Day of the Dead (18 page)

Suddenly, amazingly, Andrea Tashquinth began to sob. “I know,” she said. “It already is. I think about it every day because…” she added, “it’s all my fault.”

The story came out then in fits and starts. “I was almost two years older than Roseanne,” Andrea said. “When I went to first grade, there weren’t many jobs on the reservation and our parents were both migrant workers. They went away for months at a time. Whenever they were gone—to California or Washington or Oregon—Roseanne and I stayed at home with our grandmother—our father’s mother—in
Ak Chin
.”

“Arroyo Mouth,” Brandon Walker responded in English.

Andrea cast him a sidelong glance. She wasn’t accustomed to
Mil-gahn
who spoke Tohono O’odham. Once again, just as it had with Andrea’s mother the day before, Brandon’s facility with the Desert People’s native language allowed her to relax a little as she continued.

“When I went off to school on the bus that first day, Roseanne cried and cried. Our grandmother was a mean old woman, and Roseanne didn’t want to be left alone with her. When I came home, I told Roseanne there were kids her age in another class, and she begged me to take her along. The next day, I told my grandmother that Roseanne was supposed to go, too. It was a lie, of course, but Grandmother didn’t know any better. She let us go.

“When we got to school, everything was fine until Roseanne realized that she couldn’t be in the same class with me. She got scared and started to cry. She cried so hard that finally the principal came. He was a big man—a huge man. He picked Roseanne up and carried her under his arm like a sack of potatoes. She kicked and screamed the whole way down the hall. I went after him and kept telling him to put her down, put her down, but he didn’t. He carried her all the way back to his office. He threw her into a closet—a coat closet with no light inside it—and slammed the door. Then he made me go back to class. I heard her crying all the way down the hall.

“I didn’t see her again until after school—until it was time for us to get on the bus. When she did, Roseanne’s face was still wet like she had been crying the whole time. On the way home, I tried to get her to talk to me and tell me what happened. She wouldn’t answer—wouldn’t say a word. And she never talked again. Not to me, not to my parents, and especially not to anyone at school.

“She went to school because my father made her. She never answered questions in class or turned in papers. My parents took her to a bunch of doctors, here and in Phoenix, too, but they couldn’t find anything wrong. When the doctors couldn’t help her, my father even took her to a medicine man. He said she was retarded. There was nothing he could do—that’s how she was.”

Brandon Walker looked down at his own white skin and was suddenly ashamed. He felt a surge of anger toward that brutish grade school principal whose actions had so traumatized an innocent four-year-old girl that she had damned herself to a lifetime of silence.

The worthless son of a bitch!
he thought.
Somebody should have thrown his ass in jail.

“Two years later there was a new principal, a nice one,” Andrea continued. “When the school secretary told him what had happened, he fixed it so Roseanne and I were in the same class. She was my shadow.”

“Ehkthag,”
Brandon said.

Andrea Tashquinth looked Brandon full in the face and smiled for the first time. “Yes,” she agreed. “Roseanne was my
ehkthag
.”

“Whatever happened to the first principal?” Brandon asked.

Andrea shrugged. “Nothing,” she said. “He left. Went somewhere else. When
Mil-gahn
do bad things on the reservation, they leave, but nothing ever happens to them. That’s the way it is—the way it’s always been.”

***

After Philip staggered off,
a humiliated Delia Cachora stood on the sidewalk looking at Fat Crack Ortiz, this ghost from her distant past. She had felt this same way the day her father had come to Ruth’s house in Tempe to collect Eddie and take him back to the reservation.

When they arrived in Tempe, Ellie Chavez had planned to stay with Sister Justine’s friend, Ruth Waldron, just that one night. They arrived late in the evening because it had taken so long to get the car running. Then they’d encountered a summer rainstorm that made the washes between Quijotoa and Casa Grande impassable. They’d had to wait for the water to go down.

When they finally stopped in front of the small frame house, they had passed through the worst of the storm, but a fitful rain still fell. It was late. Eddie had fallen sound asleep in the backseat. As soon as the car stopped, an outside light flashed on and a tall bony woman—the tallest
Mil-gahn
woman Delia had ever seen—emerged onto the porch. A cloud of mouthwatering fragrances drifted out of the house behind her, and Delia realized she was hungry.

