Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [49]
Not that she had squandered any time lecturing him about it. Gladys Johnson had taught her grandson self-reliance the old-fashioned way—by example. When her husband, Harold, returned from the Battle of the Bulge a crippled and broken man, Gladys did what had to be done. She found a job as a grocery-store clerk and supported both her husband and her daughter. When the doctor said that the VA hospital in Tucson, Arizona, offered Harold the best chance of recovery, she’d packed up her family and driven there in a ’53 pickup truck, hauling her family’s worldly possessions in the back of the pickup and in the flimsy trailer she’d hitched on behind the truck.
When Gladys and Harold’s daughter died of cancer at age twenty-five and their grieving son-in-law had dropped six-month-old Erik off on Gladys’s doorstep shortly thereafter, saying he couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it, Gladys had handled that as well. And she had done it all without complaint.
So get yourself up off your butt and start down the damned mountain, Erik told himself that sunny April morning. As Grandma would say: “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
Wanda Ortiz came out to the ramada a few minutes after Brandon Walker drove away with two dozen each of tamales and flour tortillas packed in a foam ice chest.
“It’s getting hot out here,” she said to her husband. “Don’t you want to come inside?”
“No,” Fat Crack replied. “I’m fine.”
Shrugging and more than a little exasperated, Wanda returned to the house, leaving Fat Crack where he was. The chill Gabe Ortiz felt in his bones right then had little to do with the weather. He and Brandon had smoked the Peace Smoke many times over the years. Doing so today had been Fat Crack’s own friendly gift, a way of saying thank you and good-bye. But now that it was over—now that he had given away the medicine pouch and the sacred tobacco, he was left with a terrible sense of neijig—of foreboding.
Fat Crack had grown accustomed to having glimpses into the future. For instance, when Leo and Delia had come to the house to tell them Delia was pregnant, Fat Crack had known at once that the baby would shrivel and die in his mother’s womb. Fat Crack hadn’t told Leo and Delia that dreadful news. He had kept it to himself, just as he also had not betrayed his knowledge that this new baby, another little boy, would thrive and grow up to be tall and strong.
With his old friend Brandon Walker, Fat Crack knew something wasn’t right. Had the medicine man still possessed Looks at Nothing’s precious crystals, even without his eyesight they might have helped him clarify in his own mind exactly what was happening. As it was, he was cursed with a sense that something was wrong without any means of preventing whatever it was from happening.
Fat Crack wondered if his disquiet could have something to do with the very thing he had spoken with Brandon about—the coming conflict between two powerful women, between Delia and Lani. Closing his eyes, Fat Crack remembered the first time he had seen them both, these two women whose power struggle might well divide the Desert People. With Lani it had been the day he and Wanda had picked the little Ant-Bit Child up from the hospital and taken her to the Walkers’ place in Gates Pass. And even as they did it—even as they delivered the little Indian baby into the hands of the Anglos who would be her parents—Fat Crack had been blessed with the unerring sense that he was doing the right thing. With Delia Chavez Cachora Ortiz, things weren’t nearly so clear-cut.
Sister Justine had summoned Gabe Ortiz to Topawa early that long-ago Wednesday morning. He had driven there in the old blue-and-white tow truck