Forests of the Heart (23 page)

Tonight was a perfect example. He hadn’t pushed when he knew she wasn’t up to talking about what had upset her. Instead he’d eased their conversation into silly, harmless discussions on new releases, odd customer encounters in—and out—of the store, and deliberations on just how weird their co-workers were. As usual, Titus had won out, hand over fist, but then how could he not? Adam was merely an arrested adolescent; one day he might actually grow up. But Titus … Titus was almost pathological.

But now they’d left the easy companionship of the restaurant behind, Hunter had gone off home after seeing her to her door, and all the bad feelings she’d left in the apartment—firmly shutting the door on them for the few hours she was gone—were back once more. Sighing, she went into the living room and slouched down on the couch. She left the lights dark, the sound system off, and waited.

Donal didn’t get in until almost one, fumbling with his key in the lock, tripping over her boots when he got through the door, reeking of alcohol. She let him get his boots off and drop his parka on the floor. It wasn’t until he went stumbling down the hall toward his bedroom that she called out his name.

“Jaysus,” he said, banging back against the wall. “You gave me a right bloody start.”

Miki said nothing for a moment. She had to concentrate on breathing evenly, to get her temper under control before she spoke.

“So what’re you doing, sitting here in the dark?” Donal asked.

“Waiting for you.”

There. That was good. Level tone. Breathing calm. Pulse still too fast.

Donal came into the room and dropped into one of the club chairs.

“Now isn’t that sweet,” he said. “Waiting up for her brother, she is. Why one would almost think she had no life of her—”

“Don’t you dare start in with that shite,” she told him.

So much for staying calm.

“That time of month then, is it?” he asked.

The thing many people didn’t realize, mostly because of her size, was just how strong Miki was. It didn’t take much—a good diet, plenty of the right kind of exercise. You didn’t have to be big to be strong. Donal should have remembered, but he was too soused. He should have remembered her temper as well.

She shot out of the sofa, grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt, and hauled him out of his chair.

“Christ, woman!”

Instead of answering, she shoved him towards the hall. He went stumbling, arms flailing. As soon as he almost caught his balance, she shoved him again, continuing to keep him off balance until they reached the door of his studio.
Her
bedroom that she’d gone and given up like the bloody fool he’d played her for. At the door she gave him one final shove and he went tumbling. He grabbed at the nearest surface and brought a shower of paint tubes, rags, and brushes down upon himself as he fell.

She stood in the doorway, glaring at him. He made no effort to get up, but there was a royal anger in his eyes as well.

“So,” he asked, the tone of his voice deceptively mild. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

Miki knew that voice too well. It was the same one their father had used before he’d beat the shite out of one or the other of them. Sometimes both. It didn’t scare her now. But it hurt, because the drunken brother lying on the ground was the same one who’d protected her from the worst of their father’s rages, who’d looked out for her when they’d escaped the clutches of Social Services and went to live on the street.

“No,” she said. “But it looks like you have.”

Donal sat up. “What’re you on about?”

She pointed at the canvas behind him. In the faint light that came in the window from the street lamps outside it looked even more realistic than it had earlier in the evening, as well as more disturbing.

“Oh, that.”

“What’s it about, Donal?”

He shrugged. “It’s a bloody painting—what does it look like?”

“I’ll tell you what it looks like,” Miki said. “It looks like that shite Uncle Fergus was always on about. All that mad ugly talk about the Gentry and stringing up some poor sod who they’d treat like a king all summer, then nail up to a tree come Samhain for the luck of the community.”

“Fergus would be our great-uncle, actually.”

“And you know as well as I that his spew of meanness and spite, with its pretensions to Celtic Twilights and druids and Yeats and all, has no real basis in fact, mythical or historical—not the way he tells it. What he and his cronies spout is just some bloody hodgepodge stolen from a half-dozen different folklores that they’ve bent to their own liking.”

Donal shook his head. “It’s real.”

“Oh, aye. In bits and pieces, each belonging to its own. But not the way they tell it. Their telling is just an excuse to nail up some bugger they don’t like and fuck a few flower-draped handmaidens who’re too scared of their stories about the Gentry and the like to tell them no.”

“The Gentry are real,” Donal told her.

“And my shite smells of roses.”

“Who do you think the hard men are?”

An unhappy quietness settled over Miki. For a long moment she couldn’t speak.

“Don’t tell me you’re spending time with the likes of them,” she said finally.

