Living the Dream (9 page)

“Open the door. I’m dropping the damn Doritos!” Aunt Evalina was suddenly glowering at Aunt Bonita through the open window. Cody’s great aunts had seemed fiercely united in their mission to rescue her, but now they had Cody they were snapping and sulking like seven-year-olds; except seven-year-olds don’t generally chain-smoke.

The aunts squabbled all the way from Maryland through the state of Tennessee, meanwhile working their way through shedloads of junk food. They kept offering snacks to Cody, but she silently shook her head. Now and then she sipped at a diet Coke.

“That stuff rots your innards,” Aunt Bonita growled, exhaling clouds of smoke into the truck.

“The child’s queasy, leave her be,” Aunt Evalina told her. She started flicking through the radio stations till she found a country music tune to hum along to. But after so many days on the road, even the aunts’ caffeine-fuelled energy levels were dropping. After three choruses of “Achy Breaky Heart”, their voices petered out. By the time we reached Nashville and drove by the Grand Old Opry, the world famous country music venue, I was the only person who actually bothered to look.

We stayed the night in a motel where the decor was stuck in a 1970s time warp. Giant lime green and orange flowers loomed from every surface, making the room more claustrophobic than it already was. Cody fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Aunt Evalina and Aunt Jeannie were close behind.

Aunt Bonita propped herself up on top of the lime and orange bedcover, her bare feet stuck out stiffly in front, her eyes glinting beadily in the light of the TV, as she watched CNN news with the sound down.

A terrible flood had made millions of people homeless. The snows in the Himalayas were melting faster than anyone had predicted…

Before I left I’d hastily downloaded Reuben’s tunes. I put in my iPod (just one ear-bud because I was on duty) and clicked on another of Reubs’ works in progress, “Earth Dreams”.

Reuben has this way of mixing shimmering cosmic chords with gritty human beats borrowed from tunes I’ve lent him. His voice isn’t totally tuneful, but as a sound it works. When he reached the chorus, I broke into goosebumps as he sang:

Born from the same star, you’ve come so far, Born from the same star, you’ve come so far, But the circle got broken, Earth was torn open, All her treasures stolen, and this wasn’t, this wasn’t, this wasn’t what we dreamed.
..

How the sassafras had Ambriel’s words, which he never at any point spoke aloud, found their way into Reuben’s tune!!

I felt as if I was balanced on the edge of some huge mystery. Lola’s glimpse of a nightmare future, Ambriel’s last-ditch crusade to save the world, a Navajo girl under a curse; they were all connected, I could feel it -if I could only figure out how…

I could hear some kind of disturbance in the hall, probably guests coming back late after a few beers, but Aunt Bonita was instantly on red alert.

She glanced sharply at Cody, uneasily asleep on the pull-out bed provided for kids, then with a tiny grunt of effort, she swung her legs off the bed. She softly dragged a chair over to the door and jammed it carefully under the handle. Then she went back to CNN. Apparently Aunt Bonita was planning to sit up all night guarding her great niece.

I wondered what this feisty old Navajo lady could have seen in her dream that made her drive hell for leather all the way to Maryland? It wasn’t possible, surely, that she knew about the PODS? If she knew what Cody was up against, she’d know that just blocking a motel door wouldn’t stop them. The Powers of Darkness can send a disembodied agent swirling up through a bathroom plughole if they want to. They could be monitoring us from the Hell dimensions right now through the screen of the TV…

Stop it!
I commanded.
You’re freaking yourself out
.

I was totally freaked for a few seconds, then I pulled myself together and got busy with some cosmic precautions of my own. I moved softly around the room setting shimmery angelic symbols on the ceiling, floor, walls, door and windows. These ancient symbols are invisible to humans and blazingly toxic to the PODS.

As I drew the final symbol, sealing the circle of divine protection, I caught sight of Aunt Bonita’s lips moving in silent prayer and wondered if I’d got it all wrong. Maybe Aunt Bonita did know who was threatening Cody. Maybe she was doing the only thing a human can do: whisper a prayer and stay on guard till morning.

