Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [82]
Delia paused and took a deep breath. “If you’ll have me,” she said, “I’d like to accept the position.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’m glad you’re coming home. Your aunt Julia will be pleased.”
For the five men who gathered in Ban Thak that Sunday morning, digging Fat Crack’s grave was as much a time of remembrance as it was of physical labor. They arrived in four separate vehicles just as the sun cleared the jagged tops of the Tucson Mountains off to the east.
There was little left of the village—only the feast house, a tiny chapel, a few crumbling adobe houses, an equal number of mobile homes, and the parched-earth cemetery. Some of the graves were well tended, marked with headstones or crosses that were decorated with wreaths or vases of plastic flowers. Others moldered in obscurity, with the names of the dead long since obliterated from crosses that tipped precariously in one direction or the other.
Leo and Baby unloaded shovels, pry bars, and a wheelbarrow from the truck. Then they hauled the yellow-and-red watercooler over to the cemetery and perched it on a fence post so it would be close at hand when needed.
Long habit made it easy for the brothers to work without need of extraneous conversation. They had toiled together in their father’s tow-truck and auto-repair business from the time they could each hold a wrench, and they had played in Four Winds, a modestly successful chicken-scratch band, from the time they were in high school. By the mid-nineties, people had teased them about being so e wehem—so together—that neither one of them would ever have room for a woman in his life. Then Delia Chavez Cachora appeared on the scene in her slick Saab 9000, and both Leo and Richard wanted her.
Baby Fat Crack, older than Leo by two years, remembered Delia from first grade at Indian Oasis School years earlier. Baby was shy and reticent, and his understated way of courting was to learn everything possible about her Saab. Leo solved the problem by making himself indispensable.
Delia’s father, Manny, had been brutally attacked with a shovel. Although the medical community diagnosed his paralysis as a result of spinal-cord damage, Delia’s aunt Julia claimed Manny had been stricken by Staying Sickness, one of a group of ailments specific to the Tohono O’odham people. Manny’s particular strain, Turtle Sickness, resulted from a person’s being rude.
Whatever had caused the paralysis, the result was the same. Manny Chavez was a hopeless invalid in need of constant care and supervision. Delia’s brother, Eddie, spent most of his life timed-out on booze. Consequently, despite Delia’s stormy history with her father, his care fell on her—and, because he volunteered for the task, on Leo Ortiz’s broad shoulders as well. When Delia moved from her aunt’s home into a house in what had formerly been the BIA compound in Sells, Leo was there, moving boxes and furniture and erecting a wooden wheelchair ramp so Manny could come to visit once he was finally released from the rehab facility in Tucson. Leo helped Delia find a suitable caregiver for her father, and he helped transport him back and forth to the hospital for various doctor’s visits.
Leo’s constancy and patient way of dealing with her father and with her was so different from everything Delia knew from Philip that she couldn’t help noticing—and falling in love. When the Saab’s turbo hiccoughed and quit, Baby Fat Crack was the one who installed a replacement. And when the compressor for the air-conditioning went out, Baby fixed that as well, but somehow that all went right over Delia’s head. She was too busy with other concerns. Had Baby come right out and said something, she might have realized how he felt about her. But it wasn’t until after her divorce from Philip was final and she and Leo announced their engagement that the full implication of what had happened hit home—for all three of them.
The night before Leo and Delia’s wedding, Fat Crack brought his two sons together and insisted that they sit down and share the Peace Smoke. Only then had they been able