Kiss of the Bees

the rock lost, but later, once she arrived in Phoenix, the basket itself had been confiscated by school matrons who had a ready market for such profitable artifacts. Years later, when Rita was sent from the reservation in disgrace, Oks Amichuda once again gave Rita a basket to take with her. This one, although far inferior to the first, nonetheless contained yet another spirit rock, a child’s fist-sized chunk from that same geode.

Years later, working as a domestic in a Mil-gahn house in Phoenix, Rita had stumbled across that original medicine basket, complete with all its contents, sitting in a glass display case. On the night she fled the house for faraway California, Rita had exchanged the one basket for the other.

Having heard the stories countless times, David recognized at once that the hank of human hair in Quentin’s hand was one of Rita’s medicine-basket treasures—her great-grandfather’s scalp bundle.

“You shouldn’t have that. Nobody’s supposed to touch it,” Davy said. “Put it back.”

“What’s she going to do to me if I touch it?” Quentin taunted. “Turn me into a toad?”

“I said put it back.”

“Who’s gonna make me?”

Quentin was four years older than Davy and almost twice as big, but Davy flew at him with such ferocity that the older boy was caught off-guard. He fell down, cracking his head on the rock wall behind him while Davy pummeled his unprotected face with flailing fists. Once Quentin recovered from the initial shock, the fight was short but brutal. Davy took the brunt of the physical damage. When the battle was over, his nose was bloody, his shirt had been torn to pieces, and one bottom tooth dangled by a thread.

Brandon had arrived in time to put an end to the hostilities. He lined all four boys up in order of size. His own sons, Quentin and Tommy, were at the head of the line, followed by Davy and then by Brian Fellows, Quentin and Tommy’s half-brother.

Janie, Brandon Walker’s first wife, had been three months pregnant with Brian when she divorced Brandon in order to marry Don Fellows, Brian’s father. Janie’s second marriage didn’t last any longer than her first one had. Don Fellows disappeared into the woodwork when Brian was three. By the time Brian was four, he would come and stand forlornly on the porch, watching whenever Brandon came by to take his own sons for an outing.

Over time, that lost, affection-starved look had worn down Brandon Walker’s resistance. By the time Davy appeared on the scene, Brian came along with Quentin and Tommy as often as not. Brian was a few months younger than Davy. He was small for his age and still prone to wetting the bed. Quentin and Tommy jeeringly called him “the baby.” Brandon Walker often referred to him as “the little guy.”

“All right now,” Brandon Walker growled on the day of the fight over the medicine basket. “Tell me what happened, and remember, honesty’s the best policy. I want the truth.”

“I was trying to help him learn to ride my bike,” Quentin said. “The big one, not the one with training wheels. He fell, and so did I. The bike landed on top of me.”

The lie came so easily to Quentin’s lips that the two younger boys, Brian and Davy, looked at one another in shocked amazement. Meanwhile Brandon moved down the line to his second son. “Is that right, Tommy? Remember, what I want from you is the truth.”

Tommy nodded. “Yup,” he said. “That’s what happened.”

Next Brandon leveled his gaze on Davy. “What do you have to say, young man?”

Davy shrugged his scraped shoulder and hung his head. “Nothing,” he said.

“And you, Brian?”

“Nothing, too,” he said.

Convinced he still didn’t have a straight answer but unable to crack the four boys’ united front, Brandon turned back to Davy. “Do me a favor, Davy. Stick with the training wheels for a while, son. Thank God that’s only a baby tooth. If it were a permanent one, your mother would kill us both. Go see Rita. She’ll help clean you up.”

The last thing Davy wanted to do was see Rita right then. Part of him wanted to tell her what had happened. But he didn’t know what to say. For a week he kept quiet, watching Nana Dahd’s broad features for any sign that she had discovered her loss.

The next weekend, when the three boys again came to visit, Brandon took the two older boys to see Rocky, a movie that was deemed too old for Brian and Davy.

As soon as the two younger boys were left alone in Davy’s room, Brian Fellows unzipped his knapsack. “Look,” he whispered, emptying the contents of his bag out onto the bottom bunk.

On top of the heap were the extra clothes Brian always had to bring along in case he had an accident. But underneath the clothing, scattered on the bedspread, lay a collection of items most people would have dismissed as little-boy junk—the denuded spine of a feather; a shard of pottery with the faint figure of a turtle etched into the red clay; a chunk of rock, gray on one side and covered with lavender crystals on the other; the hank of long black hair; Rita’s owij—her basket-making awl; Rita’s lost son’s Purple Heart. Last of all, Davy spied Father John’s losalo—the string of rosary beads—that the old man had given Rita the night he died.

For a moment Davy gazed in wondering, hushed silence at the medicine basket’s missing treasures. “Where did you get them?” he asked finally.

“I stole them,” Brian said casually. “Quentin had them hidden in his sock drawer, and I stole them back.”

“When he finds out, he’ll kill you.”

“No, he won’t,” Brian answered. “He’ll only beat me up. He does that all the time. It’s no big deal.”

For the first time in his life, Davy Ladd realized he had a friend, a real one—a friend whose name wasn’t Rita.

“But Tommy and Quentin are so mean,” Davy said. “Aren’t you afraid of them?”

“Not really,” Brian replied with a cheerful shrug. “They’re so afraid of getting caught, they never hurt me enough so it shows.”

7

Coyote had listened to the