Then I took all five and placed them one on top of the other.
It was a mess, but I was getting closer.
I highlighted each mask in turn and started to rotate them in various directions.
Almost. I could positively feel the tumblers falling into place. I had it now.
I had him.
More rotation.
Closer still.
And then I saw it take form in front of me. I could see the moves I needed to make like a chess master surveying his board and recognizing there was no way his strategy could fail.
I made the final moves and held the screen up before me.
I knew where he was.
Ban.
The Coyote.
My Elder Brother.
I’itoi, that mischievous trickster god.
The Man in the Maze.
DAY 4
tash gi’ik
wia
Sir Francis Galton, first cousin of Charles Darwin, was the first to study the heritance of behavioral traits and is credited with launching the behavioral genetics movement, from which came the first twin studies and the resultant nature vs. nurture debates that will undoubtedly be waged until the end of time. It is an extension of this science that led to the development of Project Genome, which is dedicated to the understanding and advancement of humanity as a species. Conversely, from this science was derived the concept of eugenics and, by extension, Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. If that in itself isn’t an argument for Team Nurture, then I don’t know what is.
THIRTY-FIVE
Bobquivari District
Tohono O’odham Nation
Arizona
September 12th
I tried to recall Antone’s words as I sped across the desert, my signal jammer making me invisible to the Oscars.
That mountain over there. Kind of looks a little like a top hat? That’s Baboquivari. Waw Kiwulik in our native tongue. It is the most sacred of all places to our people.
There’s a cave below the peak. That’s where I’itoi lives. He’s our mischievous creator god. When the world was first born, he led the Hohokam, from whom we descended, up from the underworld and to the surface. His home is within that cave, deep in the heart of a maze. Visitors to the cave must bring him an offering to guarantee their safe return.
I watched the eastern horizon as the Baboquivari Mountains grew taller and taller. It wasn’t long before I identified the top hat of Mt. Baboquivari. I could see headlights far in the distance to both the north and the south, Border Patrol agents performing their nightly routines. Although judging by the fact that I could actually see them, there had to still be more of them out here than usual because of the death of Agent Matthews. Considering I didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention, I killed my lights and navigated the arrow-straight roads by starlight until the rising winds eventually filled the air with sand and I had no other choice but to turn them back on. At least I was comfortable in the knowledge that if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. And keeping the Blackhawks in the air during such a ferocious sandstorm was an unnecessary risk. The only problem was that I could no longer see the peak. Dead reckoning was going to have to suffice.
The radio chatter was filled with complaints about the storm and jokes about the poor mechanics who would get to service all of the vehicles in the morning. It sounded like storms like this one cropped up out of the blue from time to time, but rarely tended to last for more than a few hours. Most of the agents were content to hunker down and ride it out, confident that whatever illegals were out there would no doubt be doing the exact same thing. Dispatch continued to coordinate the agents to the west along the I-85 corridor where the sandstorm had yet to hit in earnest. I would have preferred a few hours of sleep in my back seat and a hot cup of coffee upon waking, but I had a job to do. A job that only I could do.
I’itoi. My own Elder Brother. Christ. Only now was I beginning to internalize that fact. Ban—the Coyote—was the genetic expression of half of my father. Half of me. My own mirror image, to some degree. Me. Not me. Bizarro me. Similar life paths, but different choices at some of the crucial forks along the way.
I was at a disadvantage. He knew me far better than I knew him. I thought about his overt hostility the night we first met. The expression on his face had been more than anger and distrust for a federal agent on his native land; it had been directed at me specifically. And he had mocked me without me even recognizing it.
Without a body, you can’t fix time of death. So there’s no way you can pinpoint a date, let alone a time for which an alibi would be necessary.
What do you know about the body? I had asked.
Only that there wasn’t one.
And what do you think might have happened to it?
A lot of things can happen out here in the desert. Could have been a coyote dragged it off…
I hadn’t even been able to recognize his cleverness, which must have made him absolutely furious. Like Roman said, maybe all of this could have been averted had I tracked Ban down and acknowledged him earlier in his life and become something resembling a brother rather than a rival for the affection of a long-deceased father and the cause of the death of a woman I never even knew existed. Maybe. I wasn’t willing to carry that cross, though. We all have to live with the choices we make. I couldn’t change mine, so there was no point in dwelling on them now. I still had one last chance to acknowledge Ban, if that was really what he wanted, and I had every intention of doing just that.
And then I would have the opportunity to mourn him, although I doubted he’d take much solace in that fact. Fortunately, I simply didn’t care. Not about him, anyway. Someone still had to speak for his victims since he’d robbed them of their voices.
I listened to agents running down UDAs in their cars and on foot and wondered if those immigrants understood just how lucky they were to still be alive out here in the desert with the heat and the Coyote. And I thought about the Tohono O’odham, living in the middle of a war zone where the battles were waged twenty-four hours a day and few people outside of their immediate vicinity were even aware of their struggles. Even I had scoffed at Agent Randall when he pointed it out. I remembered what Antone said in his quote from the newspaper on the wall in his bedroom. The entire country needed to be made aware of the plight of the people on this reservation. The public needed to know about all of the migrants dying out here under the blazing sun while simply searching for the dream we all took for granted. This corridor of death needed to be closed down before things got even more out of hand. Before more drugs could be funneled through here and into the hands of our children. Let the big corporations with their bottomless reserves and slick lobbyists find another way to supplement their largely illegal and woefully underpaid work forces. There were too many problems to make them go away by merely sweeping them under the rug that was my ancestral reservation.