Finding Casey (12 page)

“But the boy couldn't stop thinking about that winchinchala, so he asked his grandfather, ‘What do I do to make that maiden notice me?' His grandfather laughed and told him, ‘Stupid boy! You need to make a love flute. Go find a cedar tree and a branch so long, and cut it down. Hollow it out and drill holes in it, then you play a love song to the winchinchala and she'll understand what you want.'

“ ‘Where do I find a cedar tree?' the boy asked, and the grandfather affectionately smacked him in the head.

“ ‘Go into the forest where you found Elk. You'll know the cedar tree by its smell.'

“So the boy went off into the forest with some wasna, dried elk meat, in a bundle in case he got hungry. But all the trees looked alike and smelled the same to him. He decided to climb a mountain. At the top of the mountain he'd make a sacrifice of the elk meat and then maybe he'd be rewarded with the gift of a cedar branch. So he climbed and climbed, and man, it was a long climb. When he got to the top of the mountain he was so tired he laid down and took a nap.

“While he was sleeping, wagnuka, the red-headed woodpecker, heard his snoring and came over to investigate. The boy didn't interest him until he saw that pouch filled with wasna, and aieee! Wagnuka wanted that elk meat so bad he could taste it. The more he thought about it he had to have some. So wagnuka tap-tap-tapped the warrior boy on his head and the boy woke up. ‘Aieee!' the boy said. ‘What the heck are you doing? My head is not a tree!'

“Wagnuka said, ‘I'm hungry. I want you to give me that wasna you got with you.'

“ ‘You didn't kill Elk, so why should I give you any?' the boy warrior said.

“Wagnuka laughed and flapped his wings. He took off flying and landed on a cedar tree, which was out of reach of the boy. The woodpecker started singing, ‘Cedar tree! Cedar tree! I know where is the cedar tree!' and he was a pretty good singer. Actually, he could make a song about anything sound so sad that it just about broke your heart.

“ ‘Hey!' the boy said. ‘Bring me a branch of that cedar tree and I'll give you a pinch of my wasna.'

“The woodpecker remained where he was. ‘A pinch? I want all of it.' He started singing again.

“His song was so pretty and sad that it made the boy want that winchinchala all the more. ‘Fine, you can have all of my wasna, if you bring me a branch just right for a love flute.'

“Wagnuka did just that and then he flew away with his wasna to have a feast.

“The boy tried to drill holes in the branch with an arrowhead, but he was getting nowhere fast. He was young, plus he had no patience because his father was no good, like a certain two-legged mammal I could mention. He lay down and went to sleep again. Wagnuka was enjoying his meat but he kept hearing that fool of a boy's snores. The elk meat was so good that wagnuka took pity on him, and while the boy was sleeping he hollowed out the branch and drilled the holes, and blew his song into the flute. When the boy awoke, he saw the flute and cried out, ‘Thank you, wagnuka!' but the bird was nowhere to be seen. Probably he was off making deals with someone else. So the boy returned to his village to wait behind some bushes by the water hole for the winchinchala to come with her water bag to get water for her family. When she did, he popped up
and played his flute, that same sad love song as the woodpecker had played for him. The end.”

“Wait a minute. What did the winchinchala do?”

“She threw a turnip at him.”

“After he went to all that trouble? Why?”

“To show him that she was interested. I told you, it's a Lakota tale, not a Navajo one. A Navajo would straight-up ask her to go on a date. We're not all that patient.”

Glory laughed and laughed, and thought about how her husband made her smile at least once every hour, and how despite her being the size of a whale, he never failed to tell her she was beautiful, and her heart still raced whenever he walked into the room. She nestled her head into the crook of his arm. “Listen to your own story, Joe. She didn't jump into his bed, she threw a turnip at him. She was taking things slow. Juniper will, too.”

He yawned. “We'll see. Anyhow, you calmed me down. Thanks. What's up with Halle and Bart? Did you get the low-down or what?”

Glory pushed herself up in bed, then reached across to the bedpost and took Joseph's rosary down, placing it in his hands.

“That bad?”

“Yep.”

“What a crazy Thanksgiving.”

“Tell me about it. It feels like a bomb went off in the middle of my family.”

