Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [25]
“Lani,” she replied. “Lani Walker.”
“Who else? What did Nana Dahd call you?”
Lani smiled, remembering. “Mualig Siakam,” she said at once. “Forever Spinning, because when I was little, I’d twirl around and around like the girl who turned into Whirlwind.”
“What else did Rita call you?” Fat Crack asked.
Looking at him in the starlight, Lani had realized he wasn’t smiling. These were serious questions that required serious answers.
“Kulani O’oks,” Lani whispered. “Medicine Woman.”
Unlike Forever Spinning, this name was not a happy one. As a child, Lani had been left alone by an elderly caretaker. After falling into an ant bed, she had nearly died from the hundreds of bites inflicted when disturbed ants had swarmed over her body. Her copper-colored skin was still mottled with faded patches from those bites. It was the ant bites and Lani’s presumed relationship to Kulani O’oks—the great Tohono O’odham medicine woman who had been kissed by the bees—that had caused Lani’s superstitious blood relatives to give her up for adoption.
“And?” Fat Crack urged, staring at her intently across the darkness.
Lani looked back at Fat Crack, studying his impassive face. She had yet to tell anyone about the new name she had given herself in the aftermath of the pitched battle in the limestone cave. What had saved her from Mitch Johnson was the timely intervention of a flying bat whose velvety wings had touched Lani’s skin in passing. That brief caress had somehow imbued Lani with the certain knowledge that the darkness of the cave was her friend rather than her enemy—that by surrendering herself to the darkness instead of fighting it, she could be saved.
On Lani’s final venture into the cave, where she had gone to leave her one remaining shoe as a tribute to Betraying Woman’s moldering bones, she had discovered a talisman of her own—the dried, baby-finger-like bones from a long-dead bat.
“Nanakumal Namkam,” she whispered hoarsely.
Fat Crack nodded. “Bat Meeter,” he said. “You have met Bat and made some of his strengths your strength. That, too, is good, so taken together, what do you think all this means?”
“I don’t know.”
“When Looks at Nothing came to me and told me I would be a medicine man,” Fat Crack said, “I thought he was crazy. How could I be a Christian Scientist and a medicine man at the same time? It didn’t make sense, but I know now he was right.”
He paused while Lani waited. Finally he spoke again. “You know the duajida?”
“The nighttime divination ceremony?” Lani asked.
“I have done the duajida for you, Little Bat Meeter,” Fat Crack said softly. “Every time it is the same. The spirits say you will be two things at once—Kulani O’oks, Medicine Woman, and also a doctor.”
“A doctor?” Lani asked. “As in a hospital?”
Fat Crack nodded. “It’s the same thing my auntie, Rita Antone, told me long ago,” he said. “And the duajida says it is true.”
Pulling her robe on over her naked body, Lani glanced at the window. It was still night outside on the frozen prairie beyond the double-pane glass. And since the night wasn’t over, it was still all right for her to do a duajida of her own.
For days now she’d had a nagging feeling that something was terribly wrong back home. Since Fat Crack was the one who was ill, she was convinced his condition was the source of her malaise. Because no one seemed willing to tell her what was really going on, it was hardly surprising that Lani might look to some other means of finding out what she wanted to know.
She went to the dresser and took down a small framed picture that dated from the night of her high school graduation. She stood in her cap and gown flanked on either side by Gabe and Wanda Ortiz. After retrieving her medicine basket from her dresser, she sat down cross-legged on the floor, pried off the tight-fitting top, and spilled the contents onto the rug.
There