Day of the Dead (12 page)

She spoke with the air of one trying to forget even as she remembered. Tears welled in her eyes. Brian gave her a moment to compose herself while he mentally calculated the distance a pickup truck, traveling at legal highway speed, might have covered in the space of an hour.

Just then a van containing two members of the CSI team pulled up behind Brian’s vehicle. Deputy Gomez went to meet them. He led them forward, pointing as he went. Brian stayed with Sue Lammers.

“Did you see anything that would help us?”

“No. He was too far away.”

“He?” Brian asked. “You’re sure it was a male?”

“Not really,” Sue admitted. “I mean, it looked like a man. I saw him walk from the truck into the desert and then back again. He went back and forth a couple of times. I thought he was dumping garbage, but I worried about it all the same. I mean, I was out here by myself. The last trip he made, he must have seen me. That’s when he jumped into the truck and took off.”

“When you go walking by yourself like this, are you armed?” Brian asked.

“No,” Sue said quickly. “I have my cell phone along in case anything happens, but that’s all. I don’t believe in carrying weapons. Neither does my husband.”

Maybe you should,
Brian thought. He said, “You mentioned the driver made several trips back and forth to the truck?”

“Yes.”

“Was he carrying something each time?”

“Yes.”

Brian was about to ask Sue Lammers another question when Deputy Gomez hurried up to them. “Excuse me, Detective Fellows,” he said. “I think we just found something important.”

“What’s that?”

“A bundle of bloody clothing,” Gomez said.

“You think it belongs to the girl?” Brian asked.

“It’s a pretty good guess,” Gomez replied. “This was in one of the pockets.”

He held out a glassine bag. Inside it was a business card. Brian had to squint to read the print. “Erik LaGrange,” the card said. “Development Officer, Medicos for Mexico.” Brian turned the bag over. On the back of the card was a handwritten telephone number.

Brian jotted it down. “Well,” he said, “at least this gives us a place to start.”

***

Tohono O’odham tribal attorney
Delia Ortiz waddled into her office. Dropping heavily into her desk chair, she rolled it close enough to the desk so she could reach her computer keyboard over the hefty mound of her protruding belly. She usually didn’t come into her office on Saturdays, but with the baby due in two weeks and with her office’s budget proposal expected to appear before the tribal council the week after her due date, Delia was determined to be ahead of the game.

No one was more surprised than Delia to find herself pregnant at age forty-three. She hadn’t expected to be pregnant at age forty, either. She’d lost that one—a boy they’d named Adam—due to a late-term miscarriage during her sixth month of pregnancy. She had felt the baby’s loss keenly, but her grief had been nothing compared to her husband’s. Leo Ortiz had been utterly heartbroken. It was at his insistence and only partially because they were good Catholics that they’d done nothing about birth control. Now, here she was—three years later and three years older—pregnant again.

Wedged up against the edge of her desk, the baby—another boy—gave Delia’s tummy a solid kick. Remembering how it had felt when Adam had stopped kicking, she welcomed this minor disturbance—a reminder this new child was eager to make his grand entrance into the world.

Leo had been lobbying for them to pick out a name, but Delia had resisted. She had named Adam and then lost him. She was afraid that if she named this baby too soon, the same thing might happen.

Delia browsed through her new e-mail. Midway down she spotted
Mualig Siakam,
Lani Walker’s screen name, Forever Spinning, named after the young girl who had turned into Whirlwind. The subject line of Lani’s message said: “How’s he doing?”

Just as Lani Walker had done prior to sending the e-mail, Delia Cachora Ortiz stared at her screen for a long time before opening the message. She knew Lani was writing out of real concern for Gabe Ortiz’s health. Delia was concerned, too. In large measure, everything Delia treasured in life had its origin in Fat Crack Ortiz. To a certain extent, that was true of Lani and Davy Walker as well. Delia knew Wanda and Gabe Ortiz were Lani’s and Davy’s godparents. Still, a surge of resentment boiled up in Delia’s heart the moment she saw the listing.

What business was it of Lani Walker’s to ask about Fat Crack’s health and well-being? Delia herself owed her own debt of gratitude to Gabe Ortiz, but she was sick and tired of seeing Leo—her husband and one of Gabe and Wanda’s two real sons—being pushed aside by what Delia couldn’t help but regard as a pair of interlopers.

