Day of the Dead (24 page)

The gallery job ended for reasons Delia never quite understood, and they moved into the combination studio/loft apartment on Kalorama Street, but Philip’s paintings seemed to be losing their appeal as well as their patrons. Sales just weren’t happening. At least the money wasn’t there. Finally, insisting he had to do something, Philip bought a used van, loaded his unsold paintings into it, and took it on the road, heading off for a powwow in Montana. He returned home a month later with a credit-card balance full of hotel and meal charges and with most of his paintings still in the van.

A few nights later, Delia returned from work. On the living room coffee table she spied something that looked like a mushroom on a piece of clear plastic wrap.

“What’s this?” she demanded, holding it up.

“Peyote,” Philip answered, snatching it out of her hand. “Maybe you should try it sometime. It might make you less uptight. Besides, it’s a religious thing.”

“It’s also illegal,” Delia pointed out. “I don’t want it in my apartment.”

“It’s your apartment now instead of ours?” he returned.

“It is if you look at who’s paying the bills,” she told him. The moment she said it, she was afraid she had gone too far.

Philip rounded on her in fury. “If you were a real Indian instead of such a stuck-up, straitlaced Bostonian, maybe you’d understand!”

Minutes after that, he was in the bathroom, puking his guts out. He slept on the couch in his studio that night. Much as Delia didn’t want to admit it—especially to Marcia and others who had tried to warn her away from Philip in the first place—she knew it was the beginning of the end. She hung on for a time, hoping things would change and he would get better. That was why, a few months later, it hurt so much to realize that even Aunt Julia, more than two thousand miles away, somehow knew how bad things were and tried to help by sending Fat Crack Ortiz to the rescue. She responded to his offer of help by more or less telling him to take his job and shove it.

Two weeks later, she came home from work early with a migraine and walked in on a disaster that had been ten years in the making. There in the apartment she found Philip passed out in the company of a sixteen-year-old male prostitute. Delia turned around and stormed out of the apartment without waking either of them. She made her way back to her old neighborhood and checked into the Savoy. The next morning, she called in sick and made an appointment to see her ob-gyn, where she underwent a series of tests for sexually transmitted diseases. Then she went back to the hotel to await the results, which wouldn’t be available until the following Monday.

She called no one, not even her mother. Especially not her mother. Instead, she sat in the hotel for the next eighteen hours, staring blindly at the traffic on Wisconsin Avenue and wondering whether or not Philip had contracted AIDS, and if he had, had he already passed it along to her? How long did it take to die of AIDS, she wondered, and how painful was it?

It wasn’t until the sun was coming up the next morning that she found the strength to pick up the telephone and dial Santa Fe information. There were several Cachoras listed, and it took time to jot down all the numbers. When her office opened, she called in sick for a second time. Once it was eight o’clock New Mexico time, Delia dialed one of the numbers she’d been given.

She hadn’t picked that number at random. Several of the Cachoras listed included male names. Delia skipped those, opting instead for M. A. Cachora with no address. That number had to belong to a single woman living alone. Not surprisingly, a woman answered. “Hello.”

For a moment, the sound of the voice stunned Delia to silence. “Hello?” the woman repeated. “Is anyone there?”

“Ms. Cachora…” Delia began hesitantly.

“Yes. Who is this?”

Delia’s voice trembled. So did her hand. She almost dropped the phone. “My name is Delia,” she said finally. “I wondered if you happened to know someone named Philip Cachora.”

“If we’re talking about the same person,” the other woman answered, “then he used to be my husband, the creep. What about him?”

“I married him, too,” Delia managed. “I was wondering…” She stopped, unable to continue.

The woman on the other end of the line didn’t make it any easier. “Wondering what?” she asked.

“If you’d tell me why…”

It was such a stupid thing to ask. Delia could barely believe she’d done it.

“Why what?” the woman demanded. “You mean why I divorced him? I’ll tell you why—because he liked other people better than he liked me. Philip needs a home base, you see—a place to leave his paint and his easels and all that shit, but when he’s out on the road, honey, he’s also on the make. And he’ll screw anything that walks. Male or female, it doesn’t matter.”