“It’s not a matter of choice,” Donal said. “Once you’ve gained their attention, you’re either with them or against them. You know what’s said of them: There’s no middle ground with the Gentry.”

“Oh, Donal…”

“Don’t you worry for me. They won’t be hurting me.”

No, just Hunter and whoever else came in their way. She’d been young when she’d had to sit there and listen to Fergus and his cronies go on with their hateful talk, voicing all their petty revenges and lusts with no thought of the children—her brother and herself—sitting there listening to them. But she hadn’t bought into their rationalizations then, and she wasn’t about to do so now.

“It’s not you I’m worried about,” she said. “It’s those you plan to hurt.”

“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph. I haven’t turned into some monster overnight.”

Miki looked at the painting. On its own, it was a startling image, beautifully rendered, disturbing, but so were many of the images of Christ’s crucifixions that hung in Catholic churches. She knew that. But Donal’s painting spoke to her on a deeper level. It told her just how much her brother had listened to those mad ugly stories of their uncle, how different a man he really was from who she’d thought he was, to ally himself with men who would kill another for the luck it would give them, who would use fear and intimidation to take advantage of a susceptible young woman.

It was the symbol of it, that her brother could depict such hurt, that he could consider such hurt…

“Get that thing out of here,” she told him. “And take yourself with it.”

“Miki—”

“Go and live in the wilds with your Gentry. Bugger yourselves, for all I care. But don’t be back here. And don’t even consider hurting any of my friends again. They’re under my protection—do you hear me? Go and tell your hard men that, and if they have a problem with that, they can come see me about it.”

“It’s not like you’re thinking,” Donal told her. “They’re just looking for a home. For someplace they can call their own.”

“And if it already belongs to someone else?”

Donal shook his head. “These aren’t human men we’re talking about. They’ll take nothing from us.”

“Then who will they be taking it from?”

“Jaysus, that’s so like you. Why do you have to think anything’ll be taken from anybody?”

“Because that’s what their kind do, Donal. They take from others—and do you know why? Because it tastes sweeter to them when it’s bathed in another’s hurt. That’s who you’ve allied yourself with.”

“Now
you’re
talking mad.”

“Am I? Why don’t you ask your hard men yourself? Better yet, why don’t you stand in their way and see how well you remain friends.”

“Miki…”

She shook her head. “It goes, and so do you.”

Donal nodded slowly.

“Fine,” he said.

The look in his eyes broke Miki’s heart all over again. Standing up, he put his foot through the painting, then grabbed the torn edges of the canvas and tore it in half. The sound of the canvas ripping felt like pieces of Miki’s soul being torn from her.

“There,” he added. “That make you feel better?”

Miki took a deep, steadying breath. She faced his glare with a firmness she didn’t feel.

“If only you could tear it out of yourself as easily,” she said after a long moment.

“Jaysus woman. I was doing this for us.”

“For us?”

“Who else?” Donal demanded. He softened his voice. “Do you never get tired of scrabbling for every penny?” he asked her. “Did you never want that one sweet chance to strike back at all those who spat and shat on us every chance
they
could?”

Miki shook her head. “That’s not what it’s about,” she said. “And we both know it. It’s you being himself—our father. Or Fergus. It’s you being the big man.”

“If you really believe that…”

“What else am I supposed to believe?” she asked. “If you want to be something, why don’t you be a real man for once in your life? Admit that what you’re doing is wrong. That the hard men are no more than a band of thugs who care only for themselves.”

Donal gave her a grim look. He made a fist and smacked it against his breast.

“Here beats an Irish heart,” he told her, the softness left his voice again. “I’ll not bow down to any man—neither here nor at home.”

“At home? Ireland’s not our home and you and your hard men are no more Irish patriots than some IRA bomber, taking the war to the innocent.”

“Fuck the IRA,” Donal said. “And fuck the Provos, too. This is an older struggle.”

Miki nodded. “Oh, aye. Between the mad and the sane.”

He took a step to her, still the stranger, and once again she gave him a shove. But their argument had sobered him up some and this time he didn’t lose his balance. For a moment, she thought he was going to strike her, but then he lowered his fist and sadly shook his head.

“You’re blind, is all,” he said. “I’ll forgive you that.”

When he moved forward, Miki stepped back into the hall, but he wasn’t coming after her. He walked down the hall and picked up his parka from the floor.

