The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (111 page)

In prison they’d all learned to respect the Hopi because he had continued to practice his religious beliefs. The Hopi claimed his religion included everyone; everyone was born belonging to the earth. Some Hopis and other Indians had called the Barefoot Hopi a witch because he talked about the dead as if their spirits still hovered among the living. Those who objected to talk about the spirits of the dead were either Christians or staunchly traditional Navajos and Apaches uncomfortable with the subject of dead souls.

Mosca had attended all of the Hopi’s Sunday services while he was in prison, and he had watched how the Hopi’s strategy worked. At first there had only been Indians and Mexicans; that week the Barefoot Hopi had talked about desecration. Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people. Mosca had listened to the Hopi talk for over an hour.

As the months passed, more guys showed up, and they had permission to meet for two hours. Then a few blacks had come, blacks
who believed they had Native American ancestry. After the black Indians, then other blacks had showed up; these guys had been quiet and never spoke; last came the white guys—some who
were
mixed bloods, and others who felt like Indians in their hearts—whatever that meant. The Hopi’s religion made no distinctions. A few had showed up because they had heard wild rumors. The Hopi was always aware some might be spies.

Mosca took a big hit off the joint and passed it to Calabazas; he puffed out his cheeks and chest and held his breath until he started coughing. “You should hear the Hopi tell it,” Mosca said. “He’s in town for some kind of healers’ convention. You should go.” Calabazas and Root had both nodded, and the three sat listening to the sirens and what sounded like gunshots in the distance. A police helicopter flew over the neighborhood flashing searchlights over roofs and backyards. Mosca’s attention shifted briefly to the police helicopter. “The Hopi has an answer for everything,” Mosca went on dreamily. “We know what the Hopi’s answer to a helicopter is. Boom!” Mosca pointed his finger at the sky.

“You they’ll put in the gas chamber,” Calabazas said. “The Hopi had an excuse; he was protecting his religion.”

“They might shoot me, but they won’t put me in no gas chamber,” Mosca said. “There won’t be any more prisons or gas chambers left by then anyway.”

Calabazas and Root had learned not to argue with Mosca. Root could tell Calabazas was as skeptical as he was about any plans to organize a national uprising of prison riots and jailbreaks all over the United States. It wasn’t likely all the prisons and jails would participate, and everything in the Hopi’s plan depended upon simultaneous riots so that police and other law enforcement would be overwhelmed. Calabazas had asked what the Barefoot Hopi planned to do about the National Guard and the U.S. army. Even if state police and law enforcement were overwhelmed, there were still the military and of course, citizen volunteers. The air force would drop bombs on jails and prisons to stop the uprisings. Root had expected an angry outburst from Mosca when Calabazas asked about the air force; instead, Mosca had remained calm.

“Well, you’re thinking just like the white man thinks, aren’t you?” Mosca said. “Listen to the Hopi. Army, Air Force, or Marines—the Hopi doesn’t worry about them. When the time comes, they’ll all be busy too. Anyway, bombs and guns are the least important weapons. The power lies in the presence of the spirits and their effect on our enemies’ morale.” The Barefoot Hopi was not the only one in contact
with the spirits. Mosca reminded Calabazas and Root about the spirit voice in his own right shoulder. So far the spirit voice had not said much. A spirit didn’t actually need a voice to communicate; the spirit put the idea into your head out of the blue. When the spirit had filled the people, then all at once the people would know what they must do. The Hopi didn’t mean any Christian Holy Spirit either.

The Hopi refused even to argue whether it was one spirit with many dimensions or many spirits with singular dimensions. That was white man talk. Instead the Hopi had talked about Buffalo Man, who had seduced Yellow Woman in the old stories. Buffalo Man’s spirit had moved from a human body to a buffalo bull’s body effortlessly.

IT HAD BEEN a long time since Calabazas had got so drunk by himself; Mosca and Root had left hours before. Calabazas liked the way the sound of the crickets and his own breathing were in harmony. The whole world had gone crazy after Truman dropped the atomic bombs; the few old-time people still living then had said the earth would never be the same. Human beings could expect to be forsaken by the rain clouds, and all the animals and plants would disappear. All over the world Europeans had laughed at indigenous people for worshiping the rain clouds, the mountains, and the trees. But now Calabazas had lived long enough to see the white people stop laughing as all the trees were cut and all the animals killed, and all the water dirtied or used up. White people were scared because they didn’t know where to go or what to use up and pollute next.

It was after three but neither Liria nor Sarita had come home. The U.S. government did not want the people Liria and Sarita and their Church comrades were smuggling across the border. Zeta and Lecha would say right there was the best reason to do it—because the U.S. didn’t want any more brown Indians or white Spanish-speakers on the streets of Los Angeles or El Paso. Still Calabazas tended to agree with Mosca that the motives of the Church might not be as simple and pure as the fervent nuns and priests imagined.