Ellie stepped out of the Falcon. Taking Delia by the hand, they hurried up onto the porch and out of the rain. “Miss Waldron?” Ellie asked tentatively.

Ruth Waldron stretched out both hands in greeting. “You must be Ellie,” she said. “Please call me Ruth.” She turned to Delia, who wavered on the edge of the porch like a wild thing poised for flight. Ruth bent down until her face and Delia’s were on the same level. “You must be Delia,” she added with a toothy smile. “Now where’s that brother of yours? Where’s Eddie?”

Delia pointed to the car. “He’s sleeping,” she whispered.

“I’m sure you’re all worn out,” Ruth said kindly. “Sister Justine called and told me you were on your way. Go get Eddie and come in. Supper’s waiting. By the time we finish eating, maybe the rain will be over so we can bring in your suitcases.”

The next day, however, much to Delia’s surprise, her mother didn’t go apartment hunting after all. Instead, they stayed on with Ruth for the next four years—for as long as Ellie Chavez was in the undergraduate program at ASU. While Ellie was busy studying, Ruth Waldron, a phys ed teacher at two Tempe elementary schools, became Eddie and Delia’s surrogate mother. She was good to the kids. She took them to ball games, to the zoo, and to the Arizona State Fair. She helped them with homework and attended PTA meetings when Ellie couldn’t.

Delia loved school. At first she was far behind other kids in her class. She was lumped in with the slower ones and pretty much ignored, but with her own natural capabilities and with Ruth’s nightly tutoring sessions at home, Delia soon bubbled to the top.

Neither Delia nor her brother saw their father again until four years later, the summer Eddie turned six and Delia twelve. Delia Chavez was within days of promotion to the eighth grade when, on a warm spring afternoon, she came home from the library with an armload of books and with her little brother in tow. As they approached the house, an unfamiliar pickup truck was parked in the front driveway. Manuel Chavez stood on the front porch, shouting at Ruth Waldron and at Ellie. Delia knew at once her father was just as drunk and angry as she remembered him.

“I want my son!” he yelled for all the neighborhood to hear. “You’d better give Eddie back to me before you turn him into an Anglo and a queer, too.”

Eddie had been so young when they left Sells that he had no recollection of this man who claimed to be his father, but if this loud stranger wanted to take Eddie somewhere in a shiny pickup truck, the boy was eager to go.

While the children looked on, the argument raged back and forth. In the end Ellie agreed that Eddie would return to the reservation with his father.

To Delia, the whole thing was incomprehensible. It had taken the next several years for her to come to terms with what had happened that day on Ruth’s front porch. How could her mother bear to send Eddie off with a horrible drunk who was a virtual stranger? How could she let him go without putting up a fight? It wasn’t a matter of legal custody. As far as Delia knew, there had never been a divorce or a court order or any exchange of legal documents. Ellie simply handed Eddie over even though she must have known what the consequences would be. She must have guessed that once Manny drove away with her son, she would never get him back. He would disappear into the world of the reservation and into his father’s family and be lost to her forever.

That was exactly what happened. Ellie and Ruth may have spoiled Eddie, but his Grandmother Chavez in Big Fields was far better—or worse—at spoiling. Eddie had grown up fat and lazy and every bit as much of a drunk as his father. When he graduated from eighth grade, he quit going to school, and Manny made no attempt to change his mind. Eddie contacted Delia only when he needed money—when he had wrecked his latest pickup or when he had been let out of jail and needed something to get by on until he could find a job for day wages.

As a twelve-year-old, Delia hadn’t understood all the implications of what was being said on the porch, nor did she realize how much went unspoken beneath that flurry of angry words.

Delia’s seventh-grade assessment of the situation was that her brother was a stupid, spoiled brat. That being the case, why had Manuel come to Tempe for Eddie and not for Delia? Why had he collected his crybaby son—someone who’d had to repeat kindergarten—and not his straight-A daughter? Why was Eddie worthy of being returned to the reservation when Delia was not?

