The people of Rattlesnake Skull Village were angry with the Apache for stealing their food, but they were even angrier at Young Girl. Even though she had tried to warn them of the attack, they thought she had betrayed them. And so the council changed her name and said that from that time on she would be called Betraying Woman—Gagdathag O’oks.
Young Man had been badly hurt when the women beat him. They carried Young Man back to the cave. Then they brought Betraying Woman there as well along with everything she owned—her pots and baskets, her blankets and awl. Then, leaving Young Man and Betraying Woman inside to die, they asked I’itoi to bring down the mountain and close the entrance to the cave.
Betraying Woman stayed with Young Man until he died, caring for him as best she could. And even to this day, nawoj, my friend, when you hear the wind whispering through the manzanita—the bush for which Ioligam is named—you will know it is only Betraying Woman singing a song to Young Man.
Go to sleep, Sweet Ohb. Do not be afraid.
I will not let them hurt you. I will not let them come again
To beat you with their clubs and call you evil names.
No matter what they think, Sweet Ohb, we did not betray them.
They did not listen when I tried to warn them.
They did not listen when I tried to tell them
That you were not the one who stole from them,
That you were not the enemy who spoiled their fields.
No, Sweet Ohb, although we tried to tell them
They did not listen. But do not worry. I will not leave you.
We will stay here together, Sweet Ohb,
You and I together—alone and in the dark.
IT SEEMED TO Brandon that they’d escaped the Authors’ Dinner a little earlier than usual. They drove most of the way home in companionable silence. Speedway Boulevard narrowed first from three lanes in each direction, to two, and finally to one as they followed the winding road up into Gates Pass and off onto the dirt track that led to the house.
As the city lights fell away behind them, the stars and a rising moon appeared in a now jet-black sky. When Brandon and Diana married and he had moved in with her and Davy, the house had been a long way out of town, and neighbors had been few and far between. Now the surrounding hillsides were dotted with McMansions, most of them far larger than the river rock relic Diana and her friend Rita Antone had turned from wreckage into a livable home. Their house and pool were far smaller and humbler than those of most of their neighbors, but they were also something most of the others were not—completely paid for.
Leaving the Escalade parked in the detached garage, Diana and Brandon headed for the house. As they did so, Bozo, their aging grand-dog, rose stiffly from his heated bed on the back patio and limped forward, tail a-wag, to greet them. Their son-in-law, Dan Pardee, had been Bozo’s original owner, or maybe, as Diana often pointed out, it had been the other way around. Dan had been Bozo’s handler in Iraq and credited him with saving his life in combat. When Dan’s deployment ended, he had used his own money to bring Bozo home to the United States. They had worked together as a K-9 unit attached to the Border Patrol’s Shadow Wolves.
Three years earlier, Dan and Bozo had gone after an illegal border crosser who had been packing two kilos of meth. Fleeing up the side of a mountain, the smuggler had, deliberately or not, sent an avalanche of rocks and boulders roaring down the mountainside behind him. Dan had managed to escape injury by diving out of the way. Bozo wasn’t as lucky. A vet had been able to save the dog’s life and wire his shattered shoulder back together, but Bozo’s resulting limp meant that his K-9 unit days were over. When Dan’s next K-9 partner, Hulk, arrived, Bozo had gone into mourning every day when Dan and the new dog left to go on duty. The best solution anyone could come up with, supplied by Lani, had been for Bozo to go live with Grandpa and Grandma.
There was a doggy door in the back of the house, one that Bozo steadfastly refused to use. He much preferred to be outside rather than in, but wherever he was, inside or out, he would wait patiently until a passing human opened the door before entering or exiting. Brandon suspected that the plastic sheeting hitting his shoulder bothered Bozo too much, and Brandon was the one who had insisted on installing a heated dog bed outside on the patio for Bozo to use on these still very chilly desert spring evenings.
“You’re making him soft,” Dan had objected when he saw the bed. “He never needed anything like that when we were in Iraq.”
“He isn’t in Iraq,” Brandon had countered. “He’s a veteran. He’s home now. He gets a heated bed. End of story.”
And it was.
Brandon unlocked the back door, switched on the kitchen light, and let Diana inside. “You go on to bed,” he told her. “Bozo and I are going to sit out here and be quiet together for a little while. Being stuck in crowds of people with all of them talking at once wears me out.”
“Suit yourself,” Diana said. “But if you’re going to be out here very long, turn on your heater, too.”