By the time the woman stopped speaking, Delia was sobbing uncontrollably into the phone.

“Oh, my God!” the woman exclaimed. “You just found out, didn’t you!”

Still unable to speak, Delia nodded.

“I’m sorry,” the woman continued. “I know how I felt the day I found out. I wanted to kill him. I should have killed him! If I had, this wouldn’t be happening to somebody else, to you. Are you all right, honey? Do you have any friends there with you, someone you can talk to?”

“I’m all right,” Delia managed. “I’ll be okay.”

“Yes, you will, but it’ll take time. Years, probably. Where are you?”

“Washington,” Delia answered. “Washington, D.C.”

“I wish I knew somebody there I could have come talk to you. That son of a bitch! I’d tell you to sue his ass and take him for everything he’s worth, but I already did that, so there’s not much to take. When he left me, he was dead broke. I got the house and a garageful of paintings, which I’ve been selling, by the way. If you have a chance, at least try to pick up some of the art.”

“He’s not painting much anymore,” Delia admitted.

“Drugs?”

It was as if the woman, this stranger halfway across the country, knew every sordid detail of Delia’s life. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Get out then,” M. A. Cachora advised. “Get out and stay out. And go by the health department and have yourself tested. That stupid bastard is playing Russian roulette, and he isn’t smart enough to figure it out.”

“I already have,” Delia said. “Been tested, that is. I get the results on Monday.”

“Keep my number in case you need someone to talk to in the meantime. My name’s Marcella, by the way. Call me anytime you need to talk.”

“Thanks,” Delia said. “I will.”

But she didn’t call Marcella back, and she didn’t call any other numbers in Santa Fe, either. Delia had found out everything she needed to know.

She stayed on in the hotel all through the weekend. Somewhere along the way she finally realized she was hungry and ordered food from room service. Time moved in incredibly tiny increments. Occasionally she thought about calling her mother and Ruth, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Ruth really liked Philip, and Delia didn’t want to break the spell with a harsh dose of reality. With Ellie, it meant history repeating itself in a new generation.

When Delia returned to the doctor’s office on Monday afternoon, her anxiety level was off the charts. When Dr. Hanley told her she was HIV-negative, the words hardly registered. She left the doctor’s office in a daze and made her way to the nearest pay phone. It took a while to get the tribal chairman’s number, but finally Fat Crack Ortiz came on the line.

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s Delia,” she said quickly. “Delia Cachora. Remember me?”

“Of course.”

“I’m calling about your offer,” she said. “Is the tribal attorney job still available?”

“Yes,” Fat Crack answered. “As a matter of fact it is. Why?”

Delia paused and took a deep breath. “If you’ll have me,” she said, “I’d like to accept the position.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’m glad you’re coming home. Your aunt Julia will be pleased.”

***

For the five men
who gathered in
Ban Thak
that Sunday morning, digging Fat Crack’s grave was as much a time of remembrance as it was of physical labor. They arrived in four separate vehicles just as the sun cleared the jagged tops of the Tucson Mountains off to the east.

There was little left of the village—only the feast house, a tiny chapel, a few crumbling adobe houses, an equal number of mobile homes, and the parched-earth cemetery. Some of the graves were well tended, marked with headstones or crosses that were decorated with wreaths or vases of plastic flowers. Others moldered in obscurity, with the names of the dead long since obliterated from crosses that tipped precariously in one direction or the other.

Leo and Baby unloaded shovels, pry bars, and a wheelbarrow from the truck. Then they hauled the yellow-and-red watercooler over to the cemetery and perched it on a fence post so it would be close at hand when needed.

Long habit made it easy for the brothers to work without need of extraneous conversation. They had toiled together in their father’s tow-truck and auto-repair business from the time they could each hold a wrench, and they had played in Four Winds, a modestly successful chicken-scratch band, from the time they were in high school. By the mid-nineties, people had teased them about being so
e wehem
—so together—that neither one of them would ever have room for a woman in his life. Then Delia Chavez Cachora appeared on the scene in her slick Saab 9000, and both Leo and Richard wanted her.

Baby Fat Crack, older than Leo by two years, remembered Delia from first grade at Indian Oasis School years earlier. Baby was shy and reticent, and his understated way of courting was to learn everything possible about her Saab. Leo solved the problem by making himself indispensable.

