; no one could win an argument with Mosca, especially not an argument about Mosca’s power or invincibility. Root watched cars and pedestrians scatter in front of them as Mosca casually ignored red lights at intersections. For Mosca this was it. The message had arrived. The Barefoot Hopi was the messenger.

The Hopi had no permanent location but kept moving—one week in Ontario, the next in Guatemala, then to New Mexico to lead demonstrators protesting police brutality in Albuquerque. Because the Hopi traveled around so much there had been other rumors too, rumors the Hopi was a spy or special agent. The Hopi traveled the world to raise political and financial support for the return of the land to indigenous Americans. After five hundred years of colonialism, and the terrible bloodbath in South Africa, the African tribal people had retaken Africa. Now the Hopi had received not only encouragement but financial aid from African nations sympathetic to the Hopi’s cause.

Mosca drove to the big arroyo where the homeless people had made small camps and shelters under mesquite trees. In the beginning, the homeless had mostly been white men who wintered in Tucson then fled the heat; but now the big arroyo sheltered families, and the women and children did not leave when the heat came. Two men wearing green berets watched Root and Mosca from the homeless Vietnam veterans’ camp, which had expanded since the last time they’d seen it.

Mosca seemed slightly embarrassed about the Hopi’s accommodations. Mosca was anxious for Root to understand the Barefoot Hopi traveled like this because of the police and FBI. “He travels like this
on purpose,”
Mosca said in a confidential tone. “The government’s been tracking him since he got out of prison. They don’t know what he’s up
to, but he worries them. See, the Hopi talks to the Mexicans and Africans; he even talks to the whites. People will listen to the Hopi. Even bikers and Ku Klux Klan, because what the Hopi talks about is the day all the walls fall down. Ask him if he means earthquakes or riots and the Hopi smiles and says, ‘Both.’ ”

But the Hopi was not under the mesquite tree; a neat circle of river cobbles held ashes that were still warm. A pair of green shower sandals and a small canvas pack were in the crook of the tree. Mosca said the sandals were the Hopi’s so he must have gone for a walk along the river to feel messages from the earth through his bare feet. The Hopi wouldn’t mind; they’d wait. The Barefoot Hopi’s entire philosophy was to wait; a day would come as had not been seen in five thousand years. On this day, a conjunction would occur; everywhere at once, spontaneously, the prisoners, the slaves, and the dispossessed would rise up. The urge to rise up would come to them through their dreams. All at once, all over the world, police and soldiers would be outnumbered.

The Barefoot Hopi was not more than five feet five inches tall, but he must have weighed almost three hundred pounds. Root did not think the Hopi looked fat; more like the Hopi was built like a brown boulder. The Hopi’s full-moon face was always wider with a big grin; his teeth large and perfect. Root did not think the Hopi looked old enough to have spent ten years in federal prison or five years out already. The Hopi shook Root’s hand warmly and smiled. “So we both know this
loco coyote,”
the Hopi said, looking at Mosca. Root nodded his head. “I told him you’re all right,” Mosca said, touching Root’s arm. “I told him you’re my brother.”

The Hopi had been a celebrity in prison. The media had followed his crime closely; the cameras had loved the bare feet and the traditional Hopi buckskin moccasins the Hopi carried in his woven-cotton shoulder bag. The cameras had loved the Hopi’s mouthful of perfect, pearly teeth, and his wonderful laugh. He was not sad or angry at all for going to prison. The Barefoot Hopi had confided to Mosca and a few others that he had no regrets about shooting down the helicopter. The helicopter had been hired by rich tourists from Beverly Hills to hover over the Snake Dance at old Oraibi.

Nothing had equalled the exhilaration and joy everyone at the Snake Dance had shared the day the Hopi had shot the helicopter out of the sky. The Hopi had used the carbine he had “liberated” when he had been shipped home from Vietnam. The Barefoot Hopi regretted the injuries to the pilot and passengers, but he did not regret prison. In
prison he had discovered the work he must do for the rest of his life; he must work tirelessly until all prisoners went free, and all the walls came down. The Hopi knew he might work to make preparations the rest of his life, yet never see the day when prisons and jails all over the U.S. were hit with riots and strikes simultaneously. But that didn’t discourage the Hopi. One human lifetime wasn’t much; it was over in a flash. Conjunctions and convergences of global proportions might require six or seven hundred years to develop.

