Like Margaret Danielson, Ernesto Tashquinth had been laid off six months earlier from the Hecla mining operation on the Papago Reservation southwest of Casa Grande. The bottom had dropped out of the copper market. Mines all over Arizona were closing for good.
From the time he was a baby, Ernesto’s mother, a Papago married to a Gila River Pima from Sacaton, had called her son S-abamk or Lucky One. Stories about Ernesto Tashquinth’s continuing good fortune followed him everywhere-through his sojourn at the Phoenix Indian School and during his stint in the army. That luck was once again holding true back home on the reservation.
Ernesto had been laid off from the mine along with many others at a time when job opportunities were scarce, but he had somehow managed to finagle his way into a position with the Arizona Highway Department. It wasn’t a particularly wonderful job by some standards, but it paid reasonably well, and the work was steady. With truck and tools provided for him, Ernesto’s job was to clean rest rooms, tidy up the grounds, and empty trash cans at rest areas along I-10 between Tucson and Cottonwood.
Ernesto much preferred this kind of solitary work to the dusty hubbub of the open pit mine. He enjoyed being by himself and setting his own pace. Of all the rest areas on his route, he liked the one at Picacho Peak best. For one thing, it was off the road by a few hundred yards. Without such easy access, it was usually less crowded than the others. Occasionally, the parking lot stayed empty the whole time Ernesto was working there. When that happened, he was free to let his mind wander back through the old stories his great-grandfather used to tell him, especially tales about Cloud-Stopper Mountain.
During those hot early summer days, while cleaning up other people’s garbage and wiping down the shit they sometimes smeared on rest-room floors and walls, Ernesto Tashquinth was dealing with some pretty heavy shit of his own. Straight out of high school, he had been drafted into the army and shipped off to Vietnam as an infantryman. The fact that he had returned home without so much as a scratch on his body had also been attributed to his incredibly good luck.
Unlike some of his buddies, Ernesto hadn’t been physically hurt, but he had seen plenty. His scars, none of which were visible, came in part from luck-from being one vital step away from the land mine that had blown away his best pal’s limbs and life. They came from seeing a tiny dying child, enemy or not, burned to a crisp by napalm. They came from the sounds and smells of a faraway war that still haunted his dreams and disturbed his sleep.
As the year’s summer sun warmed the Arizona desert, it warmed Ernesto as well-cleansing him somehow, driving the horrors he had experienced out of his heart and mind, gradually singing his spirit back to life. There was much to be said for the old ways his great-grandfather had told him about, and much to be learned from them as well.
By midmorning that June Saturday, Ernesto finished cleaning the two rest rooms and was coming outside to empty the trash when he saw a pair of buzzards circling high over one of the springs near the base of the mountain. As his desert forbears would have done, Ernesto wrinkled his nose and sniffed the air. If something was dead or dying up there on the mountain, the odor had not yet reached the picnic area. That was good. It would be better for him to go investigate now, to find whatever it was and get rid of it right away, rather than waiting until someone told his supervisor about it.
Assuming the carrion to be from a dead animal, Ernesto armed himself with a shovel and a large plastic trash bag. He had played on this mountain as a child, and knew the series of hidden springs that dotted Picacho Peak’s forbidding and seemingly barren flanks. He hurried to the concealing grove of trees with no trouble. Reaching them, he was surprised to find there was still no identifiable odor.
That told him the kill was relatively fresh. If the putrid odor of dead flesh had permeated the hot desert air, those buzzards would no longer be circling.
The first thing Ernesto saw through the sheltering curtain of mesquite trees was a glimpse of bare, sunburned leg. Thinking he’d stumbled upon a devoted sunbather, Ernesto’s first instinct was to turn quickly and go back the way he’d come, but something about the leaden stillness of that bright pink leg told him otherwise.
“Hello?” he called. “Anybody here?”
There was no response, no answering movement. Puzzled, he pushed his way through the leaves until he could see more clearly. A naked woman lay faceup on the rocks before him, empty eyes open to the sky, her skin burned a fierce red by the blistering sun.
In a rush, all the horror of Vietnam flooded back over Ernesto Tashquinth. Sickened, he wasn’t able to look again for several long moments. When he did, he found himself unable to turn away. He moved toward the body like a sleepwalker-staring, mesmerized. Not only was she sunburned, her whole body was a mass of wounds. Industrious ants crawled across her, following orderly, seemingly well-marked trails like hordes of tiny cars negotiating rush-hour freeway traffic. Flies swarmed and hovered in the heavy air above her, hoping to find some appropriately still-damp place in which to lay their eggs.
But what fascinated and at the same time appalled Ernesto Tashquinth, what held his eyes hostage, were the naked, sunburned, upturned breasts, especially the right one. Something was wrong with it. He moved closer until he saw that the entire right nipple was missing-not missing exactly, but hanging loose, attached to the body by a single shred of flesh and skin.
The gray shadow of a soaring bird glided overhead, an ominous cloud passing between Ernesto and the sun. A buzzard had done that to her, he assumed at once, looking up at the patiently circling bird. A buzzard had inflicted that gross indignity on the dead woman’s body.
Ernesto was grateful that he had arrived in time to interrupt the grisly process. There was nothing to be done about the flies and ants, but he could keep the birds away. Whoever she was, at least he could spare her that.
Bent on protecting the body, Ernesto tore the trash bag open until he had a flat strip of black plastic three feet wide and eight feet long. He covered her feet first, using rocks to hold the corners of the plastic in place. It wasn’t until he approached the woman’s crimson face that he realized he knew her, that she was someone he had worked with at the mine.
Margie Danielson, one of the white ladies at Hecla, had worked in payroll. She had given him his pink slip only two weeks before issuing her own.
After he recognized her, Ernesto Tashquinth knelt there silently for a moment before covering her face. His mother was right after all, he decided. He really was lucky. Ernesto Tashquinth was still alive and kicking. Margie Danielson wasn’t.
