Kiss of the Bees (15 page)

“Your father’s a crook.” Danny Jenkins, the chief bully of Maxwell Junior High, whispered in Lani’s ear as the yellow school bus rumbled down the road. “You wait and see. Before long, he’ll end up in prison, too, just like his son.”

Lani had turned to face her tormentor. Red-haired, rednecked, and pugnacious, Danny had made Lani’s life miserable from the moment he had first shown up in Tucson two years earlier after moving there from Mobile, Alabama.

“No, he won’t!” Lani hissed furiously.

“Will, too.”

“Prove it.”

“Why should I? It says so on TV. That means it’s true, doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t,
s-koshwa
—stupid,” she spat back at him. “It just means you’re too dumb to turn off the set.”

“Wait a minute. What did you call me?”

“Nothing,” she muttered.

She turned away, thinking that if she ignored him, that would be the end of it. Instead, he grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked it hard enough that the back of her head bounced off the top of the seat. Tears sprang to her eyes.

“Leave her alone, Danny,” Jessica Carpenter ordered. “You’re hurting her.”

“She called me a name—some shitty Indian name. I want to know what it was.”

Lani, with her head pulled tight against the back of the seat, clamped her lips shut. But just because Lani stayed quiet, didn’t mean Jessica Carpenter would.

“I’m telling,” Jessica yelled. “Driver, driver! Danny Jenkins is pulling Lani’s hair.”

The driver didn’t bother looking over her shoulder. “Knock it off, Danny,” she said. “Stop it right now or you’re walking.”

“But she called me a name,” Danny protested. “It sounded bad. Koshi something.”

“I don’t care what she called you. I said knock it off.”

Danny had let go of Lani’s hair, but that still wasn’t the end of it. “Why don’t you go back to the reservation, squaw,” he snarled after her as they stepped off the bus. “Why don’t you go back to where you belong?”

She turned on him, eyes flashing. “Why don’t you?” she demanded. “The Indians were here first.”

Nobody liked Danny Jenkins much, although over time his flailing fists had earned him a certain grudging respect. But now, the kids who overheard Lani’s retort laughed and applauded.

“You really told him,” Jessica said approvingly later on their way to class. “He’s such a jerk.”

Going home that afternoon, Lani and Jessica chose seats as far from Danny as possible, but after the bus pulled out of the parking lot, he bribed the girl sitting behind Lani to trade places. When Lani and Jessica got off the bus twenty minutes later, they found that a huge wad of bubblegum had been plastered into Lani’s hair.

They went into the bathroom at Jessica’s house. For an hour, the two of them struggled to comb out the gum, but combing didn’t work.

“It’s just getting worse,” Jessica said finally, giving up. “Let’s call your mother. Maybe she’ll know what to do.”

Lani shook her head. “Mom and Dad have enough to worry about right now. Bring me the scissors.”

“Scissors,” Jessie echoed. “What are you going to do?”

“Cut it off.”

“You can’t do that,” Jessie protested. “Your hair’s so long and pretty . . .”

“Yes, I can,” Lani told her friend determinedly. “And I will. It’s my hair.”

In the end Jessica helped wield the scissors. She cut the hair off in what was supposed to be a straight line, right at the base of Lani’s neck.

“How does it look?” Lani asked as Jessica stepped back to eye her handiwork.

Jessie made a face. “Not that good,” she admitted. “It’s still a little crooked.”

“That’s all right,” Lani said. “It’ll grow out.”

“So will mine,” Jessie said, handing Lani the scissors.

For a moment, Lani didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

“Cut mine, too. People tease us about being twins. This way, we still will be.”

“But what will your mother say?” Lani asked.

“The same thing yours does,” Jessica returned.

Fifteen minutes later, Jessie Carpenter’s hair was the same ragged length as Lani’s. Before they left the bathroom, Lani gathered up all the cuttings into a plastic trash bag. Instead of putting the bag in the garbage, however, she loaded it into her backpack along with her books.

“What are you doing?” Jessica asked.

“I’m going to take it home and use it to make a basket.”

“Really? Out of hair?”

Lani nodded. “Nana
Dahd
showed me once how to make horsehair baskets. This will be an
o’othham wopo hashda
—people-hair basket.”

