Day of the Dead (7 page)

As the temperature warmed, Erik sat on a rock ledge, sipped water, mopped sweat from his brow, and watched a pair of A-10s circle lazily over the valley before settling in to land at Davis Monthan. The pilots knew just where they were going. Erik had no such delusions.

Tucson had always been home to him. His grandmother had raised him here. His mother had been a girl when Grandma Johnson brought her daughter and her disabled World War II vet husband to Tucson so he could be cared for at the VA hospital. But both of Erik’s grandparents were gone now. So was his mother. As for his father? Erik had no idea where he was or whether the man was alive or dead. Erik still had a few friends in town—grade school and high school buddies who had grown up here and had never left. But with no remaining family connections tying him to Tucson, and without his job, Erik would need to find some other place to live and work. Looking over the city-filled desert below him, he felt a clutch in his gut. He loved this place and didn’t want to leave. Would he be like Grandma when she had moved away from Lake Superior’s Isle Royale—leave and never return?

One night when Erik was five or six, after Grandma came home from her job as a checker at Safeway, Erik had asked her about that while they ate supper. Through the years he had heard her tell countless stories about her childhood on Isle Royale. To Erik it always sounded like a magic, idyllic place—one he wanted to see with his own eyes.

“Couldn’t we go back there sometime?” he asked. “Just to visit?”

“Oh, no,” Grandma said. A wistful cloud of sadness wafted across her face. “It’s different now—a national park—nothing at all like it used to be. No one I knew still lives there.”

“But if it’s a park, couldn’t we go look at it?” Erik had insisted. “I could see where you used to play on the rocks and pick berries.”

Grandma had put down her fork, reached over, and pulled him to her. “No,” she said. “Sometimes you have to leave the past in the past. Otherwise it hurts too much.”

Hunkered down on the flank of the mountain, Erik LaGrange could see how that might be true for him, too. Once he left Tucson, he wouldn’t be coming back. If he didn’t burn all his bridges, Gayle Stryker was sure to do it for him.

***

She had cut
him out of the herd at a big-donor alumni function where, as a lowly junior-grade University of Arizona fund-raiser adrift in a sea of movers and shakers, Erik LaGrange had been keeping a suitably low profile.

“So who are you?” she had demanded, walking up to him with a drink in one bejeweled hand and with her other hand resting provocatively on a curvaceous hip. “I suppose you’re the son of somebody important,” she added with an ironic smile.

Some of the U of A’s most well-heeled graduates were milling about La Paloma’s glitzy ballroom. In Tucson, men seldom fought their way into tuxes, but the University of Arizona’s Alumni Association’s President’s Ball was a notable exception. Tuxes were out in force and bolo ties banished. Among the sparkling collection of women dressed in their designer best, Gayle Stryker was the hands-down standout. Her crimson floor-length gown was set off by an emerald pendant big enough to choke a horse. A cloud of silvery-blond hair encircled a perfect face, and the woman’s figure was nothing short of amazing.

“Nobody’s son,” Erik had stammered with far more truth than he intended. Even without benefit of her name tag, he had known Gayle Stryker on sight. In a roomful of major donors, Gayle and her husband, Dr. Lawrence Stryker, were in a class by themselves. Disturbed by the woman’s unblinkingly frank scrutiny, Erik found himself trying to guess her age, but the ministrations of one or several very talented plastic surgeons made that difficult. She could have been forty-five. He would learn later that she was actually twelve years older than that.

“I work here,” he murmured.

“For the hotel?” she asked.

“No,” he answered. “For the alumni association, I mean. The development office.”

She smiled. “In that case, since my husband already gave at the office, I don’t suppose you’d mind getting a lady a drink.”

“Of course not. What would you like?”

“A margarita,” she said. “Blended. No salt.”

When Erik returned with the margarita, he found Gayle deep in conversation with U of A president Dr. Thomas Moore himself. Not wanting to intrude, Erik tried to linger unobtrusively in the background, but Gayle had reached out, grabbed him by the elbow, and dragged him forward.

“Now, tell me, Tommy, since when did the alumni association start hiring babies to wheedle us out of our hard-earned cash?”

