Day of the Dead Page 8

  Brandon Walker woke up later than he had intended—well past nine. He dressed, poured a cup of coffee, and then went out on the patio, where he found Diana hard at work on her laptop. He tried tossing the ball for Damsel. Panting, she ignored the ball and stayed in the shade.

  “What’s up with Damsel?” Brandon asked. “Is she sick?”

  Diana laughed. “She’s spent the whole morning chasing butterflies and jets.”

  It was one of the dog’s most endearing peculiarities. For some reason, from the time she had come into their lives, the dog had focused her attention on the shadows planes and butterflies left on the ground rather than on the moving objects themselves. Chasing shadows was a game she played by herself, often to the point of exhaustion.

  “Dummy,” Brandon told the dog, giving the winded animal a loving pat on the head in passing. “When are you ever going to wise up?” He sat down next to Diana. “I’m going out to the reservation today,” he said to her. “To see Fat Crack. Want to come along?”

  “I wish I could, but I’d better not,” Diana said. “My deadline’s actively ticking at this point.” She paused. “Lani’s worried about him. When you get back home, give her a call and let her know how he’s doing.”

  “It won’t be good news,” Brandon said, sipping his coffee.

  “You know that, and I know that,” Diana returned. “Deep down, Lani probably knows it, too. She understands how serious this is even more than the rest of us. Her biggest worry is that Fat Crack won’t last long enough for her to get home. She wants to be here for him.”

  “Just like he was for her,” Brandon returned.

  That fateful day on Ioligam was still seared in Brandon Walker’s memory. By the time he had arrived, Mitch Johnson, Lani’s kidnapper, was already dead. Lani had killed him. Brandon had hurried there expecting to retrieve his daughter and take her home. Fat Crack had blocked his way.

  “Where is she?” Brandon demanded of his longtime friend. “Is she all right? Why isn’t she here?”

  “Because she killed a man,” Gabe Ortiz returned quietly. “She has to stay by herself. She has to fast and eat no salted food and pray for sixteen days.”

  “Sixteen days!” Brandon exclaimed. “Out here by herself? Are you nuts? What the hell are you thinking?”

  “It’s what Lani’s thinking,” Gabe replied, “and that’s what counts. It’s what she wants to do. It’s what she has to do.”

  Brandon had always known Lani was different, from the moment she had walked into his life as a toddler and wrapped her tiny fingers around his heart. It had hurt him when others called his baby Kuadagi Ke’e Al—the Ant-Bit Child, but that was the reason Lani was Brandon’s in the first place. According to Rita Antone, Lani’s blood relatives had refused to take her in because they were scared of her. They were convinced that because she had been singled out by I’itoi, she was a danger to her family members. Nana Dahd believed that being ant-bit made Lani special.

  Brandon Walker had heard all that, but he hadn’t really paid attention, and he certainly hadn’t believed it. For him, Lani was the light of his life. He had adored her, spoiled her, loved her. Now, for reasons he couldn’t understand, she seemed to be rejecting that love.

  “Why?” Brandon had asked again.

  “Because she really is Kulani O’oks,” Fat Crack explained. “Lani is destined to be a great medicine woman. To do that—to really do that—she has to abide by the old ways.”

  One look at Fat Crack’s impassive face told Brandon he was losing. No amount of arguing would do any good. He tried anyway.

  “It’s almost summer,” Brandon said. “Hotter’n hell during the day and freezing at night. Where will she sleep, Gabe? What will she eat?”

  “I’ll look after her,” Fat Crack said quietly. “It’s my job, one siwani—one chief medicine man—to another.”

  “But…”

  “Please, Brandon,” Fat Crack added. “It’s what she must do.”

  Brandon Walker had gone home empty-handed that Sunday afternoon. He had held a weeping Diana in his arms and tried to explain it to her. Although the two of them had never discussed it afterward, he suspected she didn’t like this new reality any better than he did. He wondered sometimes if Diana felt as betrayed as he did to think that Lani had turned to Fat Crack in her hour of need—to Gabe Ortiz rather than to her parents.