Glory stayed awake as long as she could, but then, despite her physical discomfort, she began to drift. As worried as Joe was about Juniper and Gopher—sometimes her mom was right on target—and as worried as Glory was about Halle's issues, really, this Thanksgiving had been good.

I woke up this morning in the reclining chair in the hospital room and my neck hurt. My legs had pins and needles, and my right foot was numb. For some reason the word
doctrine
was in my mind, sounding so much like
doctor
, but not meaning the same thing at all. Inside it there were some medical words:
doc
and
crit
, a word Susie the nurse used a lot. She said the reason she was hanging up the bag of blood to flow through the tube into Aspen's arm was because Aspen's “crit” was low. I didn't know what it meant. Then I thought of
cord
, as in,
I cut the cord when Aspen was born
. I really did do that. There wasn't anybody else there to do it but me. But in
doctrine
there were sad words, too, like
rot
and
torn
, as in
torn from your family
, or
the skin on her neck tore like paper
, making me think this day was already bad and Aspen hadn't even had the spinal tap yet. I watched Susie squeeze the bag to make the blood go in faster and wondered what a crit was. What
doctrine
means is rules to follow, or, as Seth calls them, “teachings.” I had to memorize six teachings before Seth allowed me to go out into public, and even then, I wasn't allowed to go out alone:

Know where the exits are.

Stick to the script.

If someone asks you a personal question, ask if they know Jesus.

Cops are not your friends.

Without money or identification there is nowhere to go.

Look in the mirror. Listen to your voice. The way that you are, no one else would want you.

My first trip outside the Farm was to Walgreen's in Española on Thursday, November 11, 2004, according to the newspapers for sale in a stack by the carts. The headline read, YASSER ARAFAT DIES IN PARIS.
A fat rat's ass, a sea raft
goes
aft.
Nothing good there but
safe
and I wasn't. I wondered who that was, and why did his dying make the headlines, or if anyone was sad about it. I didn't ask because newspapers were Worldly and Filled with Lies. I wasn't used to the motion of the car after so long of not being in one and it made me a little sick. Aspen was still small enough to carry in a cloth sling. We drove straight out of the farm, turned on 582. There were adobe houses and mobile homes, one with tires on the roof holding it down in case of a hurricane, I guess. That sounded interesting, having a neighbor, because we had just come to New Mexico and I hadn't met Louella or Billy yet. We passed Pueblo Pottery, and then I saw a forest of oak trees that reminded me so much of
Before
that my heart hurt like someone had stabbed a knife in it. Oak trees. Acorns. Leaves. Forest.
For rest, set. Roe, ore, tore, store, sore.
I made the words fill up my mind so there was no room for thoughts.

On the other side of the road it looked like another planet, all rocky and barren, no trees, nothing alive except for what grew out of rock. But nature is strong. Things can live in the most awful conditions. Sometimes they are tiny insects, ugly lizards, or beautiful butterflies. Then we turned left onto 74 and passed through the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo with the church
made of lava rock and the beautiful yellow doors with the metal hinges that look like black ferns turned on their sides. I wondered who made it. How did they get the idea? I was no good at ideas. Next to the church was the police department, but it was For Indians Only, Seth said. “There aren't any police in this town,” he said, and I hadn't ever seen any so I believed he was telling the truth.

Across the street from the church was the shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes, but I didn't know who that was until I saw Frances's book of Goddesses. I saw seven cars; two of them were trucks. I saw three boys wearing puffy jackets. Two black jackets, one green. The boys all had black hair and they were playing basketball. A brown dog with a curly tail crossed in front of us and Seth honked the horn at it. She was pregnant, her belly and teats hanging low. I wanted so bad to ask Seth if I could take her home because I loved dogs and especially puppies, but sometimes when I asked for things it made him so mad he would hit me, so I didn't ask very often. The church's steeple pierced the blue winter sky like a needle and I wondered if the sky could feel it. Up to now whatever snow had fallen had melted, except for some patches in shady places. We turned right onto Highway 68 that is also the old El Camino Real, and I thought of Father Juniper Sierra mountains, or someone like that. Missions were made of adobe, right? I remembered the smell of burning candles and musty hymnals. Then it was like everything flying toward me at once, Sunshine Breakfast 89 cents at the Ohkay Owingeh Casino, Walmart, Lowe's, Chili's, Mighty Modular, Quik Wash, then Walgreen's. If only it had another L and another A, it could say
A green wall.
That sounded so peaceful.