Chapter Twelve

N
ext morning Aunt Bonita grudgingly allowed Aunt Evalina to take over the driving seat. She claimed her rheumatism was playing up, but I thought the old lady was simply worn out from sitting up guarding Cody, on top of three days’ solid driving.

We had another long drive ahead of us if we were going to reach Dallas by nightfall. Hopefully we’d make it to Arizona by sometime tomorrow.

Cody looked dazed and pale. She never seemed particularly well, but today she looked like she might keel right over in her seat.

Having sat beside her for hours in the cramped, smoke-filled cab of a pick-up truck, I was getting to know her vibes. It seemed like the right moment to dig a little deeper, before we reached the reservation where I’d have to deal with all kinds of unknown factors. Extremely gently, as Mr Allbright taught us, I sent out a teensy bit of my own energy into the first outer layer of Cody’s energy field.

As I suspected, she was physically in bad shape. I had a feeling she might have an allergy the doctors hadn’t picked up. Next layer down I found a faithful record of Cody’s recent emotions. They were what you’d expect: worry for her mum, intense anxiety that she might not be allowed to live with her again. In the third layer I found worries about school, friends, boys. Normal teen worries.

Four layers down I found energy so stagnant, so totally disconnected from Cody, that I actually recoiled. It felt
wrong
, like a seam of hard black coal where there should be sparkly little streams. We’d studied energy blockages in class. Mr Allbright says sometimes it’s so painful to humans to be who they really are, they simply shut off huge areas of their life force without even knowing. Some humans, he told us, run on as little as twenty per cent of their energy supply!

I wished Mr Allbright was here with me now to explain my disturbing discovery. The feelings she’d buried were too huge, too traumatic, to be explained away by the loss of a parent she’d never really known. I’ve been an angel for long enough now to know that the PODS are not responsible for every single painful thing that happens to a human child. Sometimes stuff just happens. But when it does, the Dark Agencies are always ready and waiting, invisibly nudging things along, playing on human weaknesses, sneaking ugly thoughts into people’s heads, hoping to turn a crisis into a complete catastrophe.

“I’m going to throw up!” Cody said abruptly. We had to stop a couple more times before we reached the next official gas station, where she stumbled to the washroom, looking absolutely white.

While she was gone, Aunt Evalina checked in her battered plastic wallet. “The good news is we can afford to fill up with gas another couple of times,” she announced. “The bad news is if we want to eat, we’ll have to sleep in the truck.”

Around ten o’clock that evening they stopped off at a Spanish-style roadside Diner. The aunts ordered tacos. Cody leaned back with her eyes closed, sipping her iced water. Then everyone catnapped in the truck until first light.

Next day Aunt Jeannie took over the driving. The pick-up was in serious trouble by this time, speeds over 30 mph made the engine rattle like it was full of loose nails. When clouds of steam started curling out from under the bonnet, they were finally forced to pull off the road.

Aunt Evalina said someone would have to walk to the next town and find a mechanic. Aunt Bonita said something v. rude in Navajo and demanded to be let out of the truck. She stalked stiffly around the steaming truck as vehicles whizzed past, dangerously close. She began to chant loudly in Navajo.

Cody was cringing at the looks from passing motorists. “What’s she doing?”

“She’s blessing the truck,” Aunt Jeannie explained.

“Or scaring it!” Aunt Evalina let out a snicker of laughter. “That old bootface sure scares the hell outa me!”

As she chanted, Cody’s aunt took several pinches of something from a small leather pouch, sprinkling them carefully around the truck. I noticed her carefully sprinkle in all four directions: north, south, east and west. Finally she touched her pinched fingertips to her crown, then to her lips. Then, slightly out of breath, she got back in the truck.

“Start her up!” she commanded.

Cody’s eyes widened in amazement as the truck roared into life. “It stopped steaming! You didn’t even put in water!”

“Should get us home,” said Aunt Bonita casually. “Jim Yellowbird can fix her when we get back.”

“What’s that stuff in the pouch - like,
magic dust
?”

Cody couldn’t admit it even to herself, but she was totally spooked.