“You’ll
forgive
me?”
Miki cried.

Donal nodded. He put on his boots. Taking out his key ring, he took off the key to the apartment door and tossed it onto the sofa.

“This is how you get a home,” Miki told him, making a motion with her hand to take in the apartment. “You work for your money—earn it honestly. You pay your rent, or you buy a home. You fill it with things that mean something to you and you welcome your friends into it. It’s not something you can simply take from a person.”

“Oh, no? And those who took our home from us?”

“When you take a home, it’s not a home anymore, is it?”

“It’s whatever you make it to be,” Donal told her.

Then he stepped out of the apartment, closing the door softly behind him.

Miki stared at the closed door. The enormity of what this argument had wrought settled inside her with a deep, sorrowful hurt. Her eyes filled with tears and she made no move to wipe them away as they ran down her cheeks. She made no sound either, as she wept.

Oh, Donal, she thought. Why did you have to listen to them?

She remembered overhearing someone in a pub once, the conversation coming around to the Troubles, saying how when the Irish get hurt, they stay hurt. It was true, too. Donal had never recovered from the pain of their childhood; why else would he have let the hard men take him in the way they had with all their shite of leaf-masked Summer Kings and the need for a home— not one made through love, but taken by pain.

No, Donal had never recovered. She had, but then she’d had Donal to look up at, to depend on. He’d had no one. She’d always thought his morose-ness was only a kind of play; now she knew it was a true, deep melancholy that ran below everything he thought or did. She’d never really understood it until now. But now she knew just how he felt. Now it seemed that all the joy had been sucked out of the world and she couldn’t imagine it ever returning again.

Haz el bien y no veas a quien.

Do good and don’t worry to whom.

—M
EXICAN SAYING

SONORAN DESERT, SPRING,
1990

One Friday afternoon in early April,
the year Bettina turned sixteen, her grandmother met her as she and Adelita were leaving school. Abuela pulled up at the curb in her dusty pickup and honked to get Bettina’s attention. Beside her, Adelita rolled her eyes and stayed with their friends, but Bettina went running over to the truck. Standing on the running board, she leaned her forearms on the warm metal frame of window and poked her head into the cab.

“Abuela. What are you doing here?”

“We are going on a journey,” her
abuela
told her.

Bettina grinned. “Adelita,” she said, starting to turn. “Did you hear? We’re—”

Abuela touched her arm, stopping her.

“Not your sister,” she said. “Only you and me.”

“But—”

“It’s
Chehthagi Mashath,”
Abuela explained. “The month of the green moon. And we are going on a pilgrimage to Rock Drawn in at the Middle.”

Bettina’s eyes went wide. “But will the O’odham let us?”

Lying west of the Tucson Mountains, the Baboquivari Mountains were a sacred place to the Tohono O’odham, for hidden at the base of the cliffs that formed the walls of Baboquivari Canyon was a cave that was considered a tribal shrine. This was where I’itoi Ki lived, the Coyote-like being responsible for bringing the Desert People into this world. The cave was an antechamber of an enormous labyrinth winding under the Baboquivaris—an image captured by O’odham basketweavers with the design of a small man standing at the beginning of a circular maze.

Because Baboquivari Peak towered over the cave and could be seen from almost every village on the Tohono O’odham reservation, it was considered the heart of the O’odham universe. The Desert People called it
Waw Kiwulik,
“Rock Drawn in at the Middle,” referring to a long ago time when the granite obelisk was twice its present size. Wishing for more land, tribal elders had gone to I’itoi to ask him to move the mountains and make the valley bigger. He did so, toppling the upper half of the peak. The whole mountain range moved, widening Wamuli valley, but also angering Cloud Man who lived higher up in the mountains. Because of the people’s greed, Cloud Man refused to supply water to the new land, so the O’odham were never able to cultivate that part of the valley.

“Ban Namkam is taking us,” Abuela assured her. “And besides, we’re all
Indios.”

“Oh, I like Ban.”

“Sí,”
her
abuela
said, dryly. “That has always been rather obvious.”

Bettina blushed. Lewis Manuel was the son of Abuela’s friend Loleta, a handsome young O’odham that she’d first met at a saguaro fruit-picking camp last year. He was only six years older than her, but he might as well have been a hundred for all the attention he’d paid to her. Among his own people he was known as Ban Namkam—Coyote Meeter—because coyote was the animal he’d met in a vision while undergoing one of the four traditional degrees of manhood. Like most young men today, he probably wouldn’t attain the fourth, since it consisted of killing an enemy tribesman.

