Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (2 page)

"Hey, Ray-Feel."

I lowered my hands.  The cat-faced Comanche boy sauntered over to me, looking unnecessarily confident.  He had two rattles around his ankles, not one.

"Ra-fa-
el
," I repeated, pissed off.

"Whatever," the Comanche guy said.  "I heard a rumor about you.  Is it true?"

The rattles and the heartbeat drums shut off in my head.  The guy's face got longer, sharper.  His mouth twisted cruelly.  Imaginary boom mics came down from the air, hovering behind him like hungry sharks.  The shadows that followed me everywhere curled open on the ground.

"I heard your dad's a serial killer," the Comanche kid said.

His voice rang and rippled, blasting across the lacrosse field.  My eardrums shattered.  Imaginary stage lights flashed on over the bleachers.  I tried not to wince, white filling my eyes.

"It's true, isn't it?" the Comanche guy said, in a voice that told me he was a hunter; he'd found his game.  "So why didn't you stop him?"

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that question, I'd have two hundred nickels.  I couldn't have stopped my dad because I hadn't known what he was doing.  Nobody had.  He'd belonged to our tribal council, a position of authority.  He'd pulled the hood over everybody's eyes.  We only found out what he was up to when his last victim, a kid my age, survived his throat getting cut.  If not for that kid's dumb luck, Dad might've gone on killing forever.

Dad might've gone on being my dad.

"I get it," the Comanche guy went on.  He sounded more braggart this time.  "I'll bet you kept his secret for him.  I'll bet you even helped him get rid of the bodies--"

The stage lights snapped off.  The boom mics dropped.  The jingling rattles and rattling drums filled my ears again.  Nobody was aware of our conversation.  Nobody was aware of the anger roiling in my chest.

Anger spread through my arms, pooling in the tips of my fingers.  My hands closed in fists.  My nails cut crescents in my palms.

I punched the Comanche guy.  His head cracked on my knuckles and rebounded like a ball on a tether.  He went down.  I could feel his fear reverberating through my hand.  This time the hoyyoy music stopped for real, shouts and gasps rising around me.  I didn't care.  I couldn't think about anything except how angry I was; how small I felt.  I got down on the guy's knees and grabbed his shirt, his head lolling when I lifted him partway off the grass.  I punched him again.  My knuckles stung with hornet bites.  My eyes stung, the field spinning around me.  I was scared.  I was scared because I couldn't stop myself, and I didn't know that I wanted to, and I didn't know who I was punching him for: me, or my dad.

Marcia Thunderbird ran over to me.  She pulled me off the Comanche by the back of my shirt, stronger than I'd thought she was.  She could have shaken me, or slapped sense into me, but she didn't.  That's not our way.  I'd lost sight of our way.  I'd broken just as many rules as Dad had.  I looked at the kid on the ground, his mouth already swelling, his eyes glassy and blown out.  He wasn't bleeding, but he breathed hard and fast.  I'd hurt him.  It hurt me that I'd hurt him.

It felt like I was blurring in and out of a daydream.

"I'm walking you to the bus," Marcia said to me.  Her voice shook with rage.

That's how I got banned from all six Indian reservations in Oklahoma.

The memory left me just as soon as it came.  I came to my senses, standing on rubbery legs.  Blue badlands converged around me in an icy grip, welcoming me home.  Home was the Nettlebush Reserve in Arizona, a stone's throw away from the Sonoran Desert.  A part of our tribe had moved here after the Bear River Massacre in 1863.  We weren't supposed to live this far south.  We were supposed to be Plains People, hunting the buffalo and the wild sheep.  We were supposed to live on the rivers, in the valleys, where the prairie lilies grew freckled and orange and the grass had blue-eyed buds.

It was nighttime, my favorite time of day.  Coyotes yowled from the crooked tent rocks far off on the horizon.  The eagles had nested by now.  The falcons hadn't.  I felt like a falcon just then, because I didn't have a nest, either.  I had a home and I didn't have a home.  I was born in Arizona, but my blood came from elsewhere.  I was born in Nettlebush, and I could have loved it there, but everyone else who was born there looked at me like I was a plague.  Maybe I was a plague.  Except for his eyes, except for Mom's dimples, I had my father's face: square chin, flat nose, flat cheeks.  Sometimes I'd looked at old pictures of him and thought I was looking at me.  People needed someone to hate when their wives, their children, their mothers went missing.  Dad wasn't here anymore; people couldn't hate him to his face.  I had his face.  I was his proxy.