Flicking the switch, Brandon turned on one of the infrared heat lamps that lined the wooden ceiling of the patio and dropped into one of the chairs. Bozo stood beside him long enough to have his ears rubbed. Then, as if realizing they’d be there for a while, the dog limped back to his bed. He circled twice. With a contented sigh, Bozo lay down to sleep while Brandon leaned back to think.
That was what he needed at the end of a far too social evening—a little peace and quiet, with the delicate perfume of orange blossoms drifting on the chilly air.
AFTER LEO LEFT Lani and Gabe alone on the mountain, the first order of business was to build a fire pit. While Gabe reluctantly set about doing that, Lani unpacked the food and dishes. Once the fire was going, she emptied a bowl of precooked beans into the pot to heat. They were tepary beans, the ones the Tohono O’odham had traditionally grown and used long before the arrival of pinto beans.
The beans in question may have been part of Tohono O’odham’s ancient customs and traditions, but Lani’s manner of transporting them was not. She had loaded them into the backpack inside a sturdy plastic Ziploc container. She realized with some satisfaction, however, that the battered enameled pot she’d brought to heat them was the same one Fat Crack had used to prepare her evening meals during her sixteen-day purification ceremony. The dishes into which she ladled the steaming beans were also the ones she and Fat Crack had used back then.
Tonight she and Fat Crack’s grandson ate their food in a cloud of stubborn silence. When it was over, Lani heated some water and made a hot drink of prickly pear juice and water sweetened with honey.
“I’d rather have a Coke,” Gabe said.
“I’m sure you would,” Lani said mildly, “but sodas aren’t the point of this trip.”
“What is?”
She glanced at the fire. “Do you remember the story of Betraying Woman?” she asked.
“Not really,” Gabe replied.
“You used to know it.”
Gabe shrugged. “So?”
“Then maybe I should remind you.” She told the story then, from beginning to end.
“So that’s what this is about?” Gabe asked sarcastically when she finished telling him the story of Young Man and Betraying Woman. “We’re just going to sit around out here in the middle of nowhere and tell ghost stories all night?”
Lani felt discouraged. This should have been a time when she could give Fat Crack’s grandson the benefit of some of the old man’s wisdom. For years, she had imagined coming here with the boy when he was almost, if not completely, grown, and being able to share the Peace Smoke with him. She had hoped to be able to tell him about her battle with the evil ohb; about how Bat and the spirit of Betraying Woman had aided her in the fight; and about how Fat Crack had helped her deal with the aftermath of that awful day.
That’s what she had always wanted to do, but somehow Gabe had morphed into a difficult young man who had no patience for or interest in the old ways. It saddened Lani to think that perhaps he had drifted completely beyond her reach.
She took a deep breath. “You used to love the I’itoi stories,” Lani pointed out. “When you were little, you used to come to the hospital with me. You liked to visit the patients, especially the old ones. Sometimes you would listen while they told stories, and sometimes you would do the telling.”
“I was little then,” Gabe countered. “I believed in all that crap back then, along with Santa Claus and other stupid stuff that I don’t believe in anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I grew up.”
Lani reached over to her backpack and pulled out her medicine basket. Inside she found the soft leather pouch that held her divining crystals. Lani supposed that those four pieces of lavender-colored rock must have originally come from the wreckage of a geode that had been smashed to pieces long ago. The tiny rocks themselves, as well as the worn pouch that held them, had been passed down from S-ab Neid Pi Has—Looks at Nothing—to Gigh Tahpani—Fat Crack—and from Fat Crack to Lani. She had always supposed that one day they would go to Gabe. At the moment that outcome seemed unlikely.
“Have you ever seen divining crystals?” she asked, emptying the shards of rock into her hand. When she held them up, one at a time, they winked in the firelight.
“So this is what, like reading tea leaves or something?” Gabe asked, his voice dripping with contempt. “You look into them somehow and see the future?”
“It’s not exactly like reading tea leaves,” Lani said. “Do you remember back when you were in third grade? I went with you on a nighttime school field trip to Kitt Peak, and they let us take turns looking through the telescopes.”
“Sure, I remember,” Gabe said with a laugh. “For a long time, I thought I’d be an astronomer someday when I grew up. I’m over that, too, by the way.”
Ignoring his sarcasm, Lani continued. “When the scientists up there . . .” She paused and motioned with her head toward the collection of invisible buildings on top of the mountain that made up the Kitt Peak National Observatory. “When they look through their telescopes, they use powerful lenses to focus on things that eyes alone could never see. These crystals work the same way. They allow your mind to focus on things that you can’t necessarily see. Here, try it.”