Damning his blond hair and fair complexion, Erik LaGrange blushed. He couldn’t help it. And he had no idea what to say. Calling the wife of one of the university’s major donors an uncompromising bitch wasn’t an option. Fortunately, President Moore effected Erik’s rescue.

“Hear, hear,” Thomas Moore said jovially. “Mr. LaGrange has been with us for years, haven’t you, Erik. Besides, Gayle, don’t we all prefer to look younger than we really are?”

Erik was astonished. He had no idea President Moore even knew his name. The fact that he would save Erik by nailing someone like Gayle Stryker was beyond the realm of possibility.

“Touché,” Gayle Stryker murmured with yet another smile as she collected the drink Erik had brought her. “So he’s good, then?” she asked President Moore, all the while studying Erik’s face over the rim of her glass. There was something brazenly suggestive about that look. “At raising funds, I mean,” she added innocently as yet another blush erupted from the top of Erik’s now too-tight collar.

“Oh, yes,” President Moore agreed, giving Erik’s shoulder a hearty whack. “The best. That’s the only kind we hire.”

Someone came up behind President Moore, tapped him on the shoulder, and led him off to another group of attendees, leaving a still-blushing Erik uncomfortably close to Gayle Stryker.

“So how old are you, then?” she asked. “I don’t believe in beating around the bush.”

“Thirty,” he admitted reluctantly. “I started out working for the alumni association while I was still an undergraduate—”

“Studying what?” she interjected.

“Poli-sci,” Erik answered. “By the time I graduated, I had lost all interest in politics. I was thinking about going to law school, but the alumni association gave me a job while I was trying to figure out what else I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ve been there ever since.”

Gayle handed him her drink. Then she reached into a tiny jeweled purse and pulled out a business card, which she handed to him.

“If you’re tired of raising money for the university,” she said, “you might want to come see me. Maybe you’d enjoy taking a crack at saving the world. I’ll be in the office all week. I might make you an offer you won’t be able to refuse.”

She had sauntered away then, leaving Erik holding both the card and a lipstick-marred glass containing a virtually untouched margarita. The card said “Gayle Stryker, CFO, Medicos for Mexico.” Erik slipped the card into the pocket of his tux. Then, because he didn’t know what else to do with the margarita, he lifted it to his lips and polished it off in a single gulp.

That was the beginning,
Erik LaGrange thought to himself as he sat on the rock-bound ledge of the mountain.
And five years later, this is the end.

***

At two o’clock
in the morning a bleary-eyed Dolores Lanita Walker sat before her computer screen and longed for sleep, but sleep proved elusive this long Friday night, just as it had for days now. She knew she should be studying. Finals were coming. She didn’t really need to sweat them. She’d already been accepted into the medical school at the University of Arizona back home in Tucson. But what she really wanted was to be there right now, to be home where Lani knew she was needed.

Four years earlier, her parents had tried to convince her that it would be far simpler for her to do her undergraduate work in Tucson. Her father had been especially adamant on that score. One way or another, Brandon Walker had lost two of his three sons. He didn’t want to lose her, too, but Lani had stuck to her guns. Rather than stay home, she had come to Grand Forks, North Dakota, and enrolled in a program called INMED—Indians into Medicine at the University of North Dakota’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

As an orphaned Tohono O’odham child who had been raised in an Anglo household and attended predominantly Anglo schools, Lani had wanted to go somewhere else to school, to a place where it would be possible for her to meet and interact with other Native American kids—kids from tribes all over the country, who would know what it was like to live in that uncertain no-man’s-land between Anglo and Indian cultures. She wanted to spend time with people who, like her, negotiated those treacherous minefields every day of their lives.

Lani hadn’t been wrong. Her three roommates in this poorly insulated rental house were proof enough of that. Margie was a Paiute from Nevada, Darlene a Rosebud Sioux, and Laura a Black-foot from Montana. Laura, an accomplished skier, had taught them all to ski, while Darlene had helped Lani learn how to ice-skate. The four girls shared many of the same values and laughed at the same jokes. And they all shared similar beliefs that decreed storytelling to be a wintertime occupation.

