himself at her.
'It's Nana Dahd! You've got to help her. She's hurt bad.'
'What happened?'
The dam broke. Suddenly, Davy Ladd Was sobbing SO badly he could barely talk. 'A cow,' he mumbled. 'A cow in the road.'
,where?' Edwina demanded, but he didn't answer. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. 'Where did it happen?'
'Down on the flat. Almost to the highway.'
Just then a piercing alarm sounded all over the complex at the top of the mountain. The man from the Grand prix dashed out of the garage followed by the ambulance. Two other men appeared from nowhere and ran for the ambulance.
It's at the bottom of the mountain,' one of them shouted back at Edwina.
'Radio Sells for another ambulance.'
Edwina nodded and turned to go back inside. Holding Davy's hand, she intended to take him with her, but he pulled free and darted away, climbing back into the front seat of the Grand Prix just as it started out of the Parking lot behind the Speeding ambulance.
No matter what, Davy Ladd's place was with Nana Dahd.
'The pain was bigger than she was and hotter than the sun. It burned through her, seared through her, until she couldn't think, couldn't breathe.
Where's 01honi? she wondered. She had called for him, but he didn't answer. Where was he? Was he dead? No.
That was impossible. That couldn't be, but where was he?
She asked the man, a man who was there trying to talk to her through the mangled window of the truck, but she could no longer translate the funny white words. The only words that made sense to her now were those of her childhood, the Papago ones. The man shook his head helplessly. He didn't understand, either.
'Where is Olhoni?' she murmured again and again.
'Where is my bald-headed baby?'
There were other cars now, other people. Rita could hear them, could see feet where faces ought to be. were they Upside down or was she?
What had happened? And where was Olhoni?
And then the pain. The pain that was bigger than she was grew even larger. It was a pain bigger than the stars and the sky and the universe. The pain was everything.
She heard a noise and realized that someone had cut a hole in the door of the truck. Her body was flowing out through that hole-her body and her blood.
They were moving her now, moving her out onto the ground and strapping her down to a board or a stretcher of some kind. That was when she started to fight them. The heavy white strap locked her to the board just as another strap long ago had once locked her to a bed.
She fought them like a smart cow fights when she knows she's being led to the slaughter. The pain was blinding, but she fought through it, fought beyond it. She might have won, too, but suddenly Olhoni was there, kneeling at her side, pleading with her to be still.
'Let them help you, Nana Dahd,' he begged. 'Please let them help you.'
She looked up then and saw that beyond Olhoni some of the other faces swarming above her were Indian faces.
She wondered where they'd come from, or if they had been there all the time.
A few of the men were trying to pick up the stretcher with her on it.
She could tell from the looks on their faces that they thought she was too heavy. For some reason, this seemed funny to her, but when she tried to laugh, another searing pain shot through her.
One of the men tried to pry Davy away from her hand, but he clung to her and refused to budge.
'Let him come,' one of the attendants said. 'He's hurt, Could that be?
Olhoni hurt? Rita tried to look at him, to see what was wrong, but she blacked out then. The next thing she knew, she was riding in the ambulance, or rather on top of it. Over it somehow. She could see the two attendants huddled over a strangely familiar figure lying flat on a stretcher.
Olhoni was sitting off to one side. Rita called to him, but he didn't look up, didn't hear her. His eyes never left the face of the old woman on the stretcher. There was a bottle with some kind of liquid in it hanging above her.
A plastic tube led from the bottle to a needle pressed into the flesh of the woman's arm.
Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. 'We're losing her! We're losing her!' one of the attendants shouted.
Ruthlessly, the other man shoved Olhoni aside, pushing him roughly up into the front seat. The boy didn't protest.
He went where he was told and sat there, with his hands clutching the dashboard, staring out the window in front of him.
And that was when Rita saw the buzzards, three of them, sitting in a row on three separate telephone poles,