  When Fat Crack finally brought Lani home to Gates Pass sixteen days later, she was a different person. She had been a carefree teenager—little more than a child—when she was taken from them. She returned as a serious-minded young woman who was far more in tune with her Indian heritage than she had ever been before.

  From then on, the relationship between Lani and her adoptive parents was forever altered. There was no blow-up—no identifiable breach or specific argument. Things were just different. Brandon was smart enough not to blame Fat Crack for the changes that had occurred. Dolores Lanita Walker was still their Lani, still at home with them. She learned to drive, got her license, and graduated from high school at the top of her class. Yet Brandon knew Mitch Johnson had succeeded in robbing him of something precious when he had kidnapped Lani.

  He had stolen her innocence. No one in the world—not even Fat Crack Ortiz—could give it back to her.

  I’ll talk to her about Fat Crack’s condition,” Brandon told Diana now, staring down into a mug where his forgotten coffee had long ago gone cold. “If I have to, I’ll even lie to her about it.”

  “No,” Diana counseled. “Don’t do that. If the news is really bad, we can fly her home early. She’s already canceled walking through graduation—which she figured you’d appreciate. And she’s made arrangements with her professors to do some exams early.”

  “Which means she already knows it’s bad news,” Brandon observed. His eyes sought Diana’s over the rim of his coffee mug. “And so do I. You’re sure you can’t come along?”

  “I’m sure,” Diana said. “I’ve got to work.”

  “All right, then,” Brandon said. “See you later.”

  Eight

  At eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, Sue Lammers went into the family room to check on her husband, Ken, who had spent all morning glued to the Golf Channel watching a tournament.

  “Is it over?” she asked.

  “This is a different one,” he said, barely taking his eyes off their flat-screen TV. “On ABC. It just started.”

  What Sue Lammers saw right then was red! When they had first moved to their manufactured home on Fast Horse Ranch south of Tucson, they had loved it. She and Ken both worked hard all week—she as a purchasing agent for University Medical Center and he as an economist for Pima County. On weekends, they worked on the house and the yard, gradually creating a beautifully landscaped retreat out of rough, untamed desert.

  But that was before satellite TV had crept in and ruined Sue’s little Garden of Eden with the forbidden fruit of unlimited weekend sports. Now, with that ugly little satellite dish perched like an overweight eagle on the roof, life wasn’t the same. Football folded into basketball, into baseball, and back into football in an unrelenting cavalcade, with golf, auto racing, and the National Hockey League plugged in here and there for good measure. It was all Sue could do to get Ken to tear himself away from the tube long enough to eat an occasional meal at the table instead of on a tray. As for his lifting a finger around the house or yard? Forget about it.

  Grumbling to herself, Sue left the room. Ranger, their five-year-old German shepherd, followed her down the hallway and into the bedroom. As soon as she took her hiking boots down from the shelf in the closet, Ranger went on full alert. For him, boots meant only one thing—the tantalizing prospect of a walk. Ears up, nose quivering with excitement, Ranger watched as she pulled the boots on and laced them up.

  “That’s right, old boy,” she told him. “I may not be able to get Daddy off his duff, but I sure as hell don’t have that problem with you.”

  Still pissed at her husb
and, Sue took Ranger and left by the front door without even bothering to tell Ken they were leaving. She took the whistle—Ranger was well trained and would come on the run after only a single blast from the whistle—and didn’t bother with a leash. This far out in the country, leashes weren’t really necessary. She let Ranger live up to his name by racing along before and alongside her, calling him back only when she saw other people coming their way—joggers, hikers, or bicyclists. Trains were another story. The power-line access road where Sue and Ranger often walked ran along the railroad tracks, and trains spooked Ranger. When he heard one coming, he would race back to Sue and cower with his head next to her knee until the noisy thing had rumbled past and out of earshot.

  This morning, though, there were no trains on the horizon as Sue Lammers, still seething with resentment, strode along the rugged, rutted excuse for a road that ran under the power line. Is this why I’m working my heart out all week? she wondered. So I can spend my weekends alone with a dog instead of with my husband?

