Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [50]
Under the Mother Superior’s watchful eyes Fat Crack examined a derelict 1960 Falcon that was gathering dust in the garage behind the convent. When he emerged from under the hood and self-consciously pulled his sagging Levi’s back up, he realized that someone else had joined them. Even in the shadows, he recognized Ellie Chavez and could see the ugly bruises and cuts that marred her otherwise smooth skin. Beyond Ellie, peering out from behind her mother’s skirt, stood a little girl with enormous brown eyes—Delia. The child observed the proceedings with more than childlike interest, as though she understood that this discussion would impact her life in ways she could not yet fathom.
“Can you make it run?” Sister Justine asked.
Fat Crack rubbed the thin stubble on his chin. “Sure,” he said. “But it’ll cost money.”
“How much?” Sister Justine asked.
Nervously, Fat Crack hiked his pants up again. As Mother Superior of the convent and principal of Topawa Elementary School, Sister Justine was known to drive a hard bargain. “Two hundred, maybe,” he said.
When he said the words, both Delia and her mother gasped aloud. It was a sum that went far beyond their meager ability to pay. Sister Justine was undeterred.
“Two hundred maybe, or two hundred, really?” she asked.
“Two hundred really,” Fat Crack conceded, knowing that if the repairs turned out to be more expensive than that, he’d have to eat the difference.
“How soon can you have it ready?”
“Tomorrow morning?” Fat Crack asked hopefully.
Sister Justine shook her head so forcefully that the stiff material of her veil snapped and crackled like jeans on a clothesline flapping in the wind. “Today,” she insisted. “Registration at ASU ends tomorrow. Ellie has to get registered for school, find a place to live, get the kids enrolled in school and day care and be ready for classes to start on Monday. Tomorrow will be too late.”
“Getting it fixed today would take a miracle,” Fat Crack argued.
But Sister Justine had made up her mind. “You’d better get started, then,” she said. “Miracles don’t grow on trees, you know. They take work and time.”
All that day, while Fat Crack had labored over making the Falcon run, Delia Chavez lingered in the background, watching everything he did. This was long before Fat Crack Ortiz met up with Looks at Nothing, long before the aged medicine man had charged his middle-aged protégé with becoming a medicine man, too. As a consequence, while Fat Crack worked, he had no glimmer about what the future might hold for Delia Chavez. He thought she and her mother would be away from the reservation for a matter of months, not years. He had no idea that he was helping send both of them into an exile that would last almost thirty years. And he had no hint that someday he—Fat Crack Ortiz—would be the one to bring Delia back home to the reservation.
With all that had happened in between, Fat Crack was hard-pressed to know whether or not he had done the right thing. If he hadn’t fixed the Falcon that day, maybe Ellie and Delia never would have gone away in the first place. For sure, everything would have been different.
Brandon Walker took his tamales and tortillas and made his way to Basha’s. When he had first visited the reservation, there had been two trading posts—the High Store, built on a hill, and the Low Store, not on a hill. You could buy milk and sodas and staples at the trading posts, but buying decent meat or finding fresh vegetables with an actual produce manager had been out of the question. This new store in Sells looked like a regular supermarket in Tucson—smaller, but much the same.
He made his way to the produce department and looked around. The selection was different from what he might have expected in town. For instance, Brandon didn’t see any of his personal favorite—eggplant—but what was