The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Page 2

  Seese asks questions then. Is he an Arizona Indian? Why did he come to Tucson? How did he ever get hired by Ferro? Sterling had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. Just then the woman Lecha, twin sister of the boss lady, had called out the patio door for Seese. Sterling had seen Lecha in the wheelchair, yet the strength of her voice that day was remarkable. Later on he had learned Lecha only used the wheelchair occasionally. From the start there, Sterling had known to watch his step with the women. Because Sterling had seen older women and younger women too, in action, and the lessons had not been lost on him.

  It was just as well that Seese had been called away because he had not been sure where to begin his story or even if he should disobey the magazine advice. What had happened to Sterling was in the category of things magazine articles called “irreparable” and “better forgotten.” Water under the bridge.

  Seese returned before long. While Sterling was pouring chlorine pellets into the pool filter system, she had pulled a wrought-iron deck chair to the edge of the pool. As Seese stared into the deep end of the pool, Sterling suddenly realized she probably would not understand about the Pueblo and the village officers and the Tribal Council. “I would like to tell you about it,” he began in a voice so faint she had to say, “What?” Sterling repeated himself and then said, “But it’s sort of complicated, you know.”

  Her blue eyes swerved away from him back to the surface of the pool churning from the filter jets. “You could tell me part of it. I might understand more than you think.”

  “The part I will tell you some other time is the part where I am forced to go.” Seese nods. She understands that one firsthand. “I just took what I could carry. Right now I’ll just tell you how I ended up working here.” They both laugh together. “Some story, I bet—for both of us!” Sterling adds.

  EXILE

  STERLING HAD NOT intended to go to Tucson. He had bought a bus ticket only as far as Phoenix although he didn’t know a soul there either. Somehow he had been sleeping when the bus stopped in Phoenix, and the driver had not bothered to count the passengers who got off. At home in his own bed, Sterling had tossed and turned, unable to sleep. Yet now he had managed to sleep through roaring bus engines and diesel exhaust fumes as well as the loudspeaker announcements of departures and arrivals. Somewhere in the past, his life had taken a wrong turn, and Sterling had awakened to find himself surrounded by small rocky hills thick with what had first appeared to be utility poles. When he had put on his glasses, he saw they were giant cactus you always saw in cartoons with Mexicans in big hats sleeping under them.

  In the old cowboy movies Lash La Rue and Tom Mix had chased outlaws among the giant saguaro cactus. It had been near Tucson that Tom Mix died when his convertible missed a curve. Sterling thought of himself as modestly self-educated through the magazines he subscribed to. He had never been interested in television except to watch the old movies. Though it was very sad, Sterling thought it would be interesting to actually see the historic Tom Mix death site. It would be nice to look at a giant cactus close up. Sterling had been trying to emphasize the positive aspects of life and not dwell upon the terrible things that had happened at home between himself and the Tribal Council.

  Since the trouble any thought about anything that had gone wrong or might go wrong left him exhausted. There was nothing he could do now. The bus was approaching Tucson. He might as well sleep while he could.

  In the dreams Sterling is always running or chasing after them—sometimes he rides a bicycle or horse, but usually he is on foot. The Hollywood people—the producer, the director, and the cameraman—are always driving a big four-wheel-drive Chevy Blazer. The convertible top of the Blazer has been removed so they ought to be able to hear Sterling’s shouts. But this is a nightmare, and the director is leaning over the seat conferring with the cameraman and the producer in the backseat. They take no notice of Sterling racing behind them, yelling as loud as he can.

