Three Sisters (8 page)

“No you’re not.” The winner of the pot pointed a long-stemmed teaspoon at her forked-tongue sister. “And don’t let me catch you cheating on the deal. If I so much as see you batting those big eyelashes at Andy—why, there’s no telling what I might do.”

Shortly after the Spencer sisters had departed, Mandy, wincing at a stinging shin-splint pain, came to clean the table.
Just imagine them two rich young women, drawing toothpicks for who’ll marry that poor widow-man
. Beatrice had left a five-dollar bill, which covered the coffee and tea…
and twenty-five cents for me. Big whoopee. I’ll go see a movie and buy me a queen-size popcorn. With six squirts of hot butter.

A sense of humor is a great blessing.

Going about her monotonous duties, Mandy removed Cassie’s discarded half toothpick from the ashtray. Noticing a metallic gleam under the table, she squatted with a painful grunt, found a spoon bent into a U.
Now why would anybody do a thing like that?
As she was retrieving this piece of damaged flatware, the meticulous cleaner-upper noticed a second, smaller object on the floor—on Bea’s side of the booth. Another
half
toothpick. Curious. Suspicion that she was “on to something” led to an extended search. In the potted palm, our Sherlock discovered the whole toothpick. As she examined these artifacts of the game, the sordid truth became apparent:
Bea was holding
two
broken pieces—so Cassie would be bound to draw a short one
. Mandy smiled, shook her head.
Well, don’t that just beat all, how rich folks will cheat each other—and blood sisters at that!
The happy woman dropped the souvenirs into her apron pocket.

Daisy Perika had heard only a few tantalizing words on the tribal radio about the white woman up by Granite Creek who had been killed in her bedroom. Rumor had it that an animal was responsible—probably a bear. During the lunch she had prepared for herself and Charlie Moon (Sarah Frank was away at school), Daisy had kept on pressing her closemouthed relative who had been
right on the spot
. But, as was his habit, the tribal investigator was keeping whatever he knew to himself. She watched the tall man get up from his seat across the kitchen table and head for the propane range. Daisy spoke to the back of his head: “The announcer on KSUT said the bear must’ve smelled food in the house.”

“He did, did he?” Moon picked up Daisy’s sooty coffeepot.

“I can’t imagine a grown-up person doing a messy thing like that.”

“Like what?” He began to pour a dark, viscous stream into his cup.
That looks strong enough to grow hair on a doorknob
.

Daisy was watching Moon intently, to gauge his response: “Eating strawberries in bed.”

“Ow!”

Aha!
Innocently, she asked, “What’d you do?”

“Poured coffee on my thumb.”

Big dummy
. “Put it under the cold-water faucet.”

He preferred to suffer. “It was on the radio about the strawberries?”

“No.” It was
so
much fun to put one over on Charlie. “I heard
that
from Willow Bignight.” Willow’s husband, Danny, was a tribal cop; he picked up all sorts of juicy rumors at the Southern Ute police station. Daisy grinned at her nephew. “But it’s true, ain’t it?”

Moon scowled.
Danny Bignight talks too much
.

Daisy cackled a crackly laugh. “You don’t have to tell me—I can see the truth all over your face.”

“You see whatever you want to see.” He seated himself at the kitchen table, spooned six measures of highly refined, granulated cane sugar into the acidic beverage. Tasted it.
Not all that bad
.

The old woman shuddered at the thought of being ripped apart by a ravenous beast. “I’ll have to remember to keep my windows closed at night.”

“That’d be a smart thing to do.” A merry light twinkled in his eyes. “Especially if you’ve just baked a couple of pies and put ’em on the windowsill to cool.”

“Well, I haven’t baked no pies and I don’t intend to, so you might as well stop dropping hints.” She reached for the sewing basket on the chair beside her, put it in her lap.

Moon reached a long, lean arm across the table, selected an apple from a cedar bowl, polished it on his shirtsleeve.

Daisy began sewing tiny blue and white and yellow glass beads onto a miniature, soft-as-morning-mist goatskin vest. The garment was a birthday present for Myra Cornstone’s year-old baby, who, if Charlie Moon had married that nice Ute girl, would have been
his
baby boy instead of a white man’s son, which annoyed the tribal elder no end. “That Spencer woman who was killed by the bear—was she any kin to old Joe Spencer?”