A dove landed on the fuzzy glasswort growing to my left, the ground cracked around the weed's roots.  I thought it weird, because doves are diurnal, and anyway, you'll almost never find them out in the badlands.  I couldn't remember how to make a dove call, but I approached carefully; when the dove didn't ruffle her wings, I approached closer still.  She didn't warble at me, which was how I knew she was a girl.

"Hey," I said, gentle.  Or I tried.  My voice wouldn't come out at all.  Clammy panic gripped me.  I swallowed and tried again:  "Hey."  Still no voice.  Silence fell from my lips and tumbled on the cold, xeric air.  My skin stood up in gooseflesh.  I tasted my hair when it blew in my mouth, lank and stale and blue-black.

The dove took flight, gliding into the moon.  A gray feather fluttered on the breeze, sailing to the ground at my feet.  Doves molt like crazy in summer; I didn't think anything of it.  I bent down and picked up the feather, rubbing it between index finger and thumb.  It was smooth, soft as silk, rippling like water in moonlight.

"Hey," I murmured.  This time my voice came out like it was supposed to.  I calmed down.  I rolled my shoulders back, a weird numbness spreading through my body, like when you wake up in the middle of a deep dream and your limbs aren't ready to move yet.

I picked up the shaman's bota bag on the ground.  I hiked south, stinging with cold.

Between the coal seams and the promontory a canyon ran westward, the high rock faces red with aged ochre.  We've got a song about those cliffs.  "Temama mochikan, wennayo."  Only one person lived out there, the tribe's Natsugant, or shaman, or whatever you would call him in English.  Not that he actually spoke English.  I went into the canyon and walked up to his house, a wickiup of tanned animal skins stretched tight across a bare-bones wood frame.  The clay ground was dug up around the wickiup, peat moss gardens planted in the sand.  An ancient-looking buffalo skull rested on the ground alongside an empty water drum.  Shaman Quick sat in front of a small, sticky tallow fire, warming his hands by scarlet glow.  He was the oldest, oddest thing in Nettlebush, with wild, unkempt gray hair and leathery brown skin so wrinkled it looked like it belonged on a potato.  He looked up at me with cunning, hard eyes, and he stood, wearing nothing but a breechclout, peyote patterns in dark green and sharp orange and red.

"Summi!" the shaman said.

I laid the empty bota bag on the ground, surly.  "I drank the stuff," I said, but in Shoshone. 
Himpua hipippuh.

"And?" the shaman returned, sulky, unconvinced.

I shrugged.  "Dunno."

The shaman grew irate, age spots pinching small around his green-black eyes.  I wondered whether he was about to hit me.  That's not traditional way, though, and Shaman Quick was as traditional as they came.  In the end he didn't hit me, but snatched the bota bag off the ground, tying it to the breechclout on his waist.

"You swollen-headed fool of a boy," Shaman Quick said.  Nice weather we're having, he might as well have said.  "I know you saw visions.  Repeat them!"

I rubbed my elbow, feeling stupid.  You're supposed to hallucinate during the vision quest; that's why you drink the bawattsi.  I didn't want to tell the shaman I'd mostly seen my father, and my sister, and William Sleeping Fox in his hospital bed, his eyes unseeing.

"I couldn't talk," I said.

The shaman's face smoothed itself out.  "You couldn't talk."

"I mean," I said testily.  "It felt like I couldn't talk."  The bawattsi left a bad aftertaste in my mouth.  I thought I was gonna hurl.

"So I see, yes...  And which spirit guide was the one to approach you?" Shaman Quick prompted.

"Uh," I responded.  I wasn't sure that one had.

Shaman Quick flared up in a rage, reminding me of a heated jumping bean.  "Thief!" he said.  "You are wasting what little time I have left on this planet!  You come here to kill me!"

I choked on air, overwhelmed by his theatrics.  "You're the one who made me take this stupid vision quest!"

"Why are we yelling?" the shaman's granddaughter asked.  She tiptoed out of their wickiup, yawning, rubbing her eye with the heel of her hand.  Her frizzy cloud of hair stood practically on end, but that was typical for her.  A baggy gray t-shirt sagged around her knees.

"Go inside, Immaculata," Shaman Quick said glumly.

"Are we yelling at Rafael?" Immaculata asked.  Funny how suddenly she came to life, delight taking root in her beady, buggy black eyes.

"What's that in your hand?" Shaman Quick asked me.