“Does Mama know we are going?” Bettina asked to take her grandmother’s attention away from the dismal state of her love life.

“Of course,” Abuela said. “I told her we are going to stay with Loleta for the weekend.”

“But you said—”

Abuela shared a conspiratorial smile.
“Chica,”
she said. “You know how your
mama
worries.”

Yes, Mama worried. And perhaps with good cause, Bettina thought.

Last year Abuela had taken her on another pilgrimage, down into Sonora, Mexico, to fulfil her
manda,
a secret vow she had made to San Francisco Xavier. They had walked from Nogales all the way to Magdalena, accompanied by dozens of other pilgrims. Each October, during the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Desert People have made their pilgrimages to the reclining statue of St. Francis which is kept in the church of Magdalena de Kino, in Sonora. The confusion of feast days arose from the disorder that followed the replacement of the Jesuits by the Franciscans some two hundred years ago. The Desert People had been introduced to St. Francis Xavier by the Jesuits. When the Jesuits were expelled, they assumed that the St. Francis of Assisi the Franciscan priests spoke of was the same man.

Bettina had come expecting a fervent religious experience, and she hadn’t been disappointed. The plaza surrounding the cathedral had been full of pilgrims, the new arrivals waiting in line outside the catafalque on which the statue of San Francisco rested in recline. They gathered around the child-sized statue, touching it, thanking him, offering up silent prayers, pinning
milagros
to his brown Franciscan habit. When her turn came, Bettina had found herself filling up with a great sense of serenity and mystery—more potent than anything she’d known under the desert skies.

This was before Abuela had taken her into
la época de mito,
when myth time still belonged to stories, rather than experience. That day Bettina felt more magic in the catafalque than she’d ever experienced before, and she realized her first difference with her grandmother. Yes, the desert was holy, but to her mind, the church, with its saints and the Virgin, was holier still. On their return to Tucson, she began to attend mass more regularly, which pleased Mama to no end. Bettina had thought that Abuela would be upset, but her grandmother had merely smiled and said, “It doesn’t matter where we find the Mystery, only that we do find her and bring her into our lives.”

But for all the holiness in the cathedral, the fiesta was also a secular affair, an early Papago/Pima harvest festival to which the missionaries had merely attached some Christian motifs. When Bettina and her
abuela
stepped back into the sunlit plaza, it was to see a Yaqui deer dancer preparing to dance, the antlers of his stuffed deer-head mask bedecked with ribbons, rattles of dried cocoons tied to his ankles. From other plazas, and outside the small town, they could hear the rumble of the fiesta as several thousand people celebrated the Feast of St. Francis in their own way, lifting their voices in many languages against a backdrop of
mariachi
and
norteño
bands, merchants hawking their wares with amplified loudspeakers that were only a rumbling squawk against the cacophony of carnival rides.

Abuela had taken them first to where the herbal medicines were being sold, replenishing her own stock with herbs grown in wetter lands, necessary medicinal plants that she couldn’t harvest herself in the desert. Then they walked by the booths selling trinkets, hardware, religious paraphernalia such as
milagros
and postcards of the saints, leather goods, and food. They bought gifts for those back home: cotton print scarves, postcards, a bottle of tequila for Bettina’s father and his
peyoteros.
Bettina sampled the carnival rides; Abuela haggled with merchants. They admired the fresh produce stands, filled with corn, red chiles, striped squashes, and quinces, and feasted on stuffed chiles, fresh corn on the cob, and bowls of
calabacita
—boiled squash, chopped up and fried with onions, tomatoes, and asadero cheese. Abuela allowed Bettina a small glass of beer, and they finished their meal with barrel cactus candy and
alegrías,
cakes of popped amaranth seeds that, except for this fiesta, never reached farther north than Mexico City.

After night fell, they made their way to Calle Libertad, meeting up with friends from home in one of the open-air dance halls where a
mariachi
band blared tunes on a mix of brass instruments and violins. Bettina tried to stay awake, but by how she’d had a second beer and the mix of the unfamiliar alcohol and the long day finally took its toll. She fell asleep on a chair at the back of the hall. The last thing she remembered seeing was her grandmother happily dancing polkas with her friends.

