The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (130 page)

Zeta had turned to Lecha to nod her approval of the Hopi; then Awa Gee tapped Zeta’s shoulder and began whispering excitedly in Zeta’s ear. Lecha could see that Mosca had jumped up from his chair he was so excited. Even Calabazas had sat up in his chair, wide-awake. Lecha could see the Hopi gather himself for his finale; he spread his short legs and held the podium with both hands.

“Now on the eve of the final destruction of mankind, now when all seems hopeless and the greed of the destroyers unstoppable, now in our time of greatest peril, the twin brothers who have always helped our people, the twin brothers are on their way!”

Lecha heard gasps all around her; the room began to buzz with excitement. The Hopi continued in an even voice, “In Africa and in the Americas too, the giant snakes, Damballah and Quetzalcoatl, have returned to the people. I have seen the snakes with my own eyes; they speak to the people of Africa, and they speak to the people of the Americas; they speak through dreams. The snakes say this: From out of the south the people are coming, like a great river flowing restless with the spirits of the dead who have been reborn again and again all over Africa and the Americas, reborn each generation more fierce and more numerous. Millions will move instinctively; unarmed and unguarded, they begin walking steadily north, following the twin brothers.”

The Hopi paused and motioned at the big Maya Indian woman Lecha had noticed earlier. “We are privileged to have with us today Angelita La Escapía, with a message from the twin brothers.”

As soon as the big Mayan woman reached the podium and looked out at the audience, Lecha had seen she was no ordinary envoy; in fact, Lecha saw the woman was at least as powerful as the twin brothers she claimed to serve. The Maya woman spoke calmly and clearly in Spanish, but the conference had provided no interpreter. Lecha wondered how many in the audience understood her. The message was quite simple. There was nothing to fear or to worry about. People should go about their daily routines. Because already the great shift of human populations on the continents was under way, and there was nothing human beings could do to stop it. Conflicts and collisions were inevitable, but it was best to start from scratch anyway. Nothing European in the Americas had worked very well anyway except destruction. All the people needed
to remember was the twin brothers and the people from the south were coming to stop the destroyers. Converts were always welcome; Mother Earth embraced the souls of all who loved her. No fences or walls, would stop them; guns and bombs would not stop them. They had no fear of death; they were comfortable with their ancestors’ spirits. They would come by the millions.

LECHA DIDN’T CARE if she was the last one to Room 1212. She had to telephone to see how things were at the ranch. After the Barefoot Hopi’s speech, Zeta had told Lecha about Greenlee and his last joke; Lecha had felt her entire body tingle; even her scalp had prickled. Everyone had gone crazy: Mosca at Yaqui Easter, Seese at the Stage Coach, and now Zeta killing the gun dealer. Lecha spoke with Sterling and told him to tell Seese to start packing. The craziest one had been Ferro since the death of his lover. Ferro blamed the police, but he had also blamed Lecha for bringing Seese. Ferro refused to hear the truth: Jamey had been living on borrowed time, like any crooked undercover cop. No matter how many times Lecha or even Zeta had tried to talk to Ferro, to reason with him, he had exploded into a rage, screaming like a wild animal, not a human. Ferro had declared war on the Tucson police, and Zeta said no one would stop Ferro unless they killed him. Worse yet, Zeta had not been able to prevent Ferro from recruiting Awa Gee. Awa Gee refused to listen to Zeta after he learned Ferro wanted him to build car bombs. Awa Gee was even crazier than Ferro was, Zeta said. Awa Gee had babbled that the Tucson police were only a warm-up, only the beginning.

Year by year, Zeta had watched Tucson change. The years the snowfalls had fallen short in the Colorado Rocky Mountains had left the Southwest without water. Hundreds of fancy foothills houses in Tucson stood vacant. Block after block of small businesses in Tucson had closed or gone bankrupt. Affluent young professionals had been transferred out of Arizona or recalled to the safety of Phoenix, one hundred miles farther from the Mexican border.