Hair had been the main topic of conversation that night at both the Walker household and at the Carpenters’ just up the road.

“Whatever happened to your hair?” Brandon Walker demanded. “It looks like you got it caught in the paper cutter at school.”

“It was too long,” Lani answered quietly. “I decided to cut it off. Jessie cut hers, too.”

“You cut it yourself?”

Lani shrugged. “Jessie cut mine and I cut hers.”

Silenced by a reproving look from Diana, Brandon shook his head and let the subject drop, subsiding into a gloomy silence.

The next day was Saturday. With the enthusiastic approval of Rochelle Carpenter, Jessie’s mother, Diana collected both girls and took them to her beauty shop in town to repair the damage.

“You both look much better now,” Diana had told them on the way back home. “What I don’t understand is why, if you both wanted haircuts, you didn’t say something in the first place instead of cutting it off yourselves.”

Jessie kept quiet, waiting to see how Lani would answer. “We just decided to, that’s all,” she said.

Since Lani didn’t explain anything more about the fight on the bus, neither did Jessie. As for Diana, she was so accustomed to the vagaries of teenagers that she let the matter drop.

Several weeks later, Lani emerged from her bedroom carrying a small flat disk of a basket about the size of a silver dollar. Diana Ladd had spent thirty years on and around the reservation. Over those years she had become something of an expert on
Tohono O’othham
basketry and she recognized that her daughter, Rita Antone’s star pupil, was especially skilled. As soon as Diana saw this new miniature basket, she immediately recognized the quality of the workmanship in the delicate pale-yellow Papago maze set against a jet-black background.

“I didn’t know you ever made baskets like this,” Diana said, examining the piece. “Where did you get the horsehair?”

“It’s not horsehair,” Lani answered. “It’s made from Jessie’s hair and from mine. I’m making two of them, one for each of us to wear. I’m going to give Jessie hers for her birthday.”

Diana looked at her daughter. “Is that why you cut your hair, to make the baskets?”

Lani laughed and shook her head. “No,” she said, “I’m making the baskets because we cut our hair.”

“Oh,” Diana said, although she still wasn’t entirely sure what Lani meant.

It was another month before Jessie’s maze was finished as well. Each of the baskets had a tiny golden safety pin fastened to the back side. Lani strung a leather thong through each of the pins, tied her necklace around her neck, and then went to Jessica’s house carrying the other basket in a tiny white jeweler’s box she had begged from Diana.

“It’s beautiful,” Jessie said, staring down at the necklace. “What does it mean?”

“It means that we’re friends,” Lani answered. “I made the two baskets just alike so we can still be twins whenever we wear them.”

“I know that we’re friends,” Jessie giggled. “But the design. What does that mean?”

“It’s a sacred symbol,” Lani explained. “The man in the maze is
I’itoi
—Elder Brother. He comes from the center of the earth. The maze spreads out from the center in each of the four directions.”

In the years since then, the black-and-gold disk had become something of a talisman for Lani Walker. She called it her
kushpo ho’oma
—her hair charm. The original leather thong had been replaced several times over. Now when she wore it, the basket dangled from a slender gold chain Lani’s parents had given her on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday.

The people-hair charm served as a reminder that some people were good and some were bad. Lani didn’t wear it every day, only on special occasions—only when she needed to. There were times when she was nervous or worried about something—as on the day she went to the museum to apply for the job, for instance—that she made sure the necklace went with her.

Having the basket dangling around her neck seemed to give her luck. Every once in a while, she would run her fingertips across the finely woven face of the maze. Just touching the smooth texture seemed to calm her somehow. In a way Lani couldn’t quite explain, the tiny basket made her feel more secure—almost as if it summoned Nana
Dahd
’s spirit back and brought the old basket maker close to her once more.

Coming out of the bathroom with her hair sleek and dry, Lani looked at the clothing she had laid out on a chair the night before—the lushly flowered Western shirt with pearl-covered snaps, a fairly new pair of jeans, shiny boots, and a fawn-colored cowboy hat. Walking past the chair, Lani went to her dresser and opened her jewelry box. She smiled as the first few bars of “When You Wish Upon a Star” tinkled into the room.