“She was one of his three daughters.”

“Ouch!” The old woman had poked the wickedly sharp needle past the rim of her brass thimble, where it plunged deep into her finger, right to the bone. She pulled the thimble off, sucked at a drop of blood, and glared at Charlie Moon as if he were responsible for her injury. “Oh, sure—Astrid. And Cassandra, she’s the one on TV. But who’s the third one?”

“Beatrice.” Moon smiled at his aunt. “I didn’t know you were acquainted with that rich man’s family.”

“Well, there are lots and lots of things you don’t know—enough to fill a five-story library full of books.” Daisy shot her nephew a smug look. “Joe Spencer and his wife used to visit the reservation every summer. When that pale-skinned man got too much sun, he used to get sores on his head and neck. More’n once, I let him have some of my Ute medicine for skin cancers.” The fact that the “Ute” medication was Navajo
Hisiiyáaníí
oil and that Daisy had sold the pungent yellow salve to the wealthy man for a five-hundred-percent markup was a trifling detail that she did not bother to trouble her memory for. “I used to see them two or three times every year. And even after his wife died, every once in a while ol’ Joe would bring his pretty little daughters to a powwow or bear dance or rodeo. And once or twice I saw them at a sun dance.”

He took a sip of coffee. “I don’t recall ever meeting any of the Spencers on the res.”

“That’s because you spent so much time hanging out with riffraff.” Daisy puckered her lips, sucked another drop of blood from the needle puncture before saying, “A person don’t meet high-class people like the Spencers in stinky poolrooms and dirt-floor bars.” Having sucked her fingertip bloodless, Daisy commenced with her sewing. “Those girls was just like stair steps—must’ve been about two or three years between ’em. This Astrid that got killed—was she the littlest one?”

“I expect so. She was the youngest.” Moon twisted a tablespoon in a jar of honey, dunked the sweetener into his coffee.

Daisy held the unfinished baby vest up to the sunlight shining through the east window.
Something don’t look quite right. I think it needs more white beads in with the blue ones. But not so many yellow ones
. “Sometimes I can’t remember what I had for supper last night, but I remember them little girls all right. And I recall something that happened to them—just as clear as day—even though it must’ve been almost thirty years ago.” In an attempt to conjure up the long-lost scene, the aged shaman stared intently at the beadwork thunderbird. “I believe it happened at a rodeo.” A slow shake of the old gray head. “Or maybe a powwow.” She scowled at the blank space in front of her face. “No, it was a big
matukach
to-do.”

He tasted the honeyed coffee. “So what happened at this combination rodeo-powwow-big-
matukach
to-do?”

Big smart aleck
. But Auntie smiled. “One of the bigger girls won a prize of some kind. The one with the yellow hair.”

“That’d be Beatrice.”

“And Astrid, the littlest sister, got awfully sick.” Daisy closed her eyes to concentrate. Soon, the scenes from that memorable summer day were coming back to her. “Ol’ Joe Spencer was holding little Astrid up in his arms; him and her both was white as a bleached bedsheet, and the bigger sisters was crying, and wringing their hands, and reaching out to pat Little Sister and tell their daddy that she’d be all right.” As the memory faded, the old woman opened her eyes. “Sisters don’t always get along as good as they should. And if they’re mad about something, they can be lots meaner to each other than brothers would. That’s what they say.”

Charlie Moon assumed a solemn, philosophical expression that would have impressed Plato. Possibly even Socrates. “Don’t pay too much attention to what
they
say.” He pointed the apple core at his aunt. “Half the time,
they
are just blowing smoke.”

Daisy Perika stared at her nephew as one might regard a backward child.
Every once in a while, Charlie says the strangest things, like his brain was about half baked
. The tribal elder, who was not a devotee of dead Greek sages, pursued her own philosophical persuasions, which included pseudogenetic hypotheses such as “blood will tell” and “insanity is passed on by the males.”
I think he gets that craziness from his daddy’s side of the family
.

