The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (6 page)

But it had only been a matter of a few years before Geronimo’s second wife and another child were killed. They had been part of a small band of women, children, and old folks who had voluntarily come in from the mountains for the safety and peace promised on the grounds of Ft. Grant. Alerted to the approach of a mob of deranged white people driving buggies and wagons from Tucson, the army officer in command had sent frantic appeals to cavalry units away on patrol. But help had arrived too late to prevent the slaughter of the defenseless Apaches.

Thanks to his magazines, Sterling was aware that many famous
criminals had similar grievances with the governments or communities that had failed to deliver them either protection or justice.

Of course Sterling knew there was no excuse for crime. But for Geronimo it had been war in defense of the homelands. He liked the way the
Police Gazette
specials took an understanding view of the criminal’s life. Still it was clear that the law did not accept any excuses. They had all died violently. Got the gas chamber or the electric chair. Or got shot down. Except for Geronimo. The specials always ran a whole page of inky, fuzzed photographs showing them after they’d been gunned down; halos of black blood around their heads; then later propped on snow-white marble slabs.

It was clear that crime did not pay. Geronimo had been one of the few famous American public enemies who had not died in an ambush or at the end of a noose. But Geronimo had been sentenced to live out his days a prisoner at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma—punishment worse than death. Geronimo and the great warrior Red Cloud had both been condemned to the gallows in their day as savages and murderers. But both had been masters of guerrilla warfare; one fighting the U.S. cavalry on the upper Great Plains, the other outrunning five thousand U.S. cavalrymen in the impenetrable desert mountains of northern Sonora. But some years later, elected for a second term, President Teddy Roosevelt had scandalized his political adversaries by inviting Geronimo, Red Cloud, and Quanah Parker to ride in his inaugural parade. To critics, Teddy Roosevelt said all a new president owed voters was a good show—precisely what he had delivered to them!

Sterling was pretty sure Cole Younger and some of the Jesse James gang had been part Indian by their looks in old photographs. Sterling knew the Starrs had been Oklahoma half-breeds. Sterling thought he was probably one of the few Indians interested in famous Indian outlaws. He knew tribal leaders and so-called Indian experts preferred that Indians got left out of that part of American history too, since their only other appearances had been at so-called massacres of white settlers.

What Sterling knew about the Great Depression of 1929 he had learned from his detective and crime magazines. The government boarding-school history teachers had seldom ever got them past the American Civil War. Sterling had been a boy during the Depression, but it had made little or no impression on people at Laguna. Most, especially the old-timers, had said they never even knew a depression was going on, because in those days people had no money in banks to lose. Indians had never held legal title to any Indian reservation land, so there had
never been property to mortgage. But winters those years had been mild and wet for the Southwest. Harvests had been plentiful, and the game had been fat for the winter. The Laguna people had heard something about “The Crash.” But they remembered “The Crash” as a year of bounty and plenty for the people.

Seese got up from her lounge chair by the pool and helped Sterling unload colored rocks from the wheelbarrow. She didn’t know anything about any kind of garden, and especially not rock gardens, whatever they were. “Where did you grow up?” Sterling was on his hands and knees arranging little orange stones around the base of a jojoba bush. He was afraid to look in case Seese did not like his question. But there was the quick little laugh she gave when she was nervous, and then she said, “Oh, I grew up in a lot of places. Military family.”

“No gardens,” Sterling said, clearing away some weeds that had died since the last rain. “No gardens. Not much of anything to remember.” Seese was smoking a cigarette and staring off in the distance toward the city. Sterling could see she had one thing she never forgot, one thing always very near. “I was telling you about my magazine articles,” Sterling said. “You know, we can go see the place Dillinger’s gang got caught.”

Seese turned all the way around to face him. “Here?”

Sterling felt a big grin on his face. He nodded.

She laughed. “Okay. We’ll go tomorrow when the rest of them are gone.”

THERE IS CONFUSION in her dreams and memories of the child. First there is the odd dream of the snapshots of a boy, twelve or thirteen. In the dream she knows the boy is dead by the remarks others make as they look at the photographs. She is seized by the loss of him and awakens crying. She is stunned because in the dream Monte had been older, as he might look years from now. Monte would be almost two years old, wherever he was; David had kidnapped Monte when he was six months old. Seese refuses to believe he is dead. The dreams are her contact with him. She feels she has actually been with him after these dreams. She awakens crying because the odor of the baby lotion and his skin are immediate and she feels she has only just set him down in his bed. Because of these dreams she is certain he is not dead. At other times she reasons that the child probably is not alive since David spent thousands hiring detectives and paying informants. She has read about the anguish one feels as the memories of the beloved gradually recede. She knows this is to be expected. Still, she shuffles the baby pictures like a deck of cards, trying furiously to deal up just the one that will bring her back to a moment with him. She is determined to be the first not to forget. One of the few for whom the memories never dim.

