Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [10]
“What’s up?” he asked as she came toward the pool, holding out a towel.
“You may want to go in the back way to dress,” she said. “Somebody’s here to see you.”
Brandon took the proffered towel and scrambled out of the pool. “Who is it?” he asked.
“An old Indian lady named Emma Orozco,” Diana replied. “She’s using a walker, so I left her in the living room.”
“She’s on a walker and drove here by herself?”
“No. Her son-in-law brought her. He’s waiting out front. I offered to invite him in, but she said no, he’d stay in the car.”
“What does she want?”
Diana shrugged. “Beats me. Something about her daughter.”
Once out of the water, Brandon found the morning air far chillier than expected. He hurried to the sliding door and let himself into the bedroom. After dressing he made his way into the spacious living room, where a wizened Indian woman, her face a road map of wrinkles, sat primly erect on the leather sofa, one gnarled hand resting on the crossbar of her walker.
“Ms. Orozco?” Brandon asked tentatively, taking a seat opposite the old woman. “I’m Brandon Walker.”
She turned to look at him and nodded. “Your baskets are very nice,” she said.
Brandon glanced around the living room. Diana’s collection of Native American baskets, many of them finely crafted museum-quality pieces, were arrayed around the room with wild extravagance. They had been part of the household furnishings for so long that Brandon Walker no longer noticed them.
“Thank you,” he replied. “Some of them were made by Rita Antone, a Tohono O’odham woman who was once my wife’s housekeeper and baby-sitter.”
Emma Orozco nodded again. “I knew Hejel Wi i’thag,” she said. “Her nephew is the one who sent me to talk to you.”
Despite years of living around the Tohono O’odham, the Desert People, Brandon was still struck by the lingering influence of old ways and old things. Rita Antone had been dead for fifteen years, yet on the reservation she was still Hejel Wi i’thag—Left Alone. As a little orphaned girl named Dancing Quail, Rita had been given the name Left Alone in the early part of the twentieth century, long before Emma Orozco had been born. No doubt stories about Hejel Wi i’thag and her odd loyalty to an Anglo woman named Diana Ladd were now an enduring part of reservation lore.
Rita Antone’s nephew, retired Tribal Chairman Gabe Ortiz, and his wife, Wanda, were longtime family friends. In the Walker/Ladd household, Gabe was usually referred to by his familiar name of Fat Crack—Gihg Tahpani. Not wanting to betray what might seem like undue intimacy, Brandon made no reference to that name now.
“How’s Mr. Ortiz doing?” Brandon asked.
“Not so good,” Emma Orozco replied.
This was not news. A few months earlier, Fat Crack had been diagnosed with diabetes. A student of Christian Science, Fat Crack had, in middle age and with some reluctance, answered a summons to become a Tohono O’odham medicine man. Once aware of his diagnosis, Fat Crack had refused to accept the services of the Indian Health Service physicians and “get poked full of holes.” Instead, he was dealing with his ailment—one so prevalent on the reservation that it was known as the Papago Plague—with diet and exercise, along with an unlikely regimen of treatments that was as much Mary Baker Eddy as it was Native American.
“I don’t know why he has to be so damned stubborn,” Brandon’s daughter Lani had railed. Home for Christmas vacation from her pre-med studies in North Dakota, she had heard about the diagnosis while visiting Wanda and Fat Crack in their home at Sells. “He should be under a doctor’s care,” Lani had declared. “But he won’t even consider it.”
Dolores Lanita Walker was a Tohono O’odham child who, as a toddler, had been adopted by Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. She had been reared