A flicker of some quickly hidden emotion that she found even more disquieting than his tone flew across his eyes. She wasn't sure what it was, but suddenly she felt sorry for him. Then he smiled, his large white teeth showing like snow on a mountaintop against his bronze skin in the gathering light, and pointed east.
Lucy turned and at first saw nothing but the landscape, dominated by Taos Mountain, behind which the sun was preparing for a grand entrance. Then she saw it. "An eagle," she said. She knew that Jojola considered eagles to be his totem, an animal spirit guide.
As they watched, the eagle continued east toward the mountain. Then, just as the bird was about to climb into the sky above the peak, the first rays of the sun shot over the top and the eagle disappeared into the golden light.
"Wow," she said. "I guess that means something, eh?"
"Yeah," Jojola said and laughed. "I guess that I'll get to see what New York City looks like at Christmas."
Lucy laughed, too, but then noticed that the strange look had returned to his eyes. "What's wrong, John?"
Jojola didn't answer her right away but instead allowed the blanket to slip from his shoulders as he lifted his arms. He stood that way until the sun was fully over the top of the mountain, then slowly let his arms sink back to his sides.
"I don't want to go," he said at last. "In Vietnam, I had to crawl through tunnels hunting men. On several occasions I almost became the hunted, and it troubled me that I would die beneath the ground, my soul trapped by the earth to rot with my body. I don't want to die where the sun cannot find me and carry my spirit up with the eagles. I'm afraid, Lucy. Afraid that if I go to New York and these caves are more than in our dreams, I may never see this place again."
"Then don't go, John," Lucy said, afraid for him. "They're just dreams. You don't belong in New York City."
Jojola looked at her oddly, as though puzzled that she couldn't see what he saw. "Don't you feel it, the drawing together?" he said. "I have no more choice than a leaf has floating down a river."
Lucy reached out and took Jojola's hand. "I understand," she said.
8
Later that same day, but fifteen hundred miles away in New York City, Lucy's twin brothers arrived at the outdoor basketball courts at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street. Giancarlo and Isaac, better known as Zak, had no sooner opened the gate when a tall, young black man with a basketball tucked under his arm yelled at them from the sidelines of one of the courts. "Hey, you two punks are invited to leave. Ain't nobody wants you here."
When Giancarlo and Zak didn't move-mostly because they weren't sure where to go or why they were being singled out-the young man walked over with a scowl on his face. "You hear me? Take your little white asses and walk back the way you came."
Another tall, young black man walked up behind the other and gently grabbed his elbow. "Come on, Rashad. They're not hurting anybody. They're just a couple of kids who want to play ball."
Rashad Salaam yanked his arm away from his friend. "Ain't these the kids of that muthafuckin' DA, Karp?"
"Yes, but…," Khalif Mohammed replied.
"Then why you want to stick up for them?" Salaam asked without taking his angry dark eyes off the boys. "It's because of their daddy that our lives was messed up, dawg. Why you want to defend them?"
"Because they're kids," Mohammed said. "We let them play with us back before it all went down. They're not responsible for what happened. They're good kids. And who knows, their daddy may still do the right thing." He smiled at the boys, who smiled tentatively back.
Salaam snorted in disgust. "Yeah, right, like he did when that bitch assistant DA of his sent us to Attica? You remember that, homes? Remember what it was like? Well, I do, and now we don't have nothin'…no scholarship, no college, no future. If you want to play ball with his punk kids, that's your business. But I ain't going to have nothin' to do with no Karps, no way, nohow."
With that he stomped back to the court, where he started shooting at a basket with several other young men. Mohammed glanced at his friend and then back to the boys.
"That's okay, Khalif," Giancarlo said. "We'll just go shoot a little over on the other court. Thanks for sticking up for us."
Mohammed nodded and raised his hand and high-fived the twins. "Shalom, peace, brothers," he said and trotted back to where Salaam was waiting.
The twins walked over to an empty court and played a game of H-O-R-S-E. But their hearts just weren't in it. The courts at Sixth and Fourth were famous for attracting some of the best street-ball players in the city and were normally no place for a couple of seventh-grade boys. But when the weather was cold-as it was that day-fewer players showed up and they sometimes got invited to play. But not on this day.
"It's not fair," Zak muttered angrily, glancing over at where the older guys were laughing at something. "We didn't do nothin' to them."
"We didn't do anything to them, you mean," Giancarlo corrected him.
"Whatever," Zak said, rolling his eyes. "We're getting blamed because of Dad."
"Dad was just doing his job, or the assistant DA was just doing hers," Giancarlo said. He lifted the ball toward the hoop but it clanged off and into Zak's hands. The brain surgery he'd undergone that fall to remove a shotgun pellet-courtesy of a murder attempt in West Virginia-had restored his eyesight to near normal, but he was still working on his depth perception.
"But that girl lied," Zak said. "They didn't rape her. That's why they're out of prison. Dad or that prosecutor screwed up." He banked a shot off the backboard and in.
"Maybe, maybe not," Giancarlo said after outracing his brother to the ball. "Dad's still trying to decide. Just because someone wins an appeal on a technicality doesn't mean they were innocent."
Zak stole the ball and laid it up for another basket. "Don't tell me you think they really did it," he said. "We've known them ever since they started coming over here during breaks from Columbia. You know they didn't do it."
Giancarlo drove the lane only to have his brother swat the ball from his hands. "Foul!"
"No way!" Zak replied. "I got all ball."
"You got all hand," Giancarlo complained. "Look, you can see the red mark on my hand."
"I don't see nothin'," Zak said.
"Anything."
"What?"
"You don't see anything," Giancarlo said.
"Whatever."
"Good answer. And no, I don't think they'd do it either. But that's why you have judges and juries. Dad doesn't go around prosecuting people for no reason."
"Dad is just one guy. He can't know everything that goes on in every courtroom."
"Well, I'll bet he knows all there is to know about this case. He doesn't like it when one of their cases gets overturned."
The case the boys were talking about-The People vs. Salaam and Mohammed-had been tried that summer. The boys didn't know all the details, only what they'd picked up on the basketball court and heard their father talking about to their mother.
Apparently that past February, Salaam and Mohammed, both varsity players for the Columbia University basketball team, had been accused of raping a young woman in her apartment bedroom during a postgame party. They'd been convicted and sent to prison. However, a defense lawyer had won an appeal that got them out of prison because of something the prosecution had done wrong, and now they were waiting to see if the twins' dad was going to try the case again.
In the meantime, the twins had been told by friends of the pair that the university had stripped them of their scholarships and kicked them out of school without a fair hearing. Giancarlo and Zak knew that both of the young men came from poor families in East Harlem. Now no other school would offer them a scholarship or even admit them, for that matter. Even if the charges were dropped, their lives were-as Salaam had said-messed up.