The air force base in Tucson had been reopened, and military personnel were pouring into Tucson but without families. It was clear what the high command felt about the security of the U.S. border. Zeta remembered the Vietnam War and the names of the Vietnamese cities as they had fallen and the U.S.-backed forces had been forced back until at last they had been driven out of Saigon.

Already in Tucson and southern Arizona military and government vehicles patrolled the streets, ostensibly to seize illegal immigrants; but now they stopped everyone with brown skin and demanded identification. Any white people in Tucson who were not riding in health-spa limousines with bodyguards were also routinely stopped and questioned by Tucson police, who “advised” the homeless to leave town.

There were rumors the U.S. wasn’t worried about the civil war in Mexico because the U.S. had CIA all the way to the top. Rumor had it that the Arizona governor had requested military aid not against Mexicans, but to control the thousands of homeless and destitute Americans fleeing northern winters. It did Zeta’s heart good to see the white men so nervous. She had to laugh when Mosca told her about the squads of homeless veterans and the homeless families occupying vacant condominiums in the foothills.

When Lecha knocked on the door of Room 1212, she could hear a voice speaking English with a British accent. When Rose had opened the door, Lecha saw a blue-black African in bright yellow and red robes addressing the others seated around the room. Mosca had been sitting next to a black man in army fatigues wearing a green beret; Lecha saw by Mosca’s maniacal grin the African and the black man were probably Mosca’s guests. Zeta and Calabazas were on the sofa with the Maya woman sitting between them. Wilson Weasel Tail and the Hopi were sitting on the floor with their backs against the bed. Weasel Tail was tying knots in the shag carpet, but the Hopi was taking notes while the African talked. Rose had motioned for Lecha to sit down on the bed.

All night long in Room 1212 they had discussed a network of tribal coalitions dedicated to the retaking of ancestral lands by indigenous people. Europeans were welcome to convert, or they might choose to return to the lands of their forebears to be close to Europe’s old ghosts. The sun was just rising over the mountains as the meeting in Room 1212 ended. Only Calabazas looked tired, and that had been because he was skeptical. When the Hopi talked about a national or even multinational prison uprising coordinated with the activities of say the eco-warriors dynamiting power plants and high-voltage lines, Calabazas had
shook his head. Calabazas feared the jail and prison uprising riots were likely to deteriorate into race riots with the whites and Hispanics and others against the blacks. The Hopi had listened to Calabazas’s doubts respectfully; the Hopi smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Of course it would not be an easy task because the prisons were designed to keep inmates at war with each other. The Hopi knew he had his work cut out for him, but the Hopi also had a growing number of disciples inside and outside jails and prisons all over the United States. At that point, Clinton spoke up; Clinton said he was skeptical too, but so far he had seen homeless white men and homeless black men work together for a common cause—survival—just as black men and white men had fought side by side in Vietnam.

Calabazas had been stubborn. They were crazy, he said; they had seen too many Hollywood movies. The minute there were prison riots and unrest in the cities the battle lines would fall along skin color. No, the Hopi had explained patiently, if anything happened, it would be more like the haves, whatever colors they were, killing the have-nots. Anyway, the African Americans would not be the focus of attention; the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans making their way north with the twin brothers would be. Calabazas had been skeptical of the Mexican Indian woman and her account of the spirit messages the twins claimed they got from the big blue macaws the people carried with them. But the Hopi said he believed it was necessary for the hundreds of thousands of Indians to appear from the South to prevent whites from turning on blacks in the United States. Almost immediately whites would look to blacks and Hispanics as buffers or shields, and mediators between themselves and the great migration of Native Americans. Calabazas was skeptical that the millions of U.S. citizens who called themselves Christians would even tolerate, much less support, a Native American religious movement to reclaim the Americas from the destroyers. Still, the heat waves and droughts had already driven thousands north to cooler temperatures. All the big shade trees in Tucson had died as the water table plunged precipitously.