They sat under the mesquite tree in the shade. The Barefoot Hopi took a plastic bottle from a crook in the tree and offered Root water. Mosca fished a fat marijuana cigarette from his shirt pocket, and the Hopi struck a match. For a long time they sat in the shade and shared the cigarette in silence. The cicadas in the mesquites were already buzzing. Drought and heat were international news on TV, but in Tucson and the surrounding Sonoran desert, the rainfall had been normal. The cicadas had almost drowned out the whine of semi trucks on Interstate 10 across the big arroyo.

“You going to that conference they’re having here next week?” the Hopi asked. He had stretched out on the ground with a mesquite trunk for a headrest; his eyes were closed. “I’m too old to sit up two nights running with old man Peyote.”

“What conference?” Mosca wanted to know. Mosca sat up and took off his dark glasses; he glanced at Root to see how Root liked the Hopi so far. Root nodded. “Indigenous healers. Native healers,” the Hopi said, “from all over the world.” He was sitting up now, massaging his feet with both hands. He put the palms of both hands flat on the sand in front of him and closed his eyes. “Earthquakes,” the Hopi said. The tribal people had tried to warn the Europeans about the earth’s outrage if humans continued to blast open their mother. But now all the warnings were too late. The Hopi could feel the earth grinding and groaning from Alaska to the South Pole. For days at a time, the ground had not been still in northern California; dozens of volcanos had erupted along the Aleutian chain, land of ten thousand smokes. Underground nuclear test explosions in Nevada had destabilized critical faults along California’s coastal plain. A gigantic earthquake centered in a populous U.S. city might be just the occasion for their national prison uprising.

The Hopi explained that he and his followers were biding their time; they had to watch the rest of the world for signals; they were in close contact with their sisters and brothers on the streets and in the hills on reservations. They were waiting for the right moment—for certain
conjunctions between the spirit forces of wind, fire, water, and mountain with the spirit forces of the people, the living and the dead. Otherwise, the prisoners and the people in the streets and hills were certain to be crushed. The U.S. government would not hesitate to firebomb the jails and prisons or hundreds of city blocks. If anyone needed proof of this, the Hopi only had to point to the Attica prison riot years ago and to the blocks of rowhouses fire-bombed by the Philadelphia police.

But the time was drawing closer; the right moment might come after Mexico had been engulfed by unrest and violence. U.S. troops would be sent to Mexico to protect factories owned by U.S. corporations. At the same time, human waves of refugees would pour across the U.S. border from the south. The U.S. government might have enough firepower to crush the coordinated prison-jail uprisings; the government might have enough fire-power to halt the people in the streets and in the hills. But the Barefoot Hopi did not think the U.S. government would be strong enough to fight its own people at home while millions of refugees stormed the border. The Hopi had paused to take a drink of water from a plastic bottle. “Oh yeah,” the Hopi said, “while all this is happening, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado—all the southwestern states will run out of drinking water.”

Just then a black man and a white man, both wearing green berets, approached them from the ’Nam veterans’ camp. The Barefoot Hopi rolled to his feet gracefully for such a big man. He excused himself and went to shake hands with the black man. The black man introduced his companion, and the Barefoot Hopi grinned and shook his hand. Root heard the Hopi tell the black man he’d meet them later.

Root watched the Hopi curl his toes into the sand and wondered what signs or messages the Hopi was getting. Mosca and Root stood up too and shook hands with the Barefoot Hopi. “You should come to this healers’ convention,” the Hopi said, “I’ll make a speech there. You might be interested.” Mosca swore absolutely he would be there; Root had nodded too, although Root thought the Hopi was crazy; no one got prison inmates to cooperate. If they could have helped one another and organized to work together, they would not have been locked up in prison in the first place, that’s what Root thought.