Living the Dream (13 page)

First the younger kids put on their musical show, starting with a funky Navajo version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. Lily Topaha had written Navajo-type lyrics about Grandpa planting corn, the baby in its cradleboard,Grandma weaving a rug under a tree etc. The excitement was too much for one little girl who simply stopped singing, walked offstage, climbed up on to Cody’s lap and serenely went to sleep. I saw Cody softly stroke her shiny hair, the exact colour of Cody’s own.

Later the grandparents took over the school kitchen to prepare a traditional Navajo meal. A photographer from one of the reservation newspapers snuck around snapping photos of the tribal elders sternly instructing their grandkids in the right way to make Navajo frybread.

Finally, the older kids did a presentation of the Navajo Creation story in song and dance. This is basically the story for anyone who doesn’t already know it:

Long ago all of Earth’s creatures lived in the Black World. No one was happy, so they decided to leave. They travelled from world to world, but none of them seemed right until finally they entered the Glittering World, a beautiful place where everything was in perfect balance, and animals, humans and spirits could live in harmony.

“The Glittering World”, I whispered. Was it just my imagination or did I feel a sighing, golden breath?I had the strangest feeling that Ambriel had been watching as the children sang and danced their way through his dream.

After the performance the teachers invited all the grandparents back to their classrooms to view the children’s artwork. The walls of Lily’s classroom glowed with brightly coloured paintings depicting Navajo myths and legends. I saw several paintings of Coyote impatiently hurling the stars up into the sky. One girl had painted a picture of Spider Woman weaving the world together with her rainbow-coloured threads.

Toby’s grandpa chatted to Cody as they both admired Toby’s painting of Red Jacket. “He’s like the Navajo Santa Claus. Except his sleigh is pulled through the sky by magic buffalo, not reindeer!” He explained.

I saw Toby tug on Cody’s hand. “I did another painting. It’s scary though,” he added doubtfully.

If you hadn’t seen one yourself in real life, the creature in Toby’s painting might seem comical, a six-year-old’s idea of a monster, baring pointed teeth. The colour drained from Cody’s face. “I’ve - I’ve got to get some air.” She went rushing out.

I saw Grandpa Manybeads shake his head in disapproval. “These are not things to put on display in school.” He unpinned the picture and stuffed it in his pocket, but not before I’d seen the title in Toby’s six-year-old scrawl:

The Skin Walker
.

What’s a Skin Walker? I’d asked and Brice had done a mock shudder.
You don’t want to know.

More than the actual picture of the Skin Walker it was Cody’s reaction that disturbed me. Why was she so freaked? She’d been asleep the night the creature came sniffing around. Where had she seen one? And when?

On the drive back Earl put in a CD. Soon he was nodding his head to the beat. He saw Cody’s amazed expression and laughed. “Did you think we just listen to chicken scratch music and
heya heya
chants?”

“No,” she said, embarrassed. “I didn’t know you had Navajo rappers, that’s all.”

They listened to the rapper for a few minutes. Cody’s eyes kept going back to Earl’s driving mirror where something was hanging from a strip of leather. “Is that an actual bear’s claw?” she asked at last.

He nodded. “Had that since I was thirteen years old. Got it on my vision fast. On the fourth day a bear came into my camp. He took my medicine pouch and left me this claw.”

Cody gasped. “Weren’t you scared!”

“Awed more than scared. Strange things happen on a vision fast, but somehow in your inner world they make total sense.”

“So what’s it like when you get a vision?” Cody was fascinated. “Is it like, totally amazing?”

He smiled at her enthusiasm. “It’s different for everyone. Sometimes you get a new name, a name you will carry through your adult life. Sometimes the Holy People grant you glimpses of the life path they want you to follow.”

“Do girls do vision fasts?” Cody sounded oddly hopeful.

Earl shook his head. “Girls have their own ceremony called
Kinaalda
. My sister Vickie had hers last year. The only time a Navajo girl goes on a vision fast, that I heard of, is if she gets apprenticed to a traditional healer or herb woman. I don’t think that’s ever happened in my lifetime.”

Cody took a sudden breath. “Can I ask you something? Are you supposed to say Native American or American Indian?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me. You know why people call us ‘Indians’, right?”

“Not really.”

