Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days (13 page)

I don’t think I can live that way. And I’m
fairly certain George cannot live like that.

We’re leaving in eight
days. We have no choice. We cannot stay here any longer. Prophecy
or no, 480 days is going to have to be enough. We may as well head
to the Pueblo. We have no other place to go.

George, self-portrait

11/24/2056

I am proud of myself. I’ve just accomplished
the spiritual equivalent of the children’s game “Telephone.” OK,
“proud” is a little sarcastic.

My brother Earnesto’s spirit has been
hanging around a lot. Somehow, his fate and my journey are linked
together. Or maybe he’s just bored. He could just as easily want to
see his “perfect shaman brother” fall flat on his face. You never
know with brothers.

This morning, I asked him to find our
great-great-grandmother. The fact that we are leaving surrounded by
wasps and with less than 500 wasp-free days worries me. I wanted to
ask great-great-grandmother if we should stay or go.

Earnesto found my mother, who, as I
suspected, was with my father. He found my grandmother, who found
another relative. You can guess how this game went. Someone found
my great-great-grandmother and asked her to appear for me.

My great-great-grandmother was angry when
she appeared. She was told that I needed her help cooking an elk
fillet.

Yep spiritual “Telephone.”

My great-great-grandmother’s spirit came
tearing into the cell. She was furious that I would dare bother her
rest for something so trivial. She stood with finger raised, ready
to give me a tongue lashing when she heard the awful clamor of the
wasps outside the fence. Her face went still, and her finger
dropped. She simply said, “Oh.”

In a matter of moments, we cleared up all
misunderstanding. My great-graet-grandmother was like that in life.
She could switch from rage to calm and loving in a matter of
seconds, especially with her male children. She felt like males
were harder to control. She would have broken herself on me and my
brothers if not for our deep love for her -- and summer camp.

With George watching the door, she and I
held council. I told her everything that had happened. Our less
than 500 wasp-free days, the women, our work to get ready, and
finally our limited access out of the Pen. I even confessed to
starting this journal late.

(She laughed and said she assumed I would
start it late. As she used to joke, I was even late being
born.)

After we held council, she went to review
the situation for herself. When she returned, she asked if I would
tell her everything I knew about the wasps. I told her what little
I knew and what we had learned from the women. I told her about the
disturbing breeding project. I ended saying I thought the noise was
bringing wasps from all over New Mexico and maybe all over the
US.

She was frustrated with me for not keeping
track of how many souls I sent to the afterlife. But how could I
have kept track? There were thousands when the Pen transformed.
Right now, I’m back to sending on thousands of souls a day.

Of course, she would have done a better job.
She did a better job with everything. Better than I. Better than
anyone I’ve ever met. I asked her if human children were being
born, and she didn’t know. I asked her if any of our people
survived. She didn’t know that, either. She said I survived, and
that was good enough for her.

She hadn’t tolerated my whining as a child
and tolerated it much less now.

Then I had the oddest experience. All of my
life, she knew everything. She was the wisest person I’d ever met.
She had an opinion about every little detail of life, especially my
life. More than anything, she’d always known what to do. When I was
stuck, I could ask her, and she’d tell me what to do. If I did what
she said, I was always all right.

Look where going to prison got me. I’m the
only living Tewa.

Today, she didn’t know what to do. She had
no advice for me. She’d missed the rise of the wasps and the death
of the world she’d known. Yes, she’d dropped in to see me, but that
was about me. She had no idea the world had changed so much.

And frankly, I think it terrified her.

Even the rebirth of the streams, mountains,
and prairies was disturbing. For all the decades of believing and
repeating the prophecy, I don’t think she really believed it would
come to pass. Or if she did, I’m not sure she imagined anything
like this.

Who would?

Not one to waste time with sentimentality,
my great-great-grandmother left me to think. George and I went on
about our day. We killed a few thousand wasps, I moved their souls
along, and we had dinner. I’d frankly forgotten about my
great-great-grandmother when she came tearing back into the
cell.

“
You must leave as soon as
possible,” she said.

I must have looked surprised or maybe
stricken, because George turned to me with concern. I repeated what
she’d said. George shook his head. He was as unwilling as I to
leave our gear, our supplies, and the horses behind.

“
How?” I asked.

She smiled as if she was waiting for me to
ask and flew out of the cell. I had to run to keep up with her.
Unable to see her, George panicked and followed close behind me. We
went through our building and out onto the Pen campus. We ran down
the main road until we reached the Administration building. Like a
parade, I followed my great-great-grandmother’s spirit, and George
followed me. We entered the prison administration building, took a
quick turn, and went down another hallway.

