And this man was trying to get people to change their religions around and believe like him. I think he’s the one who started calling Masaw the Skeleton Man.”
Mary stopped, shook her head, laughed. “When I was just a young woman, he came around to the village and showed us tricks. He had this little deer-skin pollen bag he’d hold up in the sunlight. Like this.” She held her right hand high above her head and pinched her thumb and fingers together. “He told us to notice how ugly and brown the pollen pouch looked. That’s how this life is, he’d say, but look what you get if you’re willing to get rid of this life. To get out of it. And then the pollen sack would turn into this glittering thing sitting on the end of his fingers.”
She stared at Bernie, her expression questioning, looking for Bernie’s reaction.
“Amazing,” Bernie said. She was thinking how the trick might have been done—the thumb and forefinger squeezing the diamond out of the pouch, the pouch disappearing into the palm.
“I saw it myself,” Mary said. “That sack just glittered and glittered as he turned it in the sunlight.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t remember exactly. But in a little while, he was holding the pollen pouch again, and it didn’t glitter anymore.”
“Fascinating,” Bernie said.
“My uncle told me he thought it was some sort of trick, but this man said the Skeleton Man gave it to him to prove to people they should be willing to die. The ugly brown pollen pouch was like the life they were living now. After they died, it would be bright and shiny.”
“Where did this man come from? Does what he was telling you fit in with what they teach in your kiva?”
“I don’t remember as much about the old times as I should,” Mary said, looking sad. “I know I was taught them when I was little, but all those years up at Peach Springs talking with all kinds of other people, I forget them. And they got mixed in with other stuff. But I know that even though Masaw looked horrible—they say his face was all covered with blood—he was a friend of the people in some ways.”
“Like teaching them not to be afraid to die?”
“Like that,” Mary said, smiling. “I remember my mother used to tell that to me. That just two things we know for certain. That we’re born and in a little while we die. It’s what we do in the time between that matters. That’s what the One Who Made Us thinks about when he decides what happens to us next.”
Bernie considered that. Nodded. “I think all of us are pretty much alike, whatever our tribe and whatever color we are,” she said.
“Everybody also has sense enough to stay away from places that are dangerous,” Mary said, staring at Bernie. “Like not poking at a coiled snake with your hand.”
Bernie nodded.
“Like not trying to go up where the Skeleton Man lives,” Mary added.
“Unless you really need to go. To see if you can save a man who will get locked up in prison if you don’t find something there,” Bernie said.
Mary took a very deep breath, exhaled it. “So you’ll go up that canyon anyway?”
“I have to.”
Mary pointed up the canyon. “There’s a narrow slot in the cliff wall to your left around that corner. Then on the right, farther up, you’ll find another slot, a little wider, and a trickle of water sometimes is flowing out of it. But it’s blocked with rocks where part of the cliff fell down, and around those rocks there’s the thick brush of the cat’s claw bushes. You can’t get through that without getting all bloody.”
Bernie nodded.
“Girl,” Mary said. “You should not go. But be very careful. If you need help, no one would ever find you.”
17
Joanna Craig sat on a shelf of some sort of smooth, pale pink stone about two thousand feet above what she guessed must be the Colorado River. It was putty-colored, not the clear blue she had always imagined, and the cliffs across it (and behind her, and everywhere else) soared upward to a dark blue sky, partly crowded with towering clouds—dark on the bottom. Joanna’s mood was also at its bottom at the moment, and like the clouds, dark blue.
Joanna was admitting to herself that she had screwed up. She was facing the fact that Billy Tuve, while brain- damaged, had outwitted her. He was gone. She was alone. Worse, due to her own foolishness, she seemed to be walking into a trap. She was leaning forward, elbows on knees, head down, resting everything but her mind, ticking off the mistakes she had been making and looking for solutions.
Maybe the first mistake had been even coming here. But that was no mistake. It was something she had to do. Something, call it her destiny, had caused that damned diamond to appear out of the distant past. Maybe her prayers had caused it. Too many years of praying for a way to get revenge. To see justice done. And finally the diamond had appeared, had been given to a childlike Hopi, had set off a chain of events, led to her lawyer, and had drawn her here, two thousand miles from home, to sit, exhausted, two thousand feet above a dirty river, not knowing what to do.
Of course, she should have kept pressing Tuve about the man who came to talk to him in jail just an hour or two before she had arrived and bonded him out. Who was he? Lawyer, Tuve said. Said his name was Jim Belshaw. Said he would represent Billy, get him out of jail, but Billy had to tell him where he had gotten the diamond. What had he looked like? Big white man, hair almost white, face sort of reddish. Eyes blue. And what had he told this Jim Belshaw about where the diamond had come from? That he didn’t know. That this diamond man had just walked a little ways down the river from the blue pool near the Salt Woman Shrine and came back with it. What else? Tuve