Biting back her anger, Delia opened the message:

Dear Delia,

It’s Friday night and I can’t sleep. I’m really worried about Fat Crack. Would you please drop me a line and let me know how he is? It’s almost the end of the semester. If he’s really bad and needs me to, I can come home early.

Lani

That was the last straw! If he needs me? What did that mean? Did Lani Walker expect to come traipsing out to Gabe and Wanda’s place and push Leo and Richard aside so she could keep her own death watch?

Delia had heard all the talk about Lani Walker growing up to be a medicine woman and a doctor. She had spent too many years in the Anglo world to put much store in all the medicine-woman mumbo-jumbo, but she had taken a serious interest in how Fat Crack Ortiz intended to turn Lani Walker into a physician. He had insisted that if Lani Walker was going to come home and serve as a doctor on the reservation, the Tohono O’odham needed to pony up the money.

Having a realistic idea of exactly how expensive sending a student through medical school would be, Delia had tried to derail the idea. As tribal attorney, she had argued long and hard before the tribal council about the fiscal irresponsibility of doing just that. Of course, the Tohono O’odham tribe needed to have home-grown health care professionals—doctors and nurses whose first loyalty would be to the Desert People—but Delia thought it was wrong to use tribal funds to educate someone whose parents could well afford to pay the tuition themselves.

Gabe had still been tribal chairman then. For Delia to go up against her own father-in-law and then lose in such a public fashion had caused a reservation-wide stir. It had also caused familial difficulties between Delia and her in-laws that lingered to this day and colored all Delia’s interactions with Gabe and Wanda Ortiz.

He’s dying,
Delia thought,
but he is fine
. With that, she clicked the “reply” button and typed:

Dear Lani,

Gabe is fine. No need for you to rush home. I’ll let you know if anything changes.

Delia Cachora Ortiz

She punched “send” without giving herself a chance to reconsider. With the e-mail off in the ethers, Delia found she was far too upset to concentrate. Abandoning her plan to spend the morning working in her office, she switched off her computer, turned off the lights, locked the door, and left.

Out in the parking lot, she climbed into her aging Saab 9000 and headed for the little chapel at Topawa several miles south of Sells. It was the place where her mother had gone seeking refuge and comfort more than thirty-five years earlier. It was where Delia went looking for relief from her ever-present burden of guilt.

Delia knew that being at war with Lani Walker would only worsen the difficult situation with her father-in-law. Fat Crack Ortiz wasn’t simply Leo’s father and the grandfather of the child Delia carried. He wasn’t just the man who had hired her and brought her back to the reservation in triumph years after she and her mother had fled Manny Chavez’s house in Sells in abject terror. Fat Crack was, in fact, the one person who had made their escape possible even way back then. Everything else that had happened to her, good and bad, flowed from that.

Everything else.

***

I’m scared,
” seven-year-old Delia had told her mother. “Do we have to go? Couldn’t we just stay here?”

Ellie Chavez shook her head and kept on packing. “This is my chance to become a teacher,” she told her daughter determinedly, pretending a bravery she didn’t feel. “Sister Justine got me into this special program at Arizona State University. If I don’t do it now, I never will. I’ll be a teacher’s aide all my life—an aide but not a teacher.”

“But why do Eddie and I have to go?” Delia asked. “Couldn’t we stay here with Daddy or with Aunt Julia?”

“No,” Ellie said firmly. “It wouldn’t work. Your father wouldn’t—”

“Your father wouldn’t what?” Manuel Chavez demanded, appearing unexpectedly in the doorway. He stood with his wide body blocking the glare of the afternoon sun and throwing a giant shadow that spread like a dark cloud all the way across the room.

Delia, standing a few feet from her mother, felt a sharp twinge of fear rise in her throat. Even at seven, she knew the danger signs. She could see the half-consumed quart bottle of tequila Manny Chavez held at his side, strategically concealing it behind the outside wall of their government-built house. From Delia’s position, she could see the bottle plainly. Her mother could not.

“I was saying that it would be too hard on you to work and take care of Delia and Eddie all by yourself. And Aunt Julia already has her own grandkids to look after. That’s why Delia and Eddie have to go to Tempe with me.”