  The Chevy Blazer is racing toward the restricted area of the tribe’s huge open-pit uranium mine. The gate guards at the mine are armed with .38-caliber police specials because the Tribal Council is fed up with journalists writing scare stories about their uranium mine. The gate guards’ orders are “Shoot to kill. Ask questions later.” Journalists are no better than foreign terrorists as far as the Tribal Council is concerned. Sterling is yelling, “Stop! Stop!” when the old black man in the bus seat beside him gently touches his arm. “Mister, mister, are you okay?” Sterling feels sweaty all over despite the bus air-conditioning and tinted windows. The black man goes back to his newspaper. It is a Phoenix paper with headlines about the Middle East. There is killing everywhere. Jews and Arabs. Sterling doesn’t understand international killing. But he has made it his hobby to learn and keep up with the history of outlaws and famous criminals. Sterling will ask the man if he can just read the headline story. But right now the dream has left him sick to his stomach. He peels open a new roll of Tums. The big SceniCruiser is the fastest bus on the highway. Maybe it is the bus’s swaying as it passes cars that makes him feel sick. He closes and opens his eyes. Up ahead there is a white Arizona Highway Patrol car parked by a skinny tree with no leaves and green skin on its branches. Sterling expects to feel the bus driver brake suddenly to slow to the legal speed limit, but the driver takes no notice, and the big SceniCruiser zooms on to Tucson. Since it had all happened, Sterling couldn’t help thinking about the law, and what the law means. About people who get away with murder because of who they are, and whom they know. Then there were people like him, Sterling, people who got punished for acts they had no part in.

  Sterling had been interested in the law since he was a kid in Indian boarding school. Because everything the white teachers had said and done to the Indian children had been “required by law.” Reading his magazines, Sterling had made a modest study of the law on his own, the way Abraham Lincoln had. The Police Gazette and True Detective magazines gave the most detailed explanations of the law. Sterling had bought subscriptions to both magazines so he would never miss a single new development in the law.

  As near as Sterling could tell, injustice had been going on for a long time. Pretty Boy Floyd had struck back at bankers who were taking small farms and leaving Floyd’s people homeless during the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression. When Pretty Boy Floyd came through small Oklahoma towns, even local sheriffs waited until he was on his way again before they phoned state authorities to report his sighting. Sterling had studied photographs of Floyd and he could tell right away that Pretty Boy Floyd had been part Oklahoma Indian. Floyd’s stronghold had been in the brushy oak hill country of Indian Territory. Ma Barker had been part Creek Indian, and John Dillinger’s girlfriend, Billy Frechette, had been a Canadian Indian. Of course Sterling did not go along with what Ma Barker and her boys had done. All the people from Southwestern tribes knew how mean Oklahoma Indians could be. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had used Oklahoma Indians to staff Southwestern reservation boarding schools, to keep the Pueblos and Navajos in line.

  Sterling woke up in the bus outside the Tucson depot. All the other passengers had already got off. Gathering up his shopping bags and bundles at the back of the bus, Sterling tried to estimate Tucson’s heat by looking out the bus’s tinted windows. It was the last day of July.

  In the air-conditioning of the bus, Sterling found it difficult to estimate the outside temperature. He did not think it would be too bad, but when he stepped down the bus steps into the blinding white sunlight, he collided with a wall of desert heat. An instant later, like a cold beer bottle on a hot day, Sterling felt himse
lf covered in an icy sweat. The dampness lasted only a matter of seconds before waves of heat sucked away the sweat, and with it, Sterling’s breath. What he needed right then was someplace cool to sit down to think. He pushed down the contents of both shopping bags to resettle anything that might have shifted on the bus ride. Then he took both bags, threw back his shoulders, and went into the bus depot.

  Sterling looked around for the old black man he’d sat with, but the old man was gone. At least the lobby was air-conditioned. It was two o’clock and the benches were full of people who didn’t look like travelers but refugees from the heat. He didn’t see any depot employees behind the ticket counter. Everyone seemed to be dozing or staring off into space. The effects of the heat. He saw a couple of Indians, but they were the ones stretched out on the benches.

  Sterling pushed his suitcase into the locker with his foot and squashed the shopping bags on top and slammed the door. No siestas for Sterling. He wasn’t going to be like everyone else, he was going to have a “take charge” attitude. He was going to walk around and see the downtown area. There must be hotels. There must be places to buy a cold drink.

