Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [46]
Behind the mini-mart was what people now referred to as the Ortiz Compound. Three double-wide mobile homes were arranged around a dirt-floored ramada. The interior patio was shaded by a roof made of spiny ocotillo stalks held together by a net of chicken wire. One house belonged to Wanda and Fat Crack. The other was for their son, Richard, and his wife, Christine, a teacher from the school at Topawa. The third one, clearly empty now, had once been occupied by Fat Crack’s younger son, Leo, and his wife, Delia.
Brandon went directly to the front door of the house that belonged to Wanda and Fat Crack and rang the bell. Wanda Ortiz, smiling, opened the door and let him inside.
“He told me you’d be coming,” she said. “He’s out back. Come on this way.”
Wanda led Brandon through the house to the back door. Where once there had been three steps, there was now a sturdy wheelchair ramp.
“He’s down there,” Wanda said, pointing.
Brandon made his way down the ramp and into a gloom of shade. Fat Crack sat in the far corner of the space, dozing in a wheelchair.
Brandon had last seen Gabe Ortiz several months earlier, when he had come to Christmas dinner at Gates Pass, leaning heavily on a walker. The wheelchair was something new. It was warm but not quite hot in the late-April noonday sun. Even so, a blanket covered Fat Crack’s lap and was tucked in behind his legs.
“Gabe?” Brandon asked quietly.
Startled awake, Fat Crack looked straight past Brandon and asked, “Who is it?”
He’s blind, Brandon thought. Completely blind. “It’s me, Gabe,” he said aloud, swallowing the lump that rose suddenly in his throat. “Brandon Walker.”
Fat Crack relaxed. The corpulence that had given him his name was long gone. He seemed shriveled and old, with leathery skin as transparent and thin as parchment. “It’s good to see you, Brandon. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. There must be another chair somewhere.”
Brandon helped himself to a plastic lawn chair and dragged it close to Fat Crack’s. The shiny white surface of the plastic had been burned away by the sun. Worried that the chair might be too sun-damaged and brittle to hold his weight, Brandon tested it gingerly before settling on it.
“How come you knew I was coming?” he asked. “More of that spooky medicine-man stuff you and Lani are always talking about?”
Fat Crack laughed and pulled a cordless telephone receiver out from under the blanket that covered his lap. “Not even,” he said. “Diana called. She wanted to know if Wanda had any tamales and tortillas you could buy and take home for dinner tomorrow. The tortillas aren’t ready yet, but they will be. Just don’t forget them when it’s time to leave. Diana will kill you.”
“How are you?” Brandon asked.
“As blind as Looks at Nothing used to be,” Fat Crack answered with a chuckle. “Maybe that’s one of the medicine-man rules that S’ab Neid Pi Has forgot to tell me—that medicine men are supposed to be blind.” He paused. The smile on his face faded. “I’m an old man, Brandon,” he added. “I’m old and I’m dying.”
There it was then—all the cards laid out on the table. “Lani’s worried about that,” Brandon admitted. “She wants to be here to help.”
“I know,” Fat Crack replied. “But there’s nothing she can do. She’ll want me to check into a hospital and have me taking shots and pills. I’m not doing that, not even for Lani.”
“No,” Brandon said. “I suppose not.”
“When will she be home?”
“Sometime in the next two weeks,” Brandon answered. “Graduation is on the tenth of May, but she’ll be home before that. She’s skipping graduation and has rescheduled her finals.”
“Then I’d better hurry,” Fat Crack said. “If I could walk, I’d do what Looks at Nothing did and go out in the desert someplace by myself.” He paused again. “I don’t like being a burden,” he added. “It’s so hard on Wanda—harder on her than on me. But let’s not talk about that anymore. It’s not why you came to see me.”
Fat Crack Ortiz had been Brandon Walker