“OK, so Chris Columbus rocks up to the shores of the New World, and immediately thinks he’s found a short cut to India. YEEHAAR! He can’t wait to start trading all those desirable Indian spices. His fortune is as good as made!”

“Except it wasn’t India,” said Cody, giggling.

“True, but hey, to Chris we’re all funny brown foreigners, right! Eventually our hero found out his mistake, but the name stuck. Butterfly Woman says that from the start white people never really saw us; they always saw what they expected to see.”

Earl smiled at Cody. “People like Lily who are, you know, real earnest about their roots, believe we shouldn’t be stuck with a name that only came about because of some stupid mix-up. I say it’s ALL a stupid mix-up. Why is it better to call us ‘Native Americans’? America is their name for this country, not ours.”

Cody looked out of the window. “Aunt Bonita says all I know is white people’s history.”

Earl sighed. “Cody, some days all that skin colour talk makes me come over real tired. On those days I’d rather go hang out with the bears.” His eyes glinted with humour. “Any colour bears!”

A burst of static came over Earl’s radio, something about a bar fight. “Marlon can get that one,” he said cheerfully. “Look, I’ve got Saturday off. Why don’t I bring my sister over and we’ll show you the sights?”

Cody looked wary. “Was she one of the girls at the party?”

He laughed. “If you have to ask, Vickie definitely wasn’t there!”

That night the aunts lined up on the couch to watch a

TV programme about Miss Navajo.

“Another couple of years and we can enter Cody,” Aunt Jeannie teased. “Reckon you could butcher a sheep, Cody?”

Cody looked revolted. “Miss Navajo has to kill a sheep?”

“Of course!” Aunt Evalina seemed to be enjoying the joke. “Navajo girls have to be useful not just cute to look at!” Cody’s aunts were at it again, exchanging sly nods and glances over their niece’s head. I could feel them leading up to something.

“We were talking to Butterfly Woman,” Aunt Bonita said super-casually. “She thinks while you’re here you should do your
Kinaalda
ceremony. She thinks it would help you.”

“Help me how?” Cody was suddenly suspicious.

“Help you become stronger inside,” Aunt Evalina said. “After your
Kinaalda
you will always be a part of us. No matter where you go, you can still draw strength from the tribe. That’s what Butterfly Woman said.”

Cody looked wary. “Does a
Kinaalda
involve sheep at all?”

Aunt Evalina laughed. “No! You have to run though! Can you run?”

“Hey, I’m a Navajo girl,” Cody said, surprising everyone including herself. “Obviously I run like the wind!”

“So will you do it?” Aunt Bonita made it sound like she didn’t care either way.

Cody thought for a minute. “OK!” The aunts beamed with relief. They hadn’t thought she’d agree.

“We’ll start organising it right away,” Aunt Jeannie promised.

My phone had been silent for days so it was a shock to feel it suddenly vibrating inside my jacket. I fumbled with the buttons.

“Lola! You found him, right!” The signal was bad, making her voice drift in and out as if she was floating in deep space, but I felt myself turning cold as I realised that Lola was crying.

“Absolutely no sign. Mel, I’m so sorry. I just thought you should know.” We both cried for a while then Lola pulled herself together.

“We’ve been everywhere. In every cave, behind every waterfall. We’ve been in every monastery, every mountain inn. Brice dragged us into one today that was basically just someone’s front room. They heated it with a tiny stove that burned yak dung. The lamps burned yak butter so everything reeked of yak. Brice made us stay there for hours. He said he had a hunch we’d overhear something useful.

I gave a hysterical giggle. It was the kind of mad thing Brice would do.

“Did you? Hear anything useful?” I asked hopefully, though I already knew the answer.

“No, but it was interesting,” Lola admitted. “One old guy told a story about something that happened years ago when he was out hunting on the mountains. He was hot on the trail of a snow leopard when a scary sorcerer with yellow eyes appeared and warned him to stop. He said without the snow leopards the valley would die. The guy never hunted leopards again.”

Snow leopards and sorcerers
. It sounded like another world.

After I rang off, I wiped my eyes and dug my notebook out of my bag. I couldn’t help my friends search for Reuben, but I could do what Reubs would do if he was here with me now. I could do my job to the best of my ability, giving Cody five-star cosmic protection.