Hours after her nephew had left for the drive north to the Columbine, and Sarah was home from school and asleep in bed, and Mr. Zig-Zag had extended his after-supper nap into a long night of mysterious feline dreams, Daisy was under the quilts. But not asleep. The aged woman stared at the ceiling, sighed at a parade of sorrowful memories. Young loves. Missed opportunities. Old friends gone. Her parents, of course—and baby brother. Uncle Blue Hummingbird. Charlie Moon’s mother, a sweet woman and a good Catholic who had done her best to raise Charlie up right. Most of all, though Daisy would not have admitted it to a living soul, she missed Father Raes Delfino—in spite of the fact that the Jesuit priest was a tough, no-nonsense fellow who had never hesitated to warn Daisy that she should have nothing to do with the dwarf spirit who lived in
Cañón del Espíritu
. Unlike most whites, Father Raes (probably because of his strange experiences as a missionary in the South American jungles) accepted the Ute shaman’s “power spirit” as a reality. A
dangerous
reality.

Daisy was surprised to realize that she also missed seeing the dwarf, who, though he would occasionally provide her with useful information in exchange for a modest gift of food or tobacco, could be an annoying fellow to deal with. But it had been well over a year since their last encounter.
I guess it’s because I don’t get up into Spirit Canyon much anymore
. Not that the shaman had always met the
pitukupf
at his badger-hole home. Once, the impudent little imp had shown up in church! Daisy had been horrified at the creature’s brazen intrusion into St. Ignatius, and had the uneasy feeling that Father Raes had spotted the uninvited visitor there on the pew beside her. On a few occasions, the dwarf had visited Daisy at her home. She half wished he would show up now.
Maybe he could tell me something about those Spencer sisters. I’m still not sure where it was that I saw them. Or what it was that made little Astrid get so sick
.

The clock ticktocked away the minutes. Almost an hour’s worth.

The
pitukupf
did not make an appearance.

Having worried about everything else, Daisy began to fret about the little man.
Maybe he’s like me—too old and feeble to get out and go anywhere without help. Yes, that must be it. He’s probably layin’ in that dirty hole in the ground, thinking back about old folks that are gone—like his momma and daddy
. Which suggested a startling possibility that she had never considered.
I wonder if he ever had himself a little half-pint wife. If he did, the poor thing was probably every bit as homely as he is
. This might be why no one had ever reported seeing a baby
pitukupf. Maybe, a long time ago, the Little People were fairly good-looking
. But if they were, something bad must have happened to the
pitukupf
clan.
An ugly-curse, I bet—put on ’em by a Navajo or ’Pache witch they got crosswise of.
Since then, she conjectured, the tribe of tiny folk had been dying off.

Late at night, when the mind tends to drift off into silly thoughts, is not the best time to develop startling new theories intended to reshape the very foundations of human knowledge. Nobel Prize winners know this.

The weary woman’s yawn was interrupted at half-gape when she spotted a dime-size spider eight-footing it across the windowpane. It had not been all that long ago when another such pest had taken a hike across her bedroom ceiling—and fallen onto Daisy’s face. The startled woman had slapped her forehead so hard that her fingers still ached at breakfast time. Well aware of the taboo against killing Spider People (the murdered member’s kin, bent on revenge, will come and find you!), she had searched for the tiny corpse so she could draw an imaginary circle around it and mumble, “I didn’t kill you—it was one of them uppity Navajos. Tell your relatives to go and bite the Navajo.” But she had not found the remains. Now, as Daisy eyed the creature on the window, it occurred to her that the spider’s ghost probably knew who’d stopped his clock. If so, the avenging relatives might be camped close-by, and this one could be a scout sent to locate the Ute spider killer.

The guilty party jutted her chin, scowled at the intruder.
You even
think
about putting the bite on me, you nasty little bugger, I’ll smack you flat as a flapjack—just like I did your ugly cousin!

The leggy critter took off like a shot, boppity-bopping it back the way he had come from.

Daisy witnessed the retreat with the taste of gratification sweet on her tongue:
Hah—look at that lily-livered little backpeddler trot!
Satisfied with this modest victory, the feisty old warrior took up the yawn where she had left off. Cleared her throat of whatever it needed clearing. Shifted her stiff legs to find a more comfortable position. Sighed. Closed her eyes—one at a time, right then left, because this is the way shamans do it.

Blackness was what she saw, like a mile underground in the bowels of a coal mine. But gradually, as if the Cosmic Artist were dabbing silver paint, the dark canvas became studded with innumerable little pearls of light that bloomed, faded, tried ever so hard to look like stars. Just as she drifted off, Father Raes’s kind face appeared among those uncertain constellations, smiled down upon Daisy Perika.

Nice touch.