  For weeks she had watched as the round flat leaves of the prickly pear sprouted buds. Now, in late April, the desert was a bright sea of yellow. Somehow, seeing the desert bloom like that made her feel better. Wasn’t that the whole point of going for a walk—to feel better?

  Ahead of her, half a mile or so away, Sue spotted a dark-colored vehicle parked on the shoulder of the real road that ran parallel to where she was walking. Seeing a parked car made her uneasy. There was no legitimate reason for anyone to be parked along there—no houses, no businesses. In the distance she could see a figure moving back and forth between a clump of mesquite and the back of what she assumed was a pickup truck.

  Sue knew many people were too cheap to pay to go to the dump. They’d rather come out into the desert and use it as a personal trash heap. Meeting up with one of those lowlifes made Sue Lammers uneasy, especially when she was out walking alone—Ranger notwithstanding. She reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out her cell phone. A new tower had recently been erected in their neighborhood, making cell-phone reception better. She was relieved to see that she had a good strong signal.

  She was only a few yards closer when the person who had been walking to and from the vehicle—she could see now that it was actually a dark-colored pickup with what appeared to be a camper shell—turned and seemed to see her. He jumped into the driver’s seat and sped off, sending a cloud of dust spewing skyward. Relieved to watch him drive away, Sue kept walking. She had been about to lift the whistle to her lips to summon Ranger back, but with the pickup gone, she dropped the whistle and left Ranger free to explore.

  Sue was still a few hundred yards short of where the vehicle had been parked when she heard the distant rumble of a train. Ranger heard it, too. The dog had been a long way ahead of her. Now he came loping back. As he drew closer, Sue saw he had something in his mouth. At first she thought it was a stick, but it wasn’t a stick. It was an arm—a bloodied human arm.

  “Drop it!” Sue screamed in horror. “Drop it right now!”

  Ranger did as he was told, then scampered to her side as the train rumbled nearer.

  Feeling faint, Sue Lammers struggled to get her cell phone out of her pocket. Her fingers felt like thick, clumsy sausages. The phone slipped from her grasp and fell to the ground. Landing on a rock, it bounced once and exploded. The plastic back fell off and the battery popped free. As Sue knelt to retrieve the scattered pieces of her phone, Ranger made another grab at his prize.

  “Leave it!” she exclaimed, but by then the train was right beside them, drowning out everything. Whether he heard her or not, Ranger complied, leaving Sue scrambling on her hands and knees as she reassembled the broken phone.

  It wasn’t until after the freight train had passed that Sue was finally able to get her fumbling fingers to press the necessary numbers.

  “Nine one one,” a businesslike voice said in her ear. “What are you reporting?”

  Sue Lammers took a deep breath. “I’m out walking south of Vail, south of Fast Horse Ranch,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “My dog just found somebody’s arm. A bloody human arm!”

  Distracted, Erik gave himself permission to stop short of the summit. With his back resting against a warm cliff face in a solitary canyon well below Finger Rock, he pulled out his peanut butter sandwich and savored the first bite. It was made the right way—the way Grandma always made it—with butter on both slices of bread and with the peanut butter slathered in between.

  He had traded lunches one day in the lunch room at Hollinger Elementary and had been surprised when his friend’s peanut butter sandwich was hard to swallow. It had stuck in his throat, and once he finally realized what the difference was, he had asked Gladys about it that evening.

  “Grandma,” he said, “did you know some people make peanut butter sandwiches without buttering the bread first?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you always put butter on it?”

  “Because that’s the way you’re supposed to do it,” Gladys Johnson returned. “There’s always a right way to do something and a wrong way. Buttering the bread first is the right way.”

  “Is that how your mother did it?”

  Gladys nodded. “My mother,” she said. “And my aunt Selma, too. It’s the way everybody did it back home. Peanut butter was a lot stiffer in those days.”