It still surprised Lani to realize that her best friend, Leah Donner, who still lived in a dorm, was actually a White Mountain Apache. In the language and history of the Desert People, the word
Ohb
means Apache.
Ohb
also interchangeably means enemy.

But when Leah Donner and Lani Walker had met in a Society and Literature class their freshman year, they discovered they had more in common than either expected. Some INMED students came to the U of ND needing and finding remedial help in one or more subjects. Leah Donner and Lani were both outstanding students. Not only were they both smart, they were also orphans who had been raised in adoptive families. The two girls had been abandoned long after the practice of Anglo parents’ adopting Indian children had fallen out of fashion. Leah had been raised in an all-Indian household. She was surprised to learn that Lani’s parents were both Anglos.

It was to Leah that Lani told the story of the blond and black people hair charm—the
kushpo ho’oma
—she wore around her neck. It was to Leah that Lani first revealed her prize possession—the sturdy medicine basket Lani had woven for herself, making it as much like Nana
Dahd
’s original as possible. It wasn’t quite as well made as that of Rita’s grandmother,
Oks Amichuda
—Understanding Woman—but it was respectable enough. And it was to Leah that Lani had finally confided her worries about what was going on with Fat Crack Ortiz—about how sick he was and how much she needed to be home with him.

“I don’t get it,” Leah had said impatiently over dinner the night before. Months later, Leah was still smarting over the fact that Lani had backed out on their verbal agreement to spend the summer after graduation together, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders. Leah was still signed up to go. Lani was returning to Tucson as soon as she finished her last exam.

“That Fat Crack guy isn’t really a relative of yours,” Leah said. “If he’s diabetic and too stubborn to take his medicine, what are you going to do about it? Sit there and watch him die?”

“Yes,” Lani said. “If that’s what’s needed, it’s exactly what I’ll do—sit and watch him die.” And that was all she said, because even with Leah—even with her very best friend—Lani Walker couldn’t explain it all, couldn’t tell the whole story.

Six

Lani Walker stepped out of the steamy shower and toweled herself dry. As always, she couldn’t ignore the ugly scar Mitch Johnson’s superheated kitchen tongs had seared into her breast six years earlier. Even when the damage was hidden beneath her clothing, for Lani it was always there, just like the broken white marks Andrew Carlisle’s teeth had left on her mother’s breast years earlier.

In a way Lani couldn’t explain—the same way she couldn’t explain what she sometimes saw in the sacred crystals stored in her medicine basket—she knew that the similar scars she and her adoptive mother wore on their bodies made her Diana Ladd’s daughter in a way far more profound than adoption papers from any tribal court. It was also why she kept the scar a secret from her mother as well as from everyone else, including her best friend. It would hurt Diana too much to know about it, and to tell Leah would require too much explanation.

She hadn’t told Fat Crack about it, either, but she was sure he knew. He had come to her every day, bringing her a soothing salve as well as the salt-free evening meal called for during the required sixteen-day fast and purification ceremony—her
e lihmhun
—after Lani had killed Mitch Johnson. She and Fat Crack had talked about many things during that time. She had used the salve, but they hadn’t talked about it.

On the last night, Fat Crack had brought not only the food for that night’s evening meal, but also his
huashomi
—the fringed buckskin medicine pouch he had been given years earlier by an old blind medicine man named
S’ab Neid Pi Has
—Looks at Nothing. After the two of them had eaten together, Fat Crack had taken a stick and drawn a circle around both Lani and himself. Once they were both inside it, he opened the pouch, took out some
wiw
—wild tobacco—and rolled it into a crude cigarette, which he lit with Looks at Nothing’s old Zippo lighter. Sitting on the mountain with a beloved family friend who was not only the tribal chairman and a respected medicine man but also her godfather, Lani smoked the traditional peace smoke for the first time.

The powerful smoke had left her light-headed, so some of what they said that night had drifted away from her conscious memory in the same way the silvery smoke had dissipated in the cold night air. Other parts of it she remembered clearly.

“What’s the point of the
e lihmhun
?” she had asked. “Why did I have to stay out here by myself all this time?”