As long as she is able three or four times a year to dream about him and to awaken feeling as if she has actually been with him, holding him close, she thinks the memories are holding. She had been afraid she might become too satisfied with these dreams. She had dreamed him newborn again in her arms. The ache of the loss that woke her did not recede as the day went on, but increased with every sniff of coke, with every hit off the joint, until she was tearing open cupboards looking for
any kind of alcohol, any bottle of pills. She was staying in the penthouse on her lawyer’s advice. The lawyer wanted Seese. His wife had injured her back in a sailing accident. That was what he told her. Seese had never trusted him. Beaufrey once said the best lawyers were the best crooks. The lawyer liked the idea of a young mistress in an elegant penthouse overlooking a stretch of private beach outside La Jolla. Of course from the kitchen breakfast bar he could point out the high rise where the senior partners were preparing appellate briefs and corporate articles. She had quit opening his bills months ago. Beaufrey had taken David and left her with the apartment and enough money and drugs to kill herself. Beaufrey had left the country in a hurry with David. Before David could change his mind. She knows she had sex with the lawyer, but can’t remember a single time, nothing they did.

She tells Sterling she does not have much of a past or much to remember, but they both know she is holding out. He isn’t what she thought an Indian would be like. You don’t think of Pueblo Indians reading the
Police Gazette
and knowing all about John Dillinger. When Seese said this to Sterling, his wide face had been all a big smile, and she said, “That’s what I mean too,” pointing at his face and his mouth. “Oh,” he said, “you thought Indians didn’t ever smile or laugh,” and they were both laughing. Suddenly she stopped to remember how long it had been since she had laughed without a weight pulling from somewhere behind. With the lawyer she had laughed but knew that the feeling wasn’t true. He did not love her. Things would not work out.

Seese wonders how far back these things go. She has nightmares about diving into a pool that is too deep. Before she can manage to surface she is out of air. High above her she can see the sky and round, puffy clouds as she drowns. She remembers having the nightmare only twice before she had the baby. Both times it was the night before a math test in college. She got lost in the lines and equations; she could imagine any number of possibilities from all the signs and symbols. She read many things into them, many more than mathematicians had anticipated. Now she knows that all of it is a code anyway. The blue sky and puffy clouds seen through the deadly jade water of the nightmare pool was a message about the whole of creation. The loss of the child was another, more final message, or at least that was how it was translating—she was only just finding out that this was a translation, that the last morning she had held little Monte in her arms loving him perfectly—that had been an end too. When the drugs affected her in a certain way she was able to study the message calmly as if watching pebbles at the bottom
of a stream; she could not feel the temperature of the water. She could feel nothing after that last morning. Dark green water had closed over her head.

Beaufrey and David had taken Monte or hired someone to take Monte, but then something terrible had gone wrong. This was the story she now believed because David had had her followed, had the phone tapped and had even telephoned himself, asking to hear his son cry. The lawyer had taken the call because she knew she would break down. But David had misunderstood, and next there had been the gunman; the reasoning, the lawyer later explained, was that once Seese was dead, the court would award custody of the baby to the father. But Seese did not have Monte.

In La Jolla she had been in the habit of standing for hours in front of the glass walls facing the ocean. But it could have been a blank wall. She stared and saw nothing—not the waves rising and falling on the beach or the banks of clouds on the southwest horizon. The wind had riffled the waves so they glittered like thousands of tiny mirrors—blinding reflections that left white afterimages before her eyes. The afterimages were in the shapes of teeth—incisors, canines.

After Monte had been kidnapped, Seese could not bear to look at shadows or shapes of clouds, patterns the dampness made on the beach sand, because instantly her brain gave them definite forms. She would see the toy giraffe in a cloud. She would see the print of a small hand left by the splash of a wave.

After the gunman had fired through her bedroom window, she had called the lawyer. She was not surprised he wanted her to go away, to start a new life. He was afraid of what might happen to himself and his marriage if she remained alone in the glass penthouse above the sea. He was right of course, and her doctor had suggested it too. She had seen the doctor about her eyes, and the problems she was having with the bright reflections almost blinding her. It was the cocaine mostly, he said, and as her psychiatrist he was prescribing a change. She had to leave the surroundings so familiar and once part of her life with the child. But she could not seem to leave the place although everything reasonable and sane told her she must. She could feel an animal circling inside her, pacing around and around in her stomach and chest. It was a fierce animal; it would not stop waiting or searching the place she had last seen her child.