were they both smart, they were also orphans who had been raised in adoptive families. The two girls had been abandoned long after the practice of Anglo parents’ adopting Indian children had fallen out of fashion. Leah had been raised in an all-Indian household. She was surprised to learn that Lani’s parents were both Anglos.
It was to Leah that Lani told the story of the blond and black people hair charm-the kushpo ho’oma-she wore around her neck. It was to Leah that Lani first revealed her prize possession-the sturdy medicine basket Lani had woven for herself, making it as much like Nana Dahd’s original as possible. It wasn’t quite as well made as that of Rita’s grandmother, Oks Amichuda-Understanding Woman-but it was respectable enough. And it was to Leah that Lani had finally confided her worries about what was going on with Fat Crack Ortiz-about how sick he was and how much she needed to be home with him.
“I don’t get it,” Leah had said impatiently over dinner the night before. Months later, Leah was still smarting over the fact that Lani had backed out on their verbal agreement to spend the summer after graduation together, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders. Leah was still signed up to go. Lani was returning to Tucson as soon as she finished her last exam.
“That Fat Crack guy isn’t really a relative of yours,” Leah said. “If he’s diabetic and too stubborn to take his medicine, what are you going to do about it? Sit there and watch him die?”
“Yes,” Lani said. “If that’s what’s needed, it’s exactly what I’ll do-sit and watch him die.” And that was all she said, because even with Leah-even with her very best friend-Lani Walker couldn’t explain it all, couldn’t tell the whole story.
J. A. Jance
Day of the Dead
Six
Lani Walker stepped out of the steamy shower and toweled herself dry. As always, she couldn’t ignore the ugly scar Mitch Johnson’s superheated kitchen tongs had seared into her breast six years earlier. Even when the damage was hidden beneath her clothing, for Lani it was always there, just like the broken white marks Andrew Carlisle’s teeth had left on her mother’s breast years earlier.
In a way Lani couldn’t explain-the same way she couldn’t explain what she sometimes saw in the sacred crystals stored in her medicine basket-she knew that the similar scars she and her adoptive mother wore on their bodies made her Diana Ladd’s daughter in a way far more profound than adoption papers from any tribal court. It was also why she kept the scar a secret from her mother as well as from everyone else, including her best friend. It would hurt Diana too much to know about it, and to tell Leah would require too much explanation.
She hadn’t told Fat Crack about it, either, but she was sure he knew. He had come to her every day, bringing her a soothing salve as well as the salt-free evening meal called for during the required sixteen-day fast and purification ceremony-her e lihmhun-after Lani had killed Mitch Johnson. She and Fat Crack had talked about many things during that time. She had used the salve, but they hadn’t talked about it.
On the last night, Fat Crack had brought not only the food for that night’s evening meal, but also his huashomi-the fringed buckskin medicine pouch he had been given years earlier by an old blind medicine man named S’ab Neid Pi Has-Looks at Nothing. After the two of them had eaten together, Fat Crack had taken a stick and drawn a circle around both Lani and himself. Once they were both inside it, he opened the pouch, took out some wiw-wild tobacco-and rolled it into a crude cigarette, which he lit with Looks at Nothing’s old Zippo lighter. Sitting on the mountain with a beloved family friend who was not only the tribal chairman and a respected medicine man but also her godfather, Lani smoked the traditional peace smoke for the first time.
The powerful smoke had left her light-headed, so some of what they said that night had drifted away from her conscious memory in the same way the silvery smoke had dissipated in the cold night air. Other parts of it she remembered clearly.
“What’s the point of the e lihmhun?” she had asked. “Why did I have to stay out here by myself all this time?”
“What have you been doing while you’ve been alone?” Fat Crack asked in return.
“I made a medicine basket,” she said. “I gave Nana Dahd’s medicine basket to Davy because I knew he wanted it. I made a new one of my own.”
“Good,” Fat Crack said. “What else?”
“I kept thinking about the evil Ohb,” she said, “the one who came after me, not the one who came after my mother. And about Oks Gagda-Betraying Woman, the woman who betrayed the Desert People to the Apache and whose spirit stayed in the cave along with her unbroken pottery.”
“What did you decide about Oks Gagda?” Fat Crack asked.
Lani closed her eyes. “When Nana Dahd first told me the story, I thought it was just a ha’icha ahgidathag-a legend-like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.”
“And now?” Fat Crack inquired patiently.
“I know she was a real person once,” Lani replied. “As real as you and me. When I broke her pottery, I freed her spirit and let her go.”
Fat Crack nodded. “That’s true, too. So you’ve put this time to good use.”
“But I still don’t understand why.”
“Because you took a human life,” Fat Crack explained. “Even though it was self-defense and justified, it’s still a terrible thing for you and for your thoakag-your soul. You need to come to terms with why it happened and to understand I’itoi’s purpose in all this-why you’re alive and why Mitch Johnson is dead. Tell me now,” Fat Crack added, “who are you?”
“Lani,” she replied. “Lani Walker.”
“Who else? What did Nana Dahd call you?”
Lani smiled, remembering. “Mualig Siakam,” she said at once. “Forever Spinning, because when I was little, I’d twirl around and around like the girl who turned into Whirlwind.”
“What else did Rita call you?” Fat Crack asked.
Looking at him in the starlight, Lani had realized he wasn’t smiling. These were serious questions that required serious answers.
“Kulani O’oks,” Lani whispered. “Medicine Woman.”
Unlike Forever Spinning, this name was not a happy one. As a child, Lani had been left alone by an elderly caretaker. After falling into an ant bed, she had nearly died from the hundreds of bites inflicted when disturbed ants had swarmed over her body. Her copper-colored skin was still mottled with faded patches from those bites. It was the ant bites and Lani’s presumed relationship to Kulani O’oks-the great Tohono O’odham medicine woman who had been kissed by the bees-that had caused Lani’s superstitious blood relatives to give her up for adoption.
“And?” Fat Crack urged, staring at her intently across the darkness.
Lani looked back at Fat Crack, studying his impassive face. She had yet to tell anyone about the new name she had given herself in the aftermath of the pitched battle in the limestone cave. What had saved her from Mitch Johnson was the timely intervention of a flying bat whose velvety wings had touched Lani’s skin in passing. That brief caress had somehow imbued Lani with the certain knowledge that the darkness of the cave was her friend rather than her enemy-that by surrendering herself to the darkness instead of fighting it, she could be saved.
On Lani’s final venture into the cave, where she had gone to leave her one remaining shoe as a tribute to Betraying Woman’s moldering bones, she had discovered a talisman of her own-the dried, baby-finger-like bones from a long-dead bat.
“Nanakumal Namkam,” she whispered hoarsely.
Fat Crack nodded. “Bat Meeter,” he said. “You have met Bat and made some of his strengths your strength. That, too, is good, so taken together, what do you think all this means?”
“I don’t know.”
“When Looks at Nothing came to me and told me I would be a medicine man,” Fat Crack said, “I thought he was crazy. How could I be a Christian Scientist and a medicine man at the same time? It didn’t make sense, but I know now he was right.”
He paused while Lani waited. Finally he spoke again. “You know the duajida?”
“The nighttime divination ceremony?” Lani asked.
“I have done the duajida for you, Little Bat Meeter,” Fat Crack said softly. “Every time it is the same. The spirits say you will be two things at once-Kulani O’oks, Medicine Woman, and also a doctor.”
“A doctor?” Lani asked. “As in a hospital?”