  Crossing the street, Sterling could feel the asphalt sink a little under his tennis shoes. All surfaces—concrete and plate glass—radiated heat. But at the end of the first block, Sterling wasn’t even sweating. Because the heat was so dry, moisture could not even form on his body. The thermometer on the bank building read 103, but Sterling decided he was feeling pretty good considering.

  Downtown Tucson looked pretty much like downtown Albuquerque before they had “urban-renewed” it—and tore down the oldest buildings with merchants who had catered to Spanish-speaking and Indian people. Sterling walked up and down the streets. He liked Tucson’s bright pink courthouse. He put his fingers in the fountain; its water was not as hot as he had expected. He walked past the Santa Rita Hotel and decided it looked too expensive. He rested awhile on a bench in the shade at a park across from the city library. There were a lot of flies. Sterling fanned them away with his hat. A few of the hippies dozing on the grass opened an eye when he approached. But they pulled newspapers over their heads against the flies and went back to sleep again. Hippies in Albuquerque or Barstow pestered Indians with questions about Indian ways. In Tucson hippies were more like regular white people, who ignored Indians. That was all right with Sterling. He had learned his lesson with white people who had questions about Indian ways. A Tucson police car cruised by the city park. The cop looked sleepy, but Sterling was careful to avoid the cop’s eyes. Even if he was well dressed in his black-and-white-checkered slacks and blue short-sleeve shirt, Sterling knew some cops didn’t need any excuse to go after Indians.

  The only other sign of life Sterling found downtown was in front of the blood-plasma donor center. Two white men were loading insulated containers into an air-freight truck. The containers looked like ice chests for cold beer. Of course Sterling knew they were full of blood. That was one thing he had never done and hoped never to have to do. Sell his own blood. The donor center was probably why the little park was so full of hippies and run-down white men.

  A cold beer was what he needed. He walked north again, past the music store and the wig shop. Then he saw it: the Congress Hotel. Suddenly he remembered. This was the place John Dillinger’s gang had made their worst mistake.

  Sterling started to feel better. Tucson was going to be an interesting place. It had history. Where else could he have a cold beer at the same place Dillinger and his gang had been drinking beer in 1934? He opened the bar door and a gust of cold air-conditioning hit his face. Going from bright sun outside into the dimly lit bar left him blind for a moment. Even if they didn’t like Indians in this bar, Sterling wanted to have one drink there, for John Dillinger. When he could see again, he found the bar almost empty, except for an old woman on a stool talking to the bartender, and two old white men arguing over a video game. Sterling watched the bartender’s expression, to see if Indians were unwanted. But what he saw was relief. Maybe the bartender had wanted an excuse to get away from the old woman. Of course Sterling was well dressed. Even in the heat he was wearing his bolo tie made with a big chunk of good turquoise. The bartender was even friendly. He set the mug of beer in front of Sterling and started talking. “She’s trying to get me up to her room,” the bartender said. He was a small, balding white man with tattoos up and down both arms. The old white woman was wearing a dark purple dress with little white dots all over it. She wore open-toed, white high heels she had hooked around the bottom of the barstool like a pro. Her white hair was carefully waved in little curls around her face. She had drawn careful circles of rouge and used just the right amount of lipstick. Forty years ago she had probably been a beauty. “Don’t be fooled by the bartender,” she said to Sterling. “I’ve had him up to my room plenty of times.”

  Then she went back to her drink—something pink in a tall glass. The bartender moved away from Sterling then, wiping the bar and rinsing glasses. The two old men were no longer sitting at the video game. They were pouring beer from a pitcher and arguing over pinball machines and video games. How could you trust a video game? It was all electronics, all programmed like a computer to beat you. You had no chance. But at least with the pinball game, you could see the effects of gravity—the edge of the flipper with just the right leverage to fling the steel ball up the ramp and ring the bells and buzzer.