Calabazas took full responsibility for how things had turned out with Sarita and Liria. At one time Calabazas had spent a great deal of time with Zeta on his mind. The two beautiful sisters hadn’t been enough trouble; Calabazas had not been able to resist Zeta, who called herself
an enemy of the United States government. Zeta swore each shipment of contraband was a victory against the United States government.

Calabazas liked to watch sunrise the way the old people had when he was a child. He thought it was funny the way the human mind only copied itself over and over, yet everything found itself radically changed. He watched the sky but he did not see what they had seen. Perhaps the earth was spinning faster than before; rumors like this had circulated among tribal people since the First World War. Calabazas had heard the arguments the traditional believers had had among themselves—each accusing the other of being tainted by Mormonism or Methodism or the Catholic Church. But he had also heard them discuss the increased spin of the earth; others disagreed and had asserted it was instead the universe running downhill from a great peak and the increased speed was only temporary, before it reached the plain to slow gradually and regain a measure of stability.

Calabazas himself had no proof about the speed of the earth or about time. He did not think time was absolute or universal; rather each location, each place, was a living organism with time running inside it like blood, time that was unique to that place alone.

Calabazas no longer recognized himself in the stories Mosca or the others told about Calabazas’s adventures thirty years before. The man in the stories sounded familiar, and Calabazas could recall what had happened, but the man he had once been was gone. Liria and Sarita had recently accused him of getting soft inside like white-bread dough; maybe they were right. Most of his life Calabazas had traveled back and forth across the border in a beat-up old truck or leading a string of pack burros on his little spotted mule. Calabazas had not been careful with money. If he had worked alone, and for himself, he might have been rich, though who knows? But Calabazas had worked with the people who had loved and cared for him as a child; he had worked with his relatives and his clanspeople in the Sonoran mountain villages. He had routinely made advances and gave out loans for no interest. He split profits fifty-fifty with village farmers, but he paid all the expenses himself as his pledge to them. He had not been a good businessman. He had not bought land and new houses; he had not bought gold or guns as Zeta had. He had given Sarita and Liria all the money they had ever asked for.

Calabazas could also feel his own time running inside himself, pounded out by his heart. The bones and meat hauled the soul around
for fifty or sixty years then let go. He had seen a great many changes in the United States and in Mexico during his lifetime, and they had all been ominous. Calabazas had asked the elders, but native people around Tucson could not remember when they had seen so many white people—women and children—living in cars and in camps under the trees.

Now even crackpots such as Mosca’s pal the Hopi were planning and plotting. All the past summer, Calabazas had watched the riots and the looting in a dozen U.S. cities. Calabazas had noticed an important difference: this time the rioters did not loot or set fires in black neighborhoods. They had set fire to Hollywood instead, and hundreds and hundreds of both black and white youths had blocked fire fighters and fought police on Sunset Boulevard. The rioters had chanted, “Burn, Hollywood, burn!”

Calabazas remembered the riots and looting in the sixties vividly. The U.S. president and Congress had done nothing for the poor until the poor had taken their anger to the streets. The people had high hopes for the war on poverty, but soon U.S. strategy makers had seen a better way to stop the riots in U.S. cities. If those young black and brown men rioting wanted to fight, then the U.S. had
just the place
for them in Southeast Asia. Those who had managed to survive Vietnam had been returned to their neighborhoods by the United States government addicted and maimed to ensure they wouldn’t take to the streets and fight anymore.

Calabazas had given up on politics. Politics got you murdered in short order. Calabazas didn’t trust any government; Calabazas didn’t trust the Catholic Church either. Mosca had a good point: what business did the Church have removing political dissidents and activists? How were the people of those areas ever to rise up without their own leaders? The Church removed dissidents thousands of miles to the United States to keep them from causing any more trouble.

Maybe there was something wrong with him, maybe time had worn something down inside Calabazas, as Liria had accused, and the flame had burned out. He was not ignorant. He had listened to the old ones bitterly recount the stories of the great war for their land; the people had never got tired of recounting Yoeme’s narrow escape from the hangman’s noose during the flu epidemic. Yoeme had been a big troublemaker among the Yaquis even before the revolution. The Mexican government had kept a bounty on her scalp; only Zapata might have pardoned her for her fierce war against the government, and the whites had murdered him.

Calabazas had been lucky with his life; he had been born during the lull in the great war and had bought himself a safe perch. But now the war was spreading, and in a few years there would be no safe perch for anyone. Yoeme’s great war for the land was still being fought; only now it wasn’t just the Yaquis or even the Tohano O’Dom who were fighting. The war was the same war it had always been; the people were still fighting for their land. The war would go on until the people took back the land.