The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (16 page)

“Well, don’t worry about it too much, dear,” Aunt Marie had said as she put a stack of sugar cookies next to his teacup. She knew they were his favorites, and all the years he had been away she had sent him a two-pound coffee can full of the cinnamon-dusted cookies each month. Sterling could not bring himself to talk about the attack by Edith Kaye because Aunt Marie had warned him about accepting any sort of dinner or lunch invitations from her. Sterling knew Aunt Marie would hear all about it the next day anyway. He suddenly felt terribly weak and tired halfway through his fourth cookie.

When Sterling got to bed, he could not sleep. He could feel himself shaking. Aunt Marie was snoring in the next room. Although Sterling had been telling himself not to worry, a voice deeper inside told him there was bad trouble on the way. The voice told him mostly it was due to his long absence from the village—first, going away to boarding school so young, and then going to work for the railroad right after high school. Then, the voice continued, there was the fact that except for Aunt Marie, his close family and clanspeople had died out over the years. Who was going to plead his case for him? It was considered shabby to stand up and defend oneself. It amounted to bragging. It was far better to have
friends and in-laws vouch for your good deeds and truthfulness. He lay there in the dark and regretted that he had not done more socializing in the six months he’d been back. He had taken things easy when he first retired because he had thought he’d have plenty of time to go around renewing friendships from the past. He had taken a couple of months working on the roof of Aunt Marie’s little house because it was starting to leak pretty bad, especially in the corner where his bed was. He had been careful to stop hammering or brushing tar on holes whenever anyone passed by and greeted him. In fact, that had been the reason the repairs had taken two months to complete. When Sterling had finally got to sleep, the sky was beginning to turn light gray.

THE CONCLUSION of the Tribal Council had been reached behind closed doors while Sterling was at the clinic with Aunt Marie. The doctor had checked her out completely and announced she had the heart of a woman half her age. But her mind was made up. She had pointed to her eyes and said, “Well, a heart of a forty-year-old isn’t much good when all the rest is ninety years old. I have seen too much lately. I have begun to dislike what I see, and what I hear.” The doctor did not understand her reference to the Tribal Council proceedings against Sterling. The decision came out of the Council about four o’clock, and the governor sent word for Sterling to come. The messenger was an old man who did janitorial chores around the tribal office building. He announced that the decision had not been good. He said the Council had concluded that “conspirators” could not be permitted to live on the reservation because, in their opinion, all of the current ills facing the people of Laguna could be traced back to “conspirators,” legions of conspirators who had passed through Laguna Pueblo since Coronado and his men first came through five hundred years ago. Sterling shook his head. This was terrible. They had probably confused “conspirator” with “conquistador.”

Aunt Marie called out from her room. Sterling brought the messenger to her bedside. “Well, Auntie, I sure am sorry to have to be the
one to tell you. But the Council decided they have been too easy on conspirators all along. They really didn’t want it to be Sterling, but they decided they had to begin somewhere.” Aunt Marie tossed herself on the pillow and moaned. The messenger looked hopefully at Sterling. “They say you’ve got your railroad pension. They figure you know all about living off the reservation.” Aunt Marie turned her face to the wall. She said she had decided she might as well die. Sterling pleaded with her not to say that, but she kept her back to him too. He tried to reason with her, he needed her more than ever right now. “Yes,” she said weakly, “I know, dear. But I am just too upset at everyone to stay around any longer. I am ready to go on to Cliff House where my sisters are. They’re all waiting there for me, you know. Oh, we will do all kinds of things together again—tamales, the first thing, because tamales require many hands.” Her voice had sounded so happy and strong that Sterling was reassured. He had patted her shoulder as he left for the Council Chamber, and she had turned and kissed the fingers of his hand as she had when he was a child. “Oh, Sterling,” she said, “this is all wrong. You have always been the best one. Remember, no matter what happens, I always love you.”

Sterling still could not believe it had all happened so fast. Only a month before he had been tribal film commissioner in charge of permissible locations for the movie people. Now the Council had voted to expel Sterling from the reservation forever. A few people had come up to him after the adjournment to ask how his auntie was feeling and to whisper that “forever” might not be for always—in five or ten years he might petition the Council to reconsider. But Sterling could feel his heart stabbed with a pain that ran straight from his throat. He had dreamed of spending the years with his poor little decrepit auntie, keeping her company until she returned to her beloved sisters and her own dear aunties at Cliff House. He decided he would try to stall as long as he could, just to be with Aunt Marie a little more. Sterling had no illusions about waiting five or ten years to attempt to return. The time he had spent away from the reservation had been a big factor against him in the first place.

Sterling would always believe that Aunt Marie had done it for him, and not for selfish reasons. He believed Aunt Marie had calculated her death to shame the Council into reversing its decision. But the shock of having killed an old woman had been so great the Tribal Council had felt compelled to point the blame elsewhere. Or as one councilman had put it, “There is more reason now than ever to get rid of this kind of
man. He has no ties or responsibilities here any longer. His behavior upset our dear sister so much she is no longer with us.”