The address of Walgreen's was 1115 N. Riverside Drive. I liked the sound of it. The glass doors opened automatically.
Above the numbers were lighted red letters that spelled
Walgreen's
. I thought of all the words hiding inside:
were, gene, wale, gal, wag, wage, near, ear, ran, slag, saw, war, law. Rag, nag.
I got tired trying to keep the list in my head. The windows had advertisements for things on sale, including paper diapers. I used cloth because it's important not to ruin the environment. Every day I bleached them in the sink and my hands got dry and cracked and sometimes bled so bad I rubbed cooking oil on them. I hung the diapers out to dry on a clothesline I put up that went from our yurt to a tree. Sometimes it got so cold that the diapers froze. They made a clean, cracking noise when I folded them.

That day everyone else who worked at the Farm had gone out to clean houses in Taos and Angel Fire for ski season. Because things don't grow so much in winter, we couldn't depend on selling vegetables like we do in summer, so we did jobs. Cleaning tourist condos was one of the ways we got money for the Farm and what Seth called his “ministry.” Seth took every job that came his way, but he didn't do the work, we did. Usually he dropped the workers off and picked them up later in the van, but this time they had to take the van and the Jeep because each group had to clean seven or eight places in each location in one day. The men went but they weren't happy about it because the Bible says cleaning is women's work. I would have gone if Seth allowed me to. I am good at cleaning. When something is dirty, it makes me feel sick unless I can scrub it until it's gleaming and clean again. I would be a good janitor. I loved cleaning up after the horses and chickens because animals are so nice and I could talk to them and not feel so lonely.

But not that day.

“Laurel,” Seth said that morning, “it's time to test how you do in public.”

I didn't know what that meant. “Can I take Aspen with me?” I asked.

Seth said, “Yeah, but she better not cry and draw attention to us.”

“She won't cry,” I promised.

“Don't you start talking to anyone,” Seth said. “Just because someone smiles at you doesn't mean you can trust them.”

“I won't.”

Seth in his Levi's, his cowboy hat, Abel's bracelet on his arm. We went to Walgreen's so Seth could fill prescriptions, even though he didn't believe in taking Western medicine. “Big pharma,” he called it. Corrupt. Ruining the environment and especially the rain forests. He always said, Everything We Need Comes from Nature. So I wondered why were we getting pills? Then Frances explained to me that these prescriptions were for special pills to
sell
, not to take. It was business. One single pill could sell for one dollar per milligram, so a fifty-milligram pill of a thirty-pill prescription was fifty dollars for one and thirty pills times fifty milligrams equaled fifteen hundred dollars. Easy money, she said. Money we can use for good things. People bought them to feel high and that wasn't hurting anybody, it was a Victimless Crime. Frances, Caleb, and old St. John sold them for Seth in places like the Pueblo or Española, or Chimayo, where Frances says there's a Church of Miracles I'd have liked to see more than go to Walgreen's, but Seth was the Elder and he made the decisions.

I walked alongside him while he filled up the shopping cart with toilet paper, which we did use, chips, soda, and candy bars,
things we never ate. When he went to the pharmacy to get the pills he had almost a full cart of things to buy and I wondered where he was going to get the money to pay for it because lately he was yelling a lot about not having any cash flow and how no one ever died from eating beans and oatmeal and fasting was good because it cleaned out the spirit. Just looking at the chips I remembered the salty taste of nachos from
Before
, and the bubbly sweetness of soda and how a Snickers bar got stuck in my teeth and tasted so good all day. I hadn't had one for years. It wasn't my birthday—Seth made everyone at the Farm take January first as a birthday, including Aspen—but I wondered if it was maybe my real birthday, from
Before
. How would he know unless Abel had told him? Abel was in the desert now and always. I couldn't ask because Seth didn't like to talk about his brother. I didn't even remember Abel's face anymore, unless I looked in the mirror at my neck, so I tried not to do that. But it must have been my
Before
birthday because Seth gave me a present of a five-dollar bill. He said, “Get something for yourself,” and then he grabbed my arm hard where he always did, just above the elbow, the bruises hidden by my sleeve. “You can walk around the store by yourself, but don't try anything stupid because I'll be watching,” he said, low and slithery, like he was talking snake language.