I looked down.  I'd forgotten I was holding the dove's feather, pinched between thumb and palm.  The moon caught the thin gray tendrils and they lit up silver, calming me all over again.

Shaman Quick gave me a curious look.  "Doves represent mothers," he said quietly.

The cold night air went icy on my skin.  I should have known that about doves, because they're one of the only birds that can produce milk for their young.  In the back of my mind I saw a woman with dimpled cheeks and blue eyes, just like mine.  Her black hair was plaited, her skin brown.  She had a song for me, as pretty as a bird's, maybe prettier.  The mourning doves had reason for envy.

My heart jerked in my chest.  My chest hurt so bad, I held my breath.  I wanted to reach for that woman, but she slipped away from me in coils of smoke, as soft and fleeting as the feather between my fingers.  I looked from Shaman Quick, watching me expectantly, to Immaculata, dozing off in the doorway of her house.  Their faces morphed.  A different woman leapt out at me from my imagination.  Her hair was frizzy and unkempt, wild, just like her father's and her niece's.  She had violet eyes.  She was named for those eyes: Violet Quick.  She was Dad's third victim.

I slouched.  I put my hands in my jeans pockets.  "I gotta go," I muttered.

Shaman Quick raised an imperious hand, halting me.  "You are not telling me everything you saw," he announced.  "But you have told me enough.  You will very soon learn what it means to have no voice."

I scowled inwardly.  I already knew what it meant to have no voice.  Nobody wanted to hear anything from me unless it confirmed that Dad and I were monsters.  I was seventeen, and I didn't know where my sister laid her head at night, and my best friends were fictional characters.

"Dismissed!" Shaman Quick said.

The Yakainna was supposed to tell you what direction your life would take.  That the best the shaman had been able to tell me was I'd be feeling voiceless pretty soon made me think my life had no direction at all.  Couldn't say I was surprised.  I skulked south through the badlands, my hands in my pockets, hunching in on myself for warmth.  The slippery clay ground gave way to hard earth and sparse grass.  The gulches and gullies and canyons fell away behind me, the Nettlebush Reserve opening in front of my eyes.  The crossroads forked west and east, one lane for the farmland, one lane for the forest.  Pine trees rustled harshly in the frigid air.  I guessed those yellow pinpricks in the distance were the lit windows of log cabins, but I couldn't even see the houses.  Uncle Gabe might've been onto something when he kept yapping at me to get glasses.  It wasn't my fault I stayed up reading in the dark when I was supposed to be asleep.  Some books just begged to be read, and you couldn't say no.  Like everything Edward Eager had ever written.  That guy is boss.

Teetering on the edge of the badlands was a southern live oak, maybe the biggest tree on the rez if you didn't count the willows out in the woods.  The oak's branches were fanning and the leaves were green-gold, the giant trunk teeming with moss.  My house stood just under the boughs of that tree, wide and one-story, bursting with windows, cedar planks buried in the ground around it to repel lightning strikes.  Uncle Gabriel had built that house nine years prior, just after my mom--his sister--passed away.  I hadn't wanted to move in; because moving in meant moving on.  If you're Shoshone, you're supposed to abandon a house where a death took place, or else you'll die, too.  So what?  I wished I still lived in the house where Mom lived.  I didn't mind dying if I got to be with her.

"Rafael?"

Uncle Gabriel came out of the house right on time.  He was twenty-nine, tall and light-haired, with dimples like mine and Mom's.  His face was hairy, too, something you usually don't see on Native men outside the Pacific Northwest.  He wiped his hands on his bloody apron.  He must've been butchering sheep without me.  The both of us were pretty filthy, him with animal grime, me with sand and grit and lack of food and sleep.  I hadn't bathed--or eaten--in days.

"I want candy," I said gruffly.

Uncle Gabriel stepped back to let me in the house.  The front room was airy and enormous, the windows uncovered, moon and stars beating patterns on the hardwood floor.  A stone fireplace ran up to the wooden ceiling rafters, the rafters draped with dead animals, part of a cow and a couple of deer.  My mom's piano sat next to the hearth.  It hadn't been tuned or dusted in years.  I tromped into the kitchen, where the walls looked like sawdust and potted herbs cluttered the floor from refrigerator to pantry.  Ours was one of the few houses in Nettlebush that had electricity.  Everyone else could have had electricity, if they'd wanted it, but most people were slow to change their ways.  I must've been the same.  The industrial-sized refrigerator looked barbaric to me.  The ceiling lights annoyed the crap out of me, plasticky and fake.  At least the stove was still wood-coal.