Until the twin brothers and the people had reached the border, the Hopi advised they should all make preparations and then simply wait. As Wilson Weasel Tail’s Ghost Dance song had stated, white people seemed to be having nervous breakdowns and psychotic episodes in record numbers. The Hopi said perhaps the whites could sense the changes that were approaching. What they had done to others was
coming back on them; the tables had turned; now the colonizers were being colonized.

Calabazas said he didn’t believe in miracle conversions of Christians or Jews or Moslems back to tribal religions, and the Hopi winked and said, “But you do believe in mass hysteria? The collective need to see drops of real blood on Church statues during Lent? You know something about mass hypnosis and subliminal messages.” The Hopi smiled. “Anyway, no one says it will happen right away tomorrow. No one says anything like that. Native American people have been on these continents thirty thousand years, and the Europeans have been here for five hundred.”

The Hopi had talked about peaceful and gradual changes as if he believed voting would become the solution as soon as millions more Indians became U.S. citizens. Lecha watched the expression on Angelita’s face as the Hopi had outlined the possibilities for peaceful changes. Each time the Hopi said “nonviolent free elections,” Angelita had grimaced. Lecha could see Angelita suspected the truth: there would be no elections; great struggles were about to sweep all through the Americas as far north as Alaska and Canada. Angelita La Escapía was one tough she-dog; Lecha could see that in the Mayan’s barrel figure and steely, dark eyes. Angelita only pretended to agree with the twin brothers and their followers, unarmed and humble as they walked northward to fulfill an ancient prophecy. Lecha had seen the twin brothers on satellite TV. They looked to be hardly more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, and easy to manipulate by the likes of Angelita. Lecha wasn’t fooled; it was that big Mayan woman who was behind the twin brothers. Lecha had watched Angelita whisper to Zeta, and Zeta had made a lengthy reply. Later when Lecha asked her, Zeta admitted Angelita had asked about buying a few army surplus Stinger missiles. Lecha thought Angelita was right. The Hopi and the twin brothers might sincerely believe their recovery of the Americas could take place without bloodshed, but Lecha had her doubts especially since the hideous slaughter that had occurred in South Africa. These American continents were already soaked with Native American and African blood; violence begat violence, but if the destroyers were not stopped, the human race was finished.

Calabazas took the words of the Hopi to heart. He believed the change was in motion and was a process that had never stopped; it would all continue with or without him. Calabazas could sit back and do nothing if he wanted to and still the changes were inevitable. All the
same, Calabazas felt uneasy. He had trusted the men who had been in Room 1212, but he wasn’t sure about the women, especially not the Eskimo or the Maya woman. Those two looked like troublemakers; they looked like
killers
if a man didn’t cooperate. The Eskimo woman said “quality, rather than quantity,” and she had been talking about the Indigenous People’s Army of the North. They might be few, but they were fierce and well armed. The Army of the North would sweep down behind the U.S. forces along the Mexican border. Before Weasel Tail knew it, his Lakota armies had been absorbed into the Army of the North. Weasel Tail was a smart man because he didn’t object. No objections or resistance would stop the Maya woman or the other one, the Eskimo. Fire. All the Eskimo woman had talked about was fire. Forests and tundra burning. The earth burning. La Escapía—why, just her name—she was no better. She had talked about the fire macaw who brings destruction.

Wilson Weasel Tail and the Hopi could talk all they wanted about peaceful revolutions, but Calabazas had seen the Maya La Escapía talking to Zeta, and he knew what that meant. For years Zeta had been buying and stockpiling weapons in the old mine shafts. Calabazas was content to retire from smuggling, politics—everything; he had put in his time and had earned a rest in the shade with his little mule and burros. Calabazas would sit back and let the others make the decisions and give the orders, the way he always had, since he was a child with the old-time people in the Yaqui mountain strongholds. They had told him what must be done and he had done it. Since he was an old man now, maybe the women would give him something easy to do, something that wasn’t too strenuous or too dangerous—maybe answering the phone or mailing letters.