Eventually, in high school, Delia understood more about the dynamics of the relationships involved. It took that long for her to grasp what was really going on between her mother and Ruth Waldron—a former Benedictine nun with strong connections to an old Boston family. Both women were exiles—Ellie from the reservation and Ruth from her convent and her disapproving family. Ellie and Ruth had been lovers almost from the beginning, from the night Ruth took the reservation refugees in off the street and welcomed them into her home.

Years after that, when Delia was in law school, she finally grasped the kinds of pressures her father could have brought to bear if Ellie hadn’t given in to Manny’s demands for Eddie. Lesbian mothers had no rights in those days. If Ellie had defied her husband, she’d have risked losing both children rather than just one. A legal fracas might also have cost her the postgraduate fellowship she’d been offered. And a public furor might have wrecked Ruth’s career with the Tempe public schools as well. Gay and lesbian schoolteachers didn’t start coming out of the closet until decades later.

To their credit, Ellie and Ruth were still together, all this time later. For years, during summer vacation, Ruth would come and stay with Ellie and Delia wherever they were. Now that Ruth was retired, she and Ellie lived comfortably together in a little house Ruth had inherited just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. With her Ph.D. in education and her impeccable Native American credentials, Ellie Chavez had served a long stint with the BIA and was a much-sought-after consultant in the field of American Indian education, even though, after leaving the reservation that rainy August day, she had never returned to Sells, not even once.

***

Standing on the sidewalk
in D.C., Delia Cachora was at a loss as to what she should do. She was delighted to see Fat Crack Ortiz and wanted to invite him up to their apartment, but after seeing the condition Philip was in, she worried that the apartment would be too much of a mess. Fat Crack solved the problem for both of them.

“If you’d give me a ride back to my hotel, perhaps we could talk there.”

Delia was relieved to open the passenger door and let him in. When she handed the keys over to a parking valet, her 9000 blended in perfectly with other vehicles waiting in line at the Four Seasons.

Once they were seated in the lounge and had ordered drinks, Fat Crack grinned at her. “Accommodations for Indians are nicer around here than they were in the old days,” he said. “At least when the Great White Father is paying the freight.”

By then Delia had collected herself and she was able to smile back. “Yes,” she said. “Things have changed.”

Gabe Ortiz told her about his position with the tribe and explained how he’d come to Washington for an Indian gaming conference, but that still didn’t make clear to Delia why he’d come looking for her.

“Did my mother’s aunt Julia send you?” she asked.

Fat Crack searched her face in a way that made Delia feel he was peering into her soul. “Yes,” he admitted finally. “Julia Joaquin did ask me to drop by. She’s concerned about you. She wanted to know whether or not you’re happy, but that’s not why we’re having this talk.”

Delia felt a sudden rush of anger. She barely knew her busybody great-aunt. Had Delia passed Julia Joaquin on the street, she doubted she’d recognize her, yet Aunt Julia felt she could interfere in Delia’s private affairs. It took a moment for Delia to realize Fat Crack had stopped talking and was waiting for her response.

“Why are we?” she asked finally.

“Have you ever thought about coming back to the reservation?” Fat Crack asked.

Delia shook her head. “Never,” she said. “I like D.C. I love my job, and I haven’t been near the reservation in years. Why would I want to go back there?”

“Your aunt tells me that you’re very bright, that you’re working as a lawyer for the BIA. What do you do there?”

“I study treaties,” she said, relaxing a little. “My job is to try to make sure agreements that were supposed to last as long as the ‘grass shall grow and rivers flow’ continue to have meaning in the modern world. If a tribe signed a treaty about fishing rights a hundred years ago, one they haven’t revised, then the treaty should still apply right now.”

“Are you having any luck?”

“Some,” Delia said. “Those
Mil-gahn
treaty writers were pretty damned tricky.”

They both laughed at that.

“You mentioned fishing,” Fat Crack resumed a moment later. “Does that mean you deal with mostly Northwest tribes?”

“No, they’re from all over. Fishing rights. Timber rights. Mineral rights. Grazing.”

“Gambling, too?”

“That’s not usually mentioned, but we’re maintaining that since the tribes are sovereign nations, it’s implied.”

“We’re going to need a new tribal attorney,” Gabe Ortiz said abruptly, without any additional preamble. “Elias Segundo is about to retire. I’m offering you the job.”