Forests of the Heart (25 page)

She shook her head. Why was she thinking such things? She wasn’t in school, or learning lessons while out hiking with her
abuela.

She looked again past the sunning roadrunner, out over the rough scrub of the bajada. Singing dogs were one thing—especially when they seemed so full of fun—but she wasn’t sure she was really prepared for invisible spirits.

“¿Quién habló?”
she asked, pitching her voice low so that it wouldn’t carry to the strange dogs cavorting on the other side of the ridge. Who spoke?

The roadrunner cleared its throat.

“Are you always this rude?” it asked when it saw it had her attention.

Bettina regarded the bird for a long moment. The dogs should have prepared her for this. This was
la época del mito,
after all. The place where, according to Abuela, what passed as folktales in their world were no more than matter-of-fact occurrences.

“Perdona,”
she said finally. I’m sorry.

“I should think so. What would your grandmother say?”

“ My grandmother ?”

“¡Claro!
Everyone in this place has heard of her: Dorotea Muñoz—
la curandera de pequeños misteriós.”

“How do you know her?”

“Let’s say we have shared certain … intimacies.”

Bettina’s eyes widened. “But you … you’re a bird.”

“Is that what you see?”

As Bettina began to nod, the roadrunner folded up its short, rounded wings and rose onto its feet. A heat wave traveled the length of its speckled black and white plummage, heightening the greenish iridescent cast the feathers already held. Bettina found her gaze caught by the bright blue around its eyes where the heat wave shimmered the strongest. The intensity of those blue feathers brought a return of the vertigo she’d suffered in I’itoi’s cave and she had to close her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the roadrunner was gone.

A small, dark-skinned man sat in its place.

“¡Dios mío!”
Bettina managed to squeeze from a suddenly dry mouth.

In any other circumstance, she would have given him no more than a passing glance. He was short in stature, certainly shorter than herself, but otherwise he could have been any middle-aged O’odham on the rez. Scuffed cowboy boots, worn blue jeans, white cotton shirt, baseball cap. But his eyes were almost black, with bird-bright highlights and circles of blue shadow, his face long and lean, especially his nose. There was a roadrunner speckling of black and white in his dark brown hair, and he carried enough weight around his waist to give him the body shape of a bird.

“Where did you come from?” Bettina asked, though she already knew.

The man smiled. “Where did any of us come from?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Perhaps not. But I believe the most important questions only lead to more questions.”

“Now you sound like
mi abuela”
Bettina said.

“A fine woman. You must give her my regards.”

“Who shall I say is sending them?”

“Tadai.”

“You mean Tadai Namkam?
¿Cómo un apodo?”

“No, not a nickname. Just Tadai, nothing more …”

Bettina shook her head.
Tadai
was simply the O’odham word for road-runner. It was as if Bettina were to call herself
Chehia.
Girl. Then she found herself wondering if her present experience was like Ban’s meeting with the coyote that had given him his tribal name. Perhaps now
she’d
be called Tadai Namkam. It was all very confusing. But one thing her fifteen-year-old wisdom told her:

“That’s not a regular name,” she told him.

“And yet it’s the only one I have,” Tadai said.

Bettina gave him a considering look. “
¿Es verdad?”

“Más o menos.”
More or less.

Aha. But she decided not to press him on it. She was more interested in the singing dogs.

“Why did you warn me away from the dogs?” she asked, hoping to get a straightforward answer for a change.

“Not dogs,” Tadai said.
“Cadejos.
Weren’t you listening to their song?”

Which had now stopped, Bettina realized. She hoped her conversation with Tadai hadn’t driven them away. She tried to listen for some sound on the other side of the ridge. A click of goatish hooves on stone. A murmur of song. There was nothing.

“They seemed like such fun,” she said, not even trying to hide her disappointment.

Tadai nodded. “But they are dangerous.
Cadejos
are the children of volcanoes. How can they not be dangerous with such powerful entities as parents?”

“I’ve never heard of them before.”

“In your world they are invisible … and mostly forgotten.”

“But
why
are they dangerous?”

“Bien.
For one thing, they are doorways and can pull you between worlds.”

“Is that how I got here? Did the
cadejos
bring me?”

Tadai gave her a tired look. “Either that, or you were sent here by someone weary of your endless questions.”

“Now who’s being rude?”

“Me perdona.
But you are a most conversational child.”

Again the child business.

“I’m almost sixteen.”

“Ah.” As though that explained everything.

“In the old days I’d be married now, with children.”

Tadai shook his head. “Children having children. What a sad world you come from.”

Bettina decided she had listened long enough to this sort of talk. It was bad enough that Ban ignored her, without complete strangers voicing their opinions on how young she was. She stood up and with great dignity carefully brushed the dirt from her jeans.

“Where are you going?” Tadai asked as she started up the slope.