She’d gone to bed by this time. I softly leaned over her to check that she was sleeping soundly, then I perched beside her with my notebook, thoughtfully chewing the end of my pen. I needed answers, but what I’d got was a bigger, more confusing riddle.

Eventually I scribbled:

Butterfly Woman - what’s so special about her? Find out more.

Then, after a lot more pencil chewing I scrawled underneath:

What the sassafras is a skin walker?

Suddenly I was fumbling for my phone. “Lola, is Brice with you?”

“Sure,” she said in surprise. “I’ll put him on.”

“Hi, sweetheart,” said a familiar voice. “How’s life on the Rez?”

“I need you to tell me everything you know about Skin Walkers,” I told him.

I heard Lola’s boyfriend inhale sharply. “Do you think you’ve seen one?”

“That’s what I need to find out.”

I sat in total silence as Brice shared the results of his research, then I thanked him and rang off. Then I used my spangly new phone to go online and carefully typed
Skin Walker
into the search engine.

Thanks to Brice, I was ninety-nine per cent convinced that what I’d seen was not a bona fide Skin Walker, but I needed to make sure. Plus, to be totally honest, I needed to keep busy. While I was checking cosmic info, I was just a brain, a pair of eyes scanning tiny print. Turning back into an angel girl would mean having to face that waiting wall of worry and grief. I jumped from link to link, reading what the celestial websites had to say and learned some v. disturbing things.

I already knew from Brice that Navajo people associate Skin Walkers with witches. According to the websites, a Navajo witch is basically just a twisted human who follows the Evil Way instead of the Blessing Way. To get their evil powers, the witches must perform a v.v. Dark act which we don’t need to go into here. Even in the twenty-first century, many Navajo still believed that a witch had the power to send out a part of themselves in the shape of a hideous beast, aka a Skin Walker.

Brice said this kind of belief was pure gold to the PODS. “At the end of the day, darling, it doesn’t matter if they exist or not. The PODS can mimic any form they like. If the locals believe in fire-breathing demons, they’ll assume the form of a fire-breathing demon. If they believe in Skin Walkers…”

I read on, shivering, and grateful for the shimmery celestial light coming from my phone, until I found a paragraph that almost made my hair stand on end.

“Witches often send Skin Walkers to steal hair or anything closely connected with their chosen victim. That’s why the Navajo only allow relatives such as mothers and wives to cut their hair and even then they burn or bury it…”

I remembered Cody flushing her hair down the toilet in a panic. She knew something was after her, like she knew about Skin Walkers. Without being told, she knew.

Mr Allbright likes to joke that missions are like angel cake. He means they both have like,
layers
.

On the surface Cody’s return to the reservation was a huge success. A lot of people genuinely seemed to care about her. Jim Yellowbird dropped by, bringing samples of his late wife’s beadwork as he’d promised. He sat on the front porch explaining all the tiny patterns to Cody and what they meant.

“It’s like a story in beads!” she said, amazed.

Before he left, Jim gave her a beaded pouch with the design of a turtle. “Might inspire you to do your own beadwork.” He gave one of his sly grins. “Do it between e-mails!”

The same evening Earl drove over in his own beat-up truck with a horsebox attached. Cody and the aunts helped to lead the pony out of the box. He looked exactly like Indian ponies you see in movies, a magical speckled mix of browns and golds. The horse swivelled calm brown eyes to look at me, snickering a greeting.

“You beauty. You are exactly what Cody needs,” I told him.

“Meet Pepper,” Earl said, smiling. “Think you two can get along?” Cody was too completely overcome to speak.

Mr Allbright says the hardest thing on a v. complicated mission is that you want to believe the pretty, sugary top layer is all there is, and it’s true. I didn’t want to know about those ominous layers twanging underneath. But even as Cody let Pepper nuzzle her cheek, they were there.

“See how quickly she’s got his trust,” Aunt Evalina whispered to her sisters. “That child is Navajo to her bones.”

“Not according to some people,” said Aunt Bonita grimly. “I was in Basha’s this morning, checking out the special offers, and I heard one of Dolores Bitterwater’s cronies running her mouth.”

Aunt Evalina nodded unhappily. “Nettie told me what Dolores has been saying.”