  All these years later, even though Erik LaGrange had never met those fabled relatives he had heard so many stories about, he was glad he shared that one small trait with people who would forever be nothing but faceless names. Peanut butter on buttered bread was a tiny fragment of his own lost heritage.

  It’s the way I do it, too, he thought.

  That fateful President’s Ball had been on a Saturday night. The following Tuesday afternoon, Gayle Stryker rang Erik at his office.

  “I offered you a job the other night,” she said after identifying herself. “I thought you would have called about it by now.”

  Erik was so taken aback he could barely reply. “I wasn’t really thinking about making a change right now,” he stammered, sounding like a total dork.

  “Really,” Gayle Stryker said. “Are they paying you that much?”

  That was laughable because the truth was, they were paying him hardly anything at all. “Not really,” he admitted finally.

  In actual fact, Erik LaGrange was someone who resisted change wherever it presented itself. For him, staying in a less-than-optimal situation was better than striking off into the unknown. It made for a stable if relatively boring life.

  “How about if we get together tomorrow and have lunch?” Gayle suggested. “At El Charro downtown, say, about a quarter to one?”

  Erik thought about his ten-year-old plug-ugly but still-running Volvo with its faded orange paint and crimped front bumper. He was supposed to meet the lady for lunch driving that? And what the hell was he supposed to wear? And what was he going to say to his boss? “Well, Dick, I guess I’ll take a long lunch and see about getting a job somewhere else.”

  Richard Mathers was a guy who believed in running a tight ship. He was a micromanaging busybody who had to know where his people were at all times. He expected to be apprised of what each was doing and whether it would improve his departmental bottom line. If Erik showed up at work wearing something unusual—for Erik a sports coat and tie would definitely be out of character—Dick would ask a million questions, none of which Erik wanted to answer.

  “Okay,” Erik heard himself saying. “A quarter to one.”

  Gayle Stryker laughed. “Don’t sound so worried. I’m going to offer you a job. It isn’t exactly an invitation to a beheading.”

  But it could just as well have been. Two margaritas—blended with no salt—were waiting on the table when Erik showed up. In order to avoid rousing Dick Mathers’s suspicion, Erik had left his tie and blazer in the car when he arrived at work that morning. He donned them only after pulling into the parking lot across from the restaurant.

 
; Gayle, in a lime-green silk shirt with a pair of matching slacks, was already seated. A discreet glance at her plunging neckline left little to the imagination. She welcomed him to the table with a cordial peck on the cheek.

  “So good of you to come,” she murmured in his ear. The look she gave him as she resumed her seat left no doubt in Erik’s mind that the double entendre he thought he’d heard had indeed been intended. Once again, Erik blushed. The bones in his legs turned to mush, and he tumbled into the chair opposite her.

  Knowing Dick Mathers disapproved of what he called “boozy lunches” and hoping for something a little less volatile than tequila, Erik started to push the margarita glass away. Gayle pointed a diamond-bedecked finger in his direction and shook it reprovingly.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” she warned. “I didn’t come here to drink alone. We’re going to have a lovely lunch and get to know each other. Cheers.” She raised her glass in Erik’s direction and smiled when he followed suit. “Tell me about yourself,” she said after tasting her drink.

  Whether it was nerves or not, Erik laid the whole story out on the table. “I’m thirty years old,” he said. “My mother died shortly after I was born. I never met my father. I was raised by my grandmother right here in Tucson. I’m not married, never have been. No children, either.”

  Erik felt like a complete idiot. This wasn’t the kind of information he should have blurted out if this really was a job interview, but he was fairly certain a change of employment for him was a long way down on Gayle Stryker’s list of priorities. Her response confirmed his suspicions.

  “I see,” she said with a smile. “You’re saying you’re what could be called a blank slate?”

  Several weeks earlier Erik had watched The Graduate on Turner Classic Movies. Poor Dustin Hoffman had been putty in Anne Bancroft’s very capable hands. Somehow Erik knew at once that he was headed in the same direction.

  “I guess,” he replied uneasily, fingering the stem of his chilled glass.