Other people came out on the platform now and began boarding the train, taking the places of those who got off earlier. Soon it would be Dancing Quail’s turn. She clutched her magic rock and asked I’itoi for courage.
At last the outing matron motioned the children to move out, but not toward the doors of the train through which the other people had disappeared. Instead, they were herded back along the platform almost to the end of the train, where they were ordered up a straight metal ladder on the outside of one of the cars.
Faced with the unfamiliar ladder, Dancing Quail drew back in dismay. She knew how to climb rocks and cliffs, but she had never seen a ladder before. She watched while one of the older boys pulled himself up it. How could she climb that way and still hold on to her rock and her blanket? Dancing Quail edged her way to the back of the line, hoping to escape notice. With the other children all on top of the car, Dancing Quail found herself being pushed forward by the outing matron.
There was no alternative. Dancing Quail stuck the magic rock in her mouth and gripped it between her teeth while she started up the ladder. She was terrified climbing up, and even more terrified once she reached the top and looked back down. The ground was far away. What would happen to her if she fell?
Following the example of the other children, she dropped to a sitting position just as the whistle shrieked and the train lurched forward. Wrapping her legs around the rolled blanket, she held on to a metal rail with both hands. Wind whipped her hair across her face, blinding her. At first she was afraid the wildly rushing air would pry her loose. It was a long time before she dared let go with one hand long enough to remove Understanding Woman’s precious rock from her mouth.
Afraid to sleep for fear of falling off, Dancing Quail tried to stay awake, but eventually the rhythmic racket of metal on metal lulled her eyes closed.
“Rita!”
Someone from far away was calling her by that other name, the same name the outing matron had used.
“Rita,” the voice called again, more firmly this time.
Dancing Quail didn’t want to answer. She didn’t want to wake up because she knew when she did that it would be the same as it had been that long-ago morning when the train finally reached Phoenix. The sun would be bright overhead, and Understanding Woman’s magic rock would be gone forever. Sometime during the night it had slipped from her grasp and fallen from the swaying boxcar.
More than half a century later, Dancing Quail still mourned its loss.
Juanita Ortiz rose stiffly from the uncomfortable chair where she had spent the night at her sister’s bedside. She went to look out the window, while the nurse woke Rita to take her pulse and temperature.
Gabe hadn’t come by the BIA compound to summon his mother until late, not until after Diana Ladd had picked up Davy. Fat Crack had given Juanita some lame excuse about promising Rita not to leave the child alone. His mother didn’t approve. It wasn’t right that Gabe should have waited with the little white boy all that time without coming to tell his own family about Rita’s injuries. How could an Anglo’s needs come before those of Gabe’s own family?
Looking out the window, Juanita Ortiz shook her head in frustration. There was much she didn’t understand about her son, and she understood her sister even less.
Of all the people on the reservation, only a few-Juanita Ortiz among them-still remembered that, as a child, Rita Antone had once been called Dancing Quail. And only Rita remembered that their father’s pet name for baby Juanita had been S-kehegaj, which means Pretty One. That was all a long time ago. Dancing Quail no longer danced, and no one had called Juanita pretty in more than forty years.
With chart in hand, the nurse left the room. Juanita went back over to the bed. Dr. Rosemead had told her that Rita’s injuries weren’t nearly as serious as he had at first supposed, but that if she hadn’t been in the ambulance when her heart stopped, she surely would have died.
“Ni-sihs,” Juanita said softly. “Elder Sister, how are you?”
“Thirsty, ni-shehpij,” Rita answered, opening her eyes and speaking formally to her younger sister. “I sure am thirsty.”
The nurse had left a glass newly filled with crushed ice on the nightstand. Juanita ladled a spoonful of ice into Rita’s parched mouth.
“I must see S-ab Neid Pi Has,” Rita whispered as soon as she could speak again after swallowing the ice.
Instantly, Juanita Ortiz’s eyes hardened. S-ab Neid Pi Has, Looks At Nothing, was an aged, blind medicine man who lived as a hermit in Many Dogs, an almost-abandoned village just across the Mexican border from the rest of the reservation. He was a man who lived according to the old ways, who long ago had divorced himself from white man’s liquor, whose lungs smoked only Indian tobacco.
Juanita had converted from Catholic to Presbyterian as a young woman when she married Arturo Ortiz. She heartily disagreed when her son, Fat Crack, went off and joined the Christian Scientists, but at least, she conceded, he was Christian. Juanita staunchly drew the line at the idea of summoning a medicine man.
“Ni-sihs,” Juanita scolded disapprovingly. “Sister, you are in a hospital. Let the doctors and nurses take care of you.”
But Rita still remembered those three huge buzzards sitting with outstretched wings on the row of passing telephone poles. The Anglo doctors with their bandages and thermometers could fix her broken body perhaps, but those three ominous buzzards represented Forebodings, something that required the ministrations of a medicine man. They were symptomatic of a Staying Sickness-a disease that affects only Indians and one that is impervious to Anglo medical treatment with its hospitals, operating rooms, and bottles of pills.
“I must see Looks At Nothing,” Rita insisted stubbornly. “Please ask Fat Crack to go get him and bring him here.”
When Andrew Carlisle told his mother that he was going to Tucson to check on his storage locker, Myrna Louise wondered if he might go away and not come back. She made him a huge jar of sun tea and iced it down in a Thermos. Andrew always liked to do that, she remembered, to travel with lunches and drinks packed from home rather than stopping off someplace to buy meals. It made sense to travel that way, with prices in all the restaurants higher than a cat’s back.
She made him a good breakfast, too-toast and coffee and eggs over easy. He said he’d seen nothing but scrambled for years. Powdered scrambled. Those couldn’t be any too good.
He didn’t talk while he ate, and he didn’t look at her. Myrna Louise didn’t know what to do or say, so she hovered anxiously in the background, pouring more coffee into his cup long before it was empty, offering to make more buttered toast or fry a few more eggs.
“Look,” he said crossly, pushing his cup away before she could fill it again. “Don’t fuss over me, Mama. I can’t stand it when you fuss.”
Myrna Louise’s eyes clouded with tears, and she hung her head. “I was only trying to help,” she said, her voice quavering. “I mean, I don’t know how you expect me to act.”
He turned on the charm at once, a trick he’d been able to perform at will since childhood, forcing his mother to smile through her tears in spite of herself.
“Treat me like I just got back from Istanbul, Mama.”
“But I don’t know anything at all about Istanbul.”
He laughed. “Believe me. They probably don’t have over-easy eggs there, either.”
Diana brought a mug of coffee into the room and slammed it onto the coffee table in front of Brandon Walker. Davy, always attuned to his mother’s moods, looked at her guardedly.
“Are you mad, Mom?” he asked.
“I’m not mad at anybody, Davy,” she said, her tone contradicting the words. “Go get dressed. We’ll drive out to Sells and see how Rita is.”