When they returned home, Mama had been furious, but Abuela, as usual, was unrepentant. Mama hadn’t spoken to Abuela for a week after that, filling the house with a dark silence that touched everyone. Bettina wasn’t eager to repeat that part of the experience.

“Wouldn’t it be better to tell her the truth?” she said to her grandmother.

Abuela shrugged.
“¿Como?
And when she forbids your going? We don’t do this for her,
chica.
We do this for you. That you learn the old ways. That you are introduced to the spirits whose companionship and help you will need in the days to come. This is
curandera
business. You must trust to my judgment in this.” She looked past Bettina’s shoulder.
“¡Hola!
Adelita,” she called as Adelita and the other girls approached. “Do you want to come with us to visit the Manuels ?”

Adelita pulled a face. “I don’t have to come, do I?”

“Of course not,
chica,”
Abuela said.

“Vamos a mi casa”
Gina, one of the girls accompanying Adelita, said.

“Sí,”
Abuela said. “Go with your friends. We will see you on Sunday night.”

Bettina and her grandmother watched the girls saunter off down the dirt sidewalk that edged the road.

“You see?” Abuela said. “She doesn’t even want to come.”

“You didn’t say anything about Rock Drawn in at the Middle,” Bettina said.

Her
abuela
gave her an innocent look. “But we are going to visit the Manuels. As I told your mama.”

Bettina had to smile.

“And if we decide to take a drive later, perhaps a walk in the desert— would that be so wrong?”

Grinning now, Bettina got into the cab of the pickup.

“I’ve brought you some sensible clothes,” her grandmother said as she pulled away from the curb. “For the desert. You can change into them on the way.”

Ban Namkam appeared at his mother’s house early the next morning, startling the Gambel’s quail and doves into flight and a momentary silence. He stepped out of a pickup that was older, more battered, and even dustier than Abuela’s, a tall and ocotillo lean man in faded jeans, a short-sleeved white shirt and well-worn cowboy boots. His long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, his skin richly darkened by sun and genetics. When he smiled at Bettina, her pulse couldn’t help but quicken. Compared to the boys at school Ban was all presence and bigger than life. But while he was as handsome as ever, he remained just as oblivious to Bettina’s admiration now as he’d been the first time they’d met. When he casually ruffled her hair by way of greeting she could have bitten his hand.

Don’t say it, she willed, but of course he did.

“I swear you get taller every time I see you,” Ban told her.

Bettina could only grit her teeth.
No soy una niña,
she wanted to tell him. See, I have breasts and everything. But of course she didn’t say a word, only hung her head and stared at her feet, feeling stupid and impossibly young. Then she caught her
abuela
grinning at her and that only made her more self-conscious.

Discreet questioning of Ban’s mother the night before had allowed that, yes, he was still very much unattached. Unfortunately that was enough for Bettina to become the recipient of much gentle teasing on the part of both Loleta and Abuela for the remainder of the evening, not to mention this morning as well.

“Look,
nieta”
Abuela said when they saw the dust of Ban’s pickup approaching the house. “Here comes your boyfriend.”

Bettina’s warning glare had only made her
abuela
smile, but at least she said nothing now.

Truth was, Bettina wasn’t sure she even liked him anymore anyway. At least so she tried to convince herself. Look at him. He was obviously too full of himself, too caught up with his own importance to even notice that she was quite grown up now, thank you. Yes, his uncle Wisag Namkam was a calendar-stick keeper, marking saguaro ribs with cuts and slashes to help him remember important events, his father Rupert a medicine man, but so what? A man should be judged by his own deeds, not by the importance of his family.

Bettina sighed. Except Ban’s deeds did speak for themselves. He followed the traditional ways, but he was also working on a doctorate in botany at the University of Arizona. He was handsome, smart, kindhearted, loyal. She sighed again. And totally oblivious to her. It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t she be more like Adelita? Her sister
always
had a boyfriend.

“Are you still in this world?”

Bettina blinked, then realized that her
abuela
was speaking to her.

“Sí,”
she said quickly. “Where else would I be?”

Abuela gave Loleta a knowing look and they both rolled their eyes. Happily, Ban didn’t notice. He was looking off into the distance where the Baboquivaris rose from the horizon, their tall and stately peaks towering high above the surrounding bajadas.

“I haven’t been to the cave since Papa took me when I was a boy,” he said, turning back to the others. “I hope I can remember how to find it once we reach the cliffs.”