“No, they don’t,” Manny said. “Nobody’s going to Tempe.” Stepping forward, he brought the bottle into full view, raised it to his lips, and took a long swig.

Ellie sighed. She and Manny had discussed the ASU program earlier, and she had thought the matter settled. At the time they had reached what she assumed to be a final decision, Manny was on the wagon. Now he was off. That was another reason—the real reason—Ellie couldn’t risk leaving the children alone with their father. There were reasons beyond that as well—painfully secret reasons she had never discussed with anyone, including her beloved auntie—
Ni-thahth
Julia.

If Ellie’s parents had still been alive, she might have discussed her worries with her mother. No doubt Anthony and Guadalupe Francisco would have been thrilled to look after their grandchildren while Ellie went off to school. Unfortunately, Ellie’s parents were dead. They had died six years earlier in a Saturday-night car wreck as they returned home after buying groceries in Tucson. When it came to taking care of her children, Ellie Chavez was definitely on her own.

“Come on, Manny,” Ellie said reasonably, hoping to cajole her way around him as she had countless times before. “We’ve been over all this. You said I could go and let me sign up.”

“I changed my mind,” Manny said. “Now you’re staying here.”

“Too bad,” Ellie returned. “I’m going anyway, and that’s final. Sister Justine pulled all kinds of strings to make this work. She’s even arranged a place for us to stay.”

“A place for
you
to stay,” Manny Chavez said pointedly. “I don’t remember being invited.” He paused and took another long swig from the bottle. “I don’t care what Sister Justine did. She’s a troublemaker,” he added. “She’s trying to break us up.”

“Manny!” Ellie exclaimed. “Don’t say that in front of Delia. Sister Justine’s doing no such thing. She thinks I’ll be a good teacher, that’s all. She thinks so, and so do I.”

Manuel Chavez stepped farther into the room. “We were doing just fine with you as an aide and with me driving a bus. Why isn’t that good enough?”

“Because being an aide isn’t the same as being a real teacher,” Ellie insisted. “I want to be one of the first Tohono O’odham teachers here at Sells. It’ll set a good example for our kids and for other kids, too. It’s not right that all the teachers on the reservation are
Mil-gahn
.”

“You’ll set an example, all right,” Manny Chavez muttered, taking another step forward. “If you leave here, you’ll never come back, and you won’t get the kids, either. I won’t let you.”

“Yes, you will.”

To most of the world, Ellie Chavez included, those three small words, spoken quietly but resolutely, might have been considered a minor act of disobedience. With Manny they provoked outright war. He attacked her with the bottle and with his one free fist while Delia cowered in one corner and Eddie screamed from his crib. Ellie Chavez fought back. Although her husband outweighed her, he was also very drunk. In the end, that cost him.

He landed several telling blows. Delia watched in horror as her mother went down, blood spouting from her nose and lips. She landed on the floor and lay still. Manny staggered over to her. “I told you,” he muttered. “Nobody’s going to Tempe.”

With that, Manny raised his foot and aimed a vicious kick at his stricken wife. Seeing her father raise his foot, Delia knew what he was going to do. It was more than she could stand. With a screech of outrage, Delia rushed from her hiding place. She tackled her father from behind, hitting him just at knee level. Since he was already off balance, Delia’s unexpected blow was enough to send Manny crashing face-first into a corner of the coffee table. As he fell, the bottle was still gripped in his hand. When it smashed into the concrete floor it exploded, sending a spray of tequila and broken glass across the room.

Delia watched him fall and lie still. For several awful moments she expected he would rise and come after her mother again, but he didn’t. Slowly, covering her bleeding mouth with one hand, Ellie struggled to her feet. Bright red blood spewed from her nose and from cuts on her upper and lower lips. A long bloody scrape stretched from the tip of her nose to the top of her forehead, where she had fallen on the side of one of three matching suitcases the nuns at Topawa had given her as a going-away present.

For a moment, Ellie, too, stood over her husband as if expecting he would lumber to his feet and renew the attack. Instead, worn out with a combination of booze and physical exertion, his breathing settled into a drunken snore. Afraid Eddie’s screams might waken him, Ellie grabbed the baby from his crib and tried to quiet him. Once he settled, she examined both children to see if they had been cut or injured by that shower of broken glass, but the blood on the children had come from her own wounds.