THE DRIVING had worn Seese out. But it had been fun to drive around with old Sterling telling all about Geronimo and Dillinger. She had not thought about it much, but since she had found Lecha and had been “working for her,” Seese had weaned herself off cocaine. She had not even been trying to cut back because she had never wanted to know how badly hooked she really was. Beaufrey had always wanted her to try heroin. She did not know what she might have done if David or Eric had offered it to her. But with Beaufrey the answer always was no. She had not thought about it before, but watching Lecha with her pills and her injections had had some effect upon her own drug use. She thought it must be animal instinct, as with horses shying from a carcass on the trail. Not anything conscious or reasoned. Of course she had a job now, and she didn’t want Lecha to have any reasons for sending her away. At least not until Lecha had been able to help find Monte. Seese had to stay alert so that Lecha herself did not overdose.

And the house Lecha had brought them to was not exactly brimming over with hospitality. The afternoon Lecha and Seese had arrived by taxi had been memorable on a number of counts. Ferro had not believed Lecha when she said who she was. The cabdriver was already in a panic because two crazy women had lured him farther and farther away from pavement into the rocky and impenetrable foothills of the Tucson mountains where, as far as he could tell, only four-wheel-drive vehicles ever escaped with oil pans intact. Ferro had refused to open the main gate and had let the guard dogs out of the inner fence so they were flinging themselves at the chain-link below the intercom button, snarling and barking so loud no one could hear anything that was said. Then suddenly the six Dobermans had moved away from the fence and stopped barking. It had been then that Seese noticed they wore bulky collars that began to make crackling static sounds. Paulie’s voice came over the intercom asking Lecha to step out of the taxi and stand in front of the dogs. Lecha had
shouted to the cabdriver to tell them to call her sister, Zeta, but then Ferro interrupted and said he could hear. “It is not necessary to shout,” he had added coldly. Lecha refused to get out of the taxi. She said she was a dying woman. Finally Zeta’s voice came over the intercom. The hair on the back of Seese’s neck had stood up at its sound. Their voices were identical. Zeta was calm in a way that Seese had never seen Lecha, not even after one of her injections. Zeta merely said they should have called first. She asked that the taxi driver and “the girl” please get out and stand briefly in front of the dogs. By this time the driver was very upset. Seese waved the fifty-dollar bill Lecha had just handed her in front of the dogs, who raised their hackles but never moved or made a sound. Seese heard a faint
click-click
from one of the dog collars and saw a clear plastic globe enclosing a smaller globe that followed their motions like an eye. Then Zeta’s voice told them to proceed through the gates.

They gave the taxi driver another fifty on the driveway, and Paulie had waited until the cab was out of the first inner gate before he stepped out of the wrought-iron gate from the patio. He was holding a twelve-gauge riot gun casually in one hand. His pale blue eyes registered none of the ferocity that had been in his voice. He had an odd, almost military, stiffness to his walk. Paulie carried in the luggage while she and Lecha stood in the patio with Zeta and Ferro. Lecha had not mentioned that she and Zeta were identical twins. The resemblances were stunning. They must have weighed the same. The wrinkles around the eyes were identical. Both had teeth that were broad and white and too close, so that the incisors on the bottom were pushed forward. The one difference had been that Lecha dyed her hair black, while Zeta had left the wide streaks of silver untouched. Zeta’s manner seemed relaxed and casual. She had glanced a time or two at Seese, but did not seem particularly disturbed or interested. It was Ferro who had pounced forward, demanding to know who Seese was. Lecha had put both arms on his shoulders as if to embrace him, but Ferro had pulled away. “Oh, is this how you are going to be?” Lecha said softly. Seese noticed immediately a trace of a sway in his walk that made the heaviness in his lips and waist appear distinctly feminine. But his jaws were clenched and his words came hissing fast. “I am a grown man. I’m thirty years old.” “Oh, Ferro, I want it to be a reunion,” Lecha said. But Ferro had turned away abruptly and gone to help Paulie carry in the last big trunk.

“Oh, thank you, darling,” Lecha said as they passed by with the big trunk. “Be careful with it—it has so many of my dearest things!”

Ferro had stiffened; he looked over his shoulder at her, his face full
of rage. But what Seese found more remarkable was the look that Paulie had given Ferro at that instant; she had seen the same expression when Beaufrey looked at David.

Lecha had insisted on going to bed immediately. But while Seese did the unpacking, Lecha lay back on the pillows with her eyes half open and talked about her sister and Ferro. Lecha was dozing in and out so there wasn’t a lot of clarity in what she said. She talked about her career. At first Seese had taken that to mean the clairvoyance, but later Lecha had talked about her career as a pilot. “Oh, I was going to run my own little flying service between all the little settlements and villages. To help with the sick and injured. I planned to take Ferro along with me. He would sleep on his Indian cradleboard—through takeoff and landing! Of course I would be one of the best—I would land an airplane like an angel! But all that had only been daydreams,” Lecha told Seese. “I’d get these great ideas all by myself, but I would never get around to doing any of them. Right afterwards someone else would do the same exact thing as I’d told everyone about. Zeta was right. That’s all I was—talk, hot air. Zeta said, ‘Bullshit walks,’ and that was when I decided to go. To get out of the Southwest, to explore new territory.” Lecha’s voice trailed off and she started snoring. For whatever reasons, Ferro had not spent much time with his mother while he was growing up. Seese felt sad for Lecha and for her son; she went to the bedroom that was to be hers and she had smoked herself into oblivion, with marijuana.