“Pollen,” said Aunt Bonita, lighting a new ciggie.

“You fixed a truck with pollen?”

“I can’t fix nothin’,” Aunt Bonita said calmly. “I BLESSED the truck and the Holy People graciously decided to help us out.”

“The Holy People? Who are they?” Cody looked like she’d fallen into Looking Glass Land.

“They created our world,” Aunt Jeannie explained in the matter-of-fact tone she’d used when Aunt Bonita was blessing the truck. I hadn’t heard of the Holy People either until that moment, but I knew they were real. I’d felt a shimmery hum of power building around the truck as Aunt Bonita asked for their help.

I’m a total newbie when it comes to identifying the different hierarchies of divine beings; angels, archangels, saints, gods and goddesses, that’s as far as I feel confident. But the Holy People’s vibes seemed oddly similar to Ambriel’s. I wondered if they were like, distant Navajo cousins to Creation angels?

Thanks to the combined efforts of Aunt Bonita and the Holy People, the truck drove like a dream for the rest of the journey.

As we zoomed across the border of New Mexico into the state of Arizona, Aunt Bonita suddenly cleared her throat. “We’ll soon be arriving in Dinetah.”

Cody looked baffled. “I thought we were going to Navajoland.”

“Dinetah means the land of the Dine,” Aunt Evalina explained. “Dine is another name for the Navajo. It just means ‘people’.”

“Young people nowadays just call it the Rez,” Aunt Jeannie said, beaming.

Aunt Bonita frowned, not appreciating her younger sisters’ interruptions. “When we get to the reservation, Cody, some things are going to seem strange to you,” she went on grimly. “Try not to judge us. Act respectful. To understand why our people act and think like they do, you need to know what they’ve been through over the centuries.”

Cody flinched as if she was waiting for the dentist’s drill. “Like what?”

“I’m seventy-eight,” Aunt Bonita told her. “I don’t have enough years left on this Earth to tell you all the things white people did to us. I’ll just tell you about the Long Walk.”

“OK,” Cody said reluctantly. I think she felt that her aunt was accusing her personally.

Aunt Bonita was staring off into the distance. Her expression was utterly bleak. “In 1864, for reasons too complicated to go into now, the US government decided to move the Navajo people off their ancestral land, the home where we had lived in peace and harmony for centuries. They sent us to a place called Basque Redondo, three hundred miles away in Mexico.”

“Three hundred miles isn’t so far,” Cody said.

“It’s a long way on foot,” Aunt Evalina said quietly. “If you were a half-starved little five-year-old, or old and frail, or heavily pregnant, or sick with fever.”

“The journey took eighteen days.” Aunt Bonita seemed to be watching the ordeal unspooling in her head. “Two hundred Navajo died on the way. We lived in exile for many years. Thousands died from starvation or from the white man’s many diseases, or maybe just because our hearts were broken. The Navajo people almost died out.”

Aunt Bonita turned to Cody with a grim smile. “Then one day the government agreed to let the tattered remains of our tribe return home. They didn’t give back all our land, just the poorest, driest, most hard-scrabble part. Only now they had a new name for it. They called it ‘the Indian Reservation’. They herded us on to it like prisoners, and told us we weren’t allowed to leave.”

“Navajo people didn’t win the right to travel outside the reservation till 1924!” Aunt Jeannie chipped in.

Cody looked as if her head was spinning. “I don’t get it,” she said, bewildered. “The land belonged to you.”

“You got that the wrong way round, honey,” Aunt Evalina corrected. “That’s how white people think. This land doesn’t belong to us. We belong to the land. When we go away, it suffers. When we return, it welcomes us like our mother.”

“Look out of the window, Cody,” Aunt Jeannie said softly. “Dinetah is welcoming you now.”

Maybe it was Aunt Jeannie’s absolute belief that what she was saying was true, but I suddenly seemed able to see this barren landscape as the aunts saw it. This empty desert was alive! The waves of heat rising off the road, the cries of birds, the desert wind bending back thousands of feathery wild grasses; everything sang,
Welcome home
!