She passed the crystals over to Gabe. For a long time, he stared down at them. Finally, reluctantly, he held the first one up to his eye, peering through it at Lani.
“What do you see?” she prompted.
“You, of course.”
“Be honest now,” she said. “Tell the truth. Tell me what you really see. Don’t you see someone who’s a friend of your parents? Someone who won’t mind her own business and keeps telling you what to do?”
Gabe looked crestfallen. “I guess,” he admitted.
“Try again. Look at the fire this time,” she suggested. “What do you see there?”
He held up the second crystal and peered through it.
“I see a fire,” he answered, “a fire and nothing else.”
“But what is your mind focusing on as you look at the fire? Are you grateful to be sitting by it, glad of its warmth, or are you thinking something else? Maybe, instead of watching the fire burn, you’d rather be at home, playing with your Xbox or watching TV.”
The startled expression on the boy’s face told Lani that she had hit the nail on the head. Gabe immediately passed the crystals back to Lani.
“Obviously I’m no good at this,” he said.
“All right,” Lani agreed. “Let me try.” She held one of the crystals up to her eye. “I see a boy who was born in the backseat of a car the night his grandfather was buried. Fat Crack knew before you were born that you would be a boy. He hoped you’d follow in his footsteps.”
“And be what, a medicine man?” Gabe asked with a derisive snort. “Right. How much money do medicine men make these days? Where do they go to school?”
“Medicine men go to school in places just like this,” Lani said quietly. “They sit around fires and listen to stories—the stories their ancestors used to explain why the world around them—their particular world—was the way it was. Those stories don’t have to be scientifically accurate to be true, to contain elements of truth.”
Gabe remained unconvinced. “Whatever,” he said dismissively, shaking his head.
Lani held up the second crystal. Looking through it, she frowned as she spoke. “I see something strange here—a woman, a white-haired Milgahn woman. I don’t understand it, but she’s dangerous somehow. You need to stay away from her.”
Lani found the idea of an Anglo woman being a Dangerous Object both worrisome and puzzling. Dangerous Objects were an essential part of the Tohono O’odham tradition of Staying Sickness. According to ancient customs, there were two kinds of sicknesses abroad in the world. Traveling Sicknesses, the kinds caused by germs, were the ones Dr. Walker-Pardee routinely treated with antibiotics. Those affected everybody, Indian and Anglo alike. Staying Sicknesses, on the other hand, a kind of Spirit Sickness, were caused by Dangerous Objects and affected Indians only. A Spirit Sickness was usually diagnosed and treated by a Tohono O’odham healer—a medicine man or medicine woman—by means of a combination of traditional chants—kuadk—and related devices.
Coyote Sickness, for example, was caused by someone eating a Dangerous Object—perhaps a melon that a coyote had bitten into. Someone suffering from Coyote Sickness could be treated with coyote feces—boiled and turned into a paste, and then rubbed on the patient’s body. People with Coyote Sickness could also be treated by a medicine man rubbing the patient’s body with a coyote’s tail.
Lani knew that as a baby she herself had once been considered a Dangerous Object due to the ant bites that had covered her body. What was disturbing in this instance, however, was that the dangerous object in question was an Anglo. How was that even possible?
Gabe, however, found none of this the least bit mystifying.
“I know who that is,” he said, “white hair and all. It’s got to be Mrs. Travers, the school principal. She hates my guts.”
Without further comment, Lani held up the third crystal. “This one says that you’re walking a difficult path right now,” she said, “traveling it with some friends. You’re about to come to a fork in that path. One fork leads to the PaDaj O’odham—the Bad People—who came out of the South to do battle with I’itoi. If you go the same way your friends do, you’ll end up being bad, too.”
Gabe turned on her accusingly. “Now you’re talking about my friends, the Josés. You probably know about them from talking to my parents and not from looking in that stupid crystal. But you know what else?” he demanded, standing up suddenly and wrapping one of Fat Crack’s blankets tightly around his shoulders. “My parents don’t get to dictate who my friends are, and neither do you.”
With that, he stalked away from the fire and back toward the path.
“Wait a minute,” Lani called after him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Home,” he said.
“It’s dark, and home is a long way from here,” she argued.
“Home may be, but the road isn’t. It’s Friday night. Someone coming back from town will give me a ride.”
“What if you trip and fall?”
“The moon’s up now,” he told her over his shoulder. “My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and I can see better than I would have thought possible. And just for safety’s sake, on my way down maybe I’ll ask for some help from that precious I’itoi guy of yours in hopes he’ll look out for me.”