Taking her treasured maze necklace from its place of honor, she fastened it around her throat.

Mr. Vega—that was the name the artist had signed in the bottom right-hand corner of the sketch, (M. Vega)—had asked her to wear something Indian. Of all the things Lani Walker owned, her
o’othham wopo hashda
—people-hair basket—was more purely “Indian” than anything else.

Mr. Vega might not know that, but Lani did, and that’s what counted.

David Ladd was still reeling from the effects of yet another panic attack that Saturday morning as he finished packing his things into his new Jeep Cherokee for the long road trip back to Arizona. Even though it was a bald-faced lie, he had told his grandmother, Astrid Ladd, that he wanted to get an early start that morning.

As expected, Astrid came out of the main house to watch the loading process. She stood in the driveway between the main house and the carriage house, leaning on her cane and shaking her head as he closed the rear hatch on his carefully packed load.

“All done?”

Davy nodded. “I should probably hit the road pretty soon.”

“This early?” Astrid objected. “You can’t do that. I wanted to take you to the club one last time before you go. Not only that, if you’re going to be driving all that way by yourself, it’s important for you to keep up your strength. You should start out with a decent breakfast under your belt.”

What David knew but didn’t mention to Astrid right then was that on the first day of his trip he would be driving only as far as downtown Chicago. There, just off North Michigan Avenue on Pearson, he and Candace Waverly—his girlfriend of six months’ standing—planned to spend their farewell night ensconced in a deluxe suite at the Ritz Carlton. It was a graduation gift from Candace to Davy, compliments of the Gold AmEx card Richard Waverly provided for his darling daughter.

“Sure, Grandma,” David said, accepting his grandmother’s invitation gracefully, as he had known in advance that he would. “I suppose I can stay long enough to have breakfast,” he added.

Evanston, the town, is dry. Evanston, the golf club—across the line in Skokie—is definitely wet. That was the other thing David Ladd was both smart and discreet enough not to mention. The reason Astrid Ladd wanted to have breakfast at the golf club—which she did several times a week—had less to do with the quality of the food than it did with the inevitable Bloody Mary or two that would accompany her order of eggs Benedict.

At seventy-eight, Astrid Ladd was old enough to still observe the strictures against solitary drinking. According to her long-held beliefs, only problem drinkers drank alone. Astrid and her late husband, Garrison Walther Ladd II, had been part of the fashionable drinking set their whole married life. Living in a dry town, they had done their drinking at home, in other people’s homes or in private clubs. David’s grandfather had been dead for five years now. He had hemorrhaged to death, dying as a result of esophageal varices which were most likely related to all those years of social drinking.

With her husband and best tippling buddy gone, Astrid Ladd still wanted to drink, but she was terrified of being caught in the very unladylike trap of drinking alone. As a consequence, she spent her days plotting a vigorously active social calendar that usually involved suckering some poor unsuspecting chump into driving her out to the club early for her daily ration of grog. Later on, she would prevail on somebody else to chauffeur her home.

On this hazy, and already hot summer morning in early June, David Ladd drove both ways. Leaving behind his upstairs carriage house apartment with its magnificent view of Lake Michigan, he pulled up to the side entrance of his grandmother’s oversized mansion in Astrid’s aging but equally oversized 1988 DeVille. She came out onto the porch and stood waiting, leaning heavily on her cane, while David hustled out of the car and helped her into the rider’s side.

“I can’t believe you’re done with school already,” Astrid said as he eased her into the leather seat. “Three whole years! The time just flew by, didn’t it? I’m going to miss you desperately, Davy. You don’t know how much.”

Actually, Davy did know. The drafty old house was far too big for Astrid. In fact, most of the upstairs and part of the ground floor had been closed off for years, since long before Davy appeared on the scene. Several times during his sojourn at Northwestern, David Ladd had hinted to his grandmother that maybe it was time for her to consider unloading the family home. He suggested that she might enjoy moving into a more reasonably sized condo, one that didn’t require nearly as much upkeep. Astrid had dismissed the idea out of hand, and after the second rejection Davy hadn’t mentioned it again.

“And I’m going to miss that lovely Candace,” Astrid continued. “I probably shouldn’t, but I can’t help thinking of her as a granddaughter.”