Delia’s father, Manny, had been brutally attacked with a shovel. Although the medical community diagnosed his paralysis as a result of spinal-cord damage, Delia’s aunt Julia claimed Manny had been stricken by Staying Sickness, one of a group of ailments specific to the Tohono O’odham people. Manny’s particular strain, Turtle Sickness, resulted from a person’s being rude.

Whatever had caused the paralysis, the result was the same. Manny Chavez was a hopeless invalid in need of constant care and supervision. Delia’s brother, Eddie, spent most of his life timed-out on booze. Consequently, despite Delia’s stormy history with her father, his care fell on her—and, because he volunteered for the task, on Leo Ortiz’s broad shoulders as well. When Delia moved from her aunt’s home into a house in what had formerly been the BIA compound in Sells, Leo was there, moving boxes and furniture and erecting a wooden wheelchair ramp so Manny could come to visit once he was finally released from the rehab facility in Tucson. Leo helped Delia find a suitable caregiver for her father, and he helped transport him back and forth to the hospital for various doctor’s visits.

Leo’s constancy and patient way of dealing with her father and with her was so different from everything Delia knew from Philip that she couldn’t help noticing—and falling in love. When the Saab’s turbo hiccoughed and quit, Baby Fat Crack was the one who installed a replacement. And when the compressor for the air-conditioning went out, Baby fixed that as well, but somehow that all went right over Delia’s head. She was too busy with other concerns. Had Baby come right out and said something, she might have realized how he felt about her. But it wasn’t until after her divorce from Philip was final and she and Leo announced their engagement that the full implication of what had happened hit home—for all three of them.

The night before Leo and Delia’s wedding, Fat Crack brought his two sons together and insisted that they sit down and share the Peace Smoke. Only then had they been able to move on and let bygones be bygones. After losing out on Delia, Baby had finally found himself a suitable bride. He and Christine already had one child—a little girl—with another on the way. Now, as the two sons labored together digging their father’s grave, Fat Crack’s spirit was still the glue that held them together—not only his sons, but his sons’ children as well.

***
Brandon dropped
Diana off outside Wanda’s mobile home in Sells and then headed for
Ban Thak.
He arrived at the cemetery just after Davy and just before Brian. Brandon knew he was late. Baby and Leo had already dug down to knee level. Leo was down in the hole whaling away with a pickax while Baby stood on the surface leaning on a shovel.

He wiped his dusty hand off on his jeans before accepting Brandon’s proffered handshake. “Thanks for having us,” Brandon said.

Baby nodded. “Grab a shovel,” he said. “We’ll take turns.”

The younger men worked faster, and although Brandon shoveled steadily and was a little winded, he had nonetheless accomplished almost as much when his turn was over. Standing on the sidelines, catching his breath and listening to the others joke and tease, he remembered what Fat Crack had told him once—that as a young child, Looks at Nothing had told Rita Antone she would be a bridge between the Anglo world and the Tohono O’odham. And it was true. Years after Rita’s death, here were five men of different generations and races—Rita’s great-nephews, Brandon Walker and his
Mil-gahn
sons, who weren’t really his sons at all—working together in a blending of harmony and friendship that would have been unthinkable years earlier.

“Why so late?” Leo asked Brian. “Were you hanging around with that cute red-haired wife of yours?”

“I overslept,” Brian admitted. “I was out late last night working a case and didn’t set the alarm.”

“What kind of case?” Davy asked.

“I’m sure it’ll be on the news again today if you missed it last night,” Brian said, making conversation. “Some guy hacked a little Mexican girl to pieces and tossed her out in the desert.”

Brandon had stepped over to the fence to take a drink from the cooler, but the words stopped him. “What do you mean, hacked to pieces?” he asked.

Brian put down the pick and came out of the deepening hole while Davy went in to shovel up loosened dirt. Brian wiped his face and neck with a grimy hanky before answering.

“Just that. It was brutal. The murder weapon’s most likely a machete. Her limbs were whacked off at the joints. A woman hiking near Vail yesterday morning found the body in bags strewn along the railroad tracks.”