  Sterling could begin to see how the place must have looked in Dillinger’s day: the seats in the booths and the stools were covered with red plastic now, but he could see they had once been done in real leather. Only the bar itself was still dark mahogany. All the bar tables had been replaced with red Formica. The floor was covered with red indoor-outdoor carpet pockmarked with cigarette burns. But at the doorway an edge of black marble tile could still be seen. It had been a classy place in its day. Sterling paid for another beer and asked the bartender if it was always that quiet. “Oh, this is about average for a Tuesday,” he said. “At happy-hour time they come in.” He nodded in the direction of the two old men and the old woman. Retired people living in the cheap rooms downtown. The old woman was hanging off the stool by her high heels, leaning toward the old men, who were still arguing about pinball machines and video games. Occasionally the old woman would leer at the bartender or at Sterling. “You’re not an Arizona Indian,” the bartender said. Sterling shook his head.

  Just then two men had come into the bar. Both wore dark glasses and were nervously scanning the room, for somebody. The men wore identical white jeans and pale yellow polo shirts, and big gold wrist-watches. The Mexican with the cruel face was staring at Sterling. The young white man with him stared at Sterling too. Sterling smiled at the bartender uneasily. The men were looking for old Fernando, who worked as a gardener when he wasn’t getting drunk, but nobody had seen the old man for weeks. The Mexican with the cruel face stepped closer to Sterling. “You,” he said. “What about you? Can you work?”

  “Gardening?” Sterling suddenly felt light-headed from the beer and the heat. “Ah, yes!” Sterling said. “Yes!” Trying to come up fast with the answer the men in dark glasses wanted to hear.

  “Oh, yes!” Sterling heard himself answer. “Big lawns! All kinds of lilac bushes—dark purple, lavender, pink, white, blue!” Before Sterling could go on about the pool full of giant goldfish—all of it made-up—Ferro had turned and pointed to the door. “You’re hired. Let’s go.”

  The Mexican had the young white man drive the four-wheel-drive truck. No one spoke during the entire ride. They drove north and then west from downtown Tucson. The dry heat had parched the leaves of the desert trees pale yellow. Even the cactus plants had shriveled.

  Sterling had never seen dogs like these before—leaping high against the chain-link fence—snarling, barking guard dogs. They were either black or reddish with short coats and brown or black markings on their faces like masks. Sterling had noticed the dogs each wore heavy leather collars mounted with tiny black me
tal cylinders.

  THE STONE IDOLS

  “WELL,” STERLING SAYS, pushing the broom back toward the shallow end of the pool. He pauses and stares at the Catalina Mountains to the east. “I hope I am going to be here awhile, because I don’t have any other place to go.” Sterling has to clear his throat to keep the tears back. Seese wipes the back of her hand across her face but never looks up from the water. Her sadness startles him, and Sterling is seized by memories and lets down his guard. Remorse, bitter regret.

  The stone idols had got Sterling banished. How many times had the theft of these stone figures come up during the hearings and Tribal Council proceedings? So often his brain had gone numb and lost track. The stone figures had been stolen eighty years before. Yet at Laguna, people remembered the crime as though it had just been committed. But the incident involving the Hollywood movie crew and the shrine of the great stone snake was no crime; it had been the result of a simple mistake; a small misunderstanding, a total accident.

  The theft of the stone figures years ago had caused great anguish. Dark gray basalt the size and shape of an ear of corn, the stone figures had been given to the people by the kachina spirits at the beginning of the Fifth World, present time. “Little Grandmother” and “Little Grandfather” lived in buckskin bundles gray and brittle with age. Although faceless and without limbs, the “little grandparents” had each worn a necklace of tiny white shell and turquoise beads. Old as the earth herself, the small stone figures had accompanied the people on their vast journey from the North.

  Generation after generation the protection and care of the stone figures had passed to an elder clanswoman and one of her male relatives. She prepares cornmeal and pollen sprinkled with rainwater to feed the spirits of the stone figures, which remain in her house when they are not in the kiva. She lifts them tenderly as she once lifted her own babies, but she calls them “esteemed and beloved ancestors.”