Great-great-grandmother
went to the hoarding assistant warden’s office. She stopped behind
the woman’s desk and pointed to the wall. There was a cheap
reproduction on the wall of the historic
Jornada del Muerto
desert. She
pointed to a label on the map, and then to a book that magically
still sat on the assistant warden’s bookshelf. I picked up the
book.

The title read
Part-time Soldiers, Brave Soldiers: The History
of the New Mexican National Guard
by
Oswald Vega. I shrugged. My great-great-grandmother pointed to the
assistant warden’s nameplate. It said: Trudy Vega. This assistant
warden must have been related to the author of the book.

The book pages began to flip in my hand. My
great-great-grandmother was going through the pages until it fell
open to a page that discussed the area next to the prison. Before
the Great Human Transition, that area had housed the New Mexico
National Guard. The properties were adjacent but not connected.
There was a fence in between.

I looked at my great-great-grandmother for a
second, and she nodded. George grunted and gestured to something on
the page. I looked down.

There was a large supply tunnel into the
National Guard area. The black and white photo showed a wide
concrete tunnel lined with every kind of vehicle and even tanks.
The text said the tunnel went from under the National Guards area
to the open road.

“
Emil,” my
great-great-grandmother said, speaking my name.

It had been such a long time since I’d heard
my own name that I didn’t look up. George tapped me on the arm. I
looked at him, and he pointed toward where he’d heard the sound. I
looked at my great-great-grandmother.

“
You must leave as soon as
possible,” she said and disappeared.

I stared at the spot where she had been for
a long time. George touched my shoulder. I looked at him and told
him it was time to go. George pointed to the book, and I nodded. He
shook his head and pointed again. I shook my head because I had no
idea what he was talking about. George gestured for us to check
this new route first, and I nodded.

He started toward the door. At the door to
the assistant warden’s office, he waved for me to follow him.
Without saying another word, we left the assistant warden’s office.
We went through the administration building and out into the
sunshine. Seeing us, the wasps howled!

George took off across the compound. We ran
out of the administration building and down the road toward the
fence. George veered off a few feet from the fence. He went to what
had been a building sometime in the 1900s. The only thing that
remained was the outline of a foundation. Next to the foundation
was a set of six-foot-by-four-foot steel doors set in the dirt.
George pointed to the doors.

The doors were locked closed. There was a
chain thread through the door handles and a heavy steel padlock
holding the chains together. I picked up the lock and shook my
head. We weren’t going in that way.

George made an irritated sound and pointed
to the hinges of the doors. The hinges had rotted in the desert
heat. George lifted the metal doors as one unit and I slipped
underneath into some kind of root cellar. He followed me into the
root cellar. We waited for a few minutes until our eyes adjusted.
Then George took off to the end of the root cellar and turned
right.

Much to my amazement, there was another set
of metal doors. The locks had been broken some time ago. George put
his finger to his lips and pressed his head against the metal
doors. He nodded to me. He glanced at me before opening the doors.
He waved for me to follow him, which I did.

I stepped into a cement box. It was much
darker in this cement box. I could hear George moving around. In a
moment, the overhead lights came on.

I was standing in the National Guard’s
tunnels that went out to the streets. The tunnels were lined with
vehicles of every size. George waved me to the end where a large
four-wheel drive, medium-sized personnel carrier was parked. George
got in and turned the key.

The truck started. George’s grin told me
that he’d used this truck to get our supplies. I walked around it.
It already had puncture-proof tires. I lay down on the ground to
see if George had modified this vehicle. He had. I told him that it
was missing our flame throwers.

He grinned at me and turned off the truck.
He pointed to the wall of the tunnel. There was a line of propane
tanks along the wall. He’d gotten the propane tanks we were using
from here. I nodded. He pointed again. The corner of the tunnel was
an ammunitions depot. We could stock up on ammunition and weapons
here.

He held up two fingers to indicate that he
could have the truck ready to go in two hours.

Two hours.

I didn’t know whether to be excited or
terrified. George just grinned at me.

We have worked for years to get ready for
this exact moment. And now it was time.

While he worked on the truck, I led the
horses into the root cellar. They weren’t thrilled with being
underground, but they’d learned to trust me enough to follow my
lead. They both seemed relieved to make it into the National Guard
tunnel. I turned them over to George, who had rigged a small
trailer for them. The horses would ride inside the trailer behind
the personnel carrier. I returned to our hallway to pack the rest
of our gear.

We are really leaving! I am not taking this
typewriter. We just don’t have the room. I’m hoping to continue
this journal using a pen. (George found me a box of pens in the
National Guard’s supply cabinet.) I will take what’s left of the
coveted ream of paper.

Our journey begins at dawn. Thirty miles to
the Pecos Pueblo.