“Home,” she told him without turning. “If you haven’t scared them off with all your talking, I’m going to ask
los cadejos
to send me home.”

“But—”

Bettina paused to look back at him. “You’re the one who said that they’re doorways between worlds.”

Tadai scrambled to catch up to her.

“Si,”
he said. “But you don’t necessarily get to choose
which
world they will send you into.”

Bettina wasn’t interested in listening to him anymore. She quickly gained the top of the ridge and was half walking, half sliding down its far slope before Tadai could stop her. The
cadejos
were below, sprawled out in repose like a pack of javelinas.

“¡Por favor!”
she called to them. “Send me back home.”

They rose in a wave of color, yipping and laughing, blue and green and bright pink tails wagging, and surrounded her as she came the rest of the way down the slope, arms pinwheeling to keep her balance.

“¿Dónde está tu casa?”
one of them cried. Where is your home?

“¡Tu casa, tu casa, tu casa!”
the others took up.

“¡Qué suerte! Tienes una casa.”
How lucky. You have a home.

“¡Tu casa, tu casa, tu casa!”

“Somos los homeless.”

“No tenemos casa.”

“Verdaderos, verdaderos.”

“¡Somos los cadejos!”

They ran around and around her as they yipped and barked and made a bewildering noise. Bettina grew dizzy as she turned around herself, trying to focus on one of them long enough to make herself understood. But the
cadejos
danced around her like so many spinning carousel animals, with her at their hub, unable to move, while they were always in motion, Catherine-wheeling finally into a blur of color and sound.

“Bettina!” she heard Tadai call.

She tried to see where he was, but there were always
cadejos
in front of her, yapping, chattering, laughing. The vertigo rose up again, a huge dark swell of it, and this time she didn’t fight it. At least it would take her away from the blur of motion and their voices. Except the dogs leapt up at her now, not attacking, not even playing, but jumping at her all the same, little cloven hooves scattering dirt behind them, and into her chest they went, swallowed into her skin, and she could still hear their voices as she tumbled towards unconsciousness, only now they were echoing inside her head.

As everything went black, Tadai reached the place where she’d been standing.

“And sometimes they make
you
into a doorway,” he said, but he was alone on the bajada now, Bettina and
cadejos,
both gone.

Bettina’s spirit rose up from the darkness to find a hundred faces peering down at her, all of them spinning and turning like the carousel of
cadejos
had earlier. But slowly they resolved into two faces, Ban’s and her grandmother’s.

“Chica, chica,”
Abuela said. “You’ve made us so worried. I thought my heart would stop when you disappeared the way you did.”

Ban put his arm around her shoulders and helped her sit up when she couldn’t quite manage it on her own. The sudden movement made her head spin once more, but the vertigo quickly ebbed. Candlelight filled her sight, flickering on the offerings stuck into the cave’s wall niches and hanging from its roof. When she saw them she realized that they were still in I’itoi’s cave. So it had all been a strange dream. Except…

“I… I disappeared … ?”

“Sí,”
Ban said. “One moment you were here, the next you were gone.”

“I thought it was a dream …”

“What did you see?” her
abuela
asked.

Bettina didn’t answer for a long moment. She felt surprisingly clearheaded and was enjoying the sensation of being so close to Ban. See? she wanted to say to him. Does this feel like a child you hold in your arms?

“Bettina?” Abuela said.

Bettina sighed and looked at her grandmother.

“I met Tadai,” she said.

“Aroadrunner?”

“No. Yes. At first. Then he became a man. He said he knew you, Abuela. That you had been lovers.”

Abuela’s eyebrows rose. “Did he now.”

Bettina could feel herself blushing. “Well, he said you had shared intimacies.”

“I see.”

“And that I should give you his regards.”

“Very thoughtful of him.”

“Do
you know him?”

Her grandmother smiled. “I know a rather short, shape-shifting
curandero
whose imagination often gets the better of him. Did he … harm you in any way?”

Bettina shook her head. “Why didn’t you come for me?” she asked. “I called to you.”

“I know,” Abuela said. “I heard you. But,
chica, la época del mito,
it is a large place with many layers of time and myth laid one upon the other. It could have taken me weeks to find you. I thought it better to wait a few minutes first, to see if you could return on your own.”

“A few minutes?”

Ban laughed. “Time moves to its own rhythm in that place,” he said. “Half a day there can be but a minute here. You were gone no more than a few moments.”

“I felt like it was at least an hour “

“It is a confusing place,” Ban agreed, “especially at first. But come, let’s get you outside. You’ll feel better under the open sky.”

He and Abuela started to help her out through the cave opening, but she made them wait until she could dig into her pocket and leave behind a piece of candy for I’itoi. Outside, the night lay dark upon the bajada, a hundred thousand stars peering down on them from the clear sky overhead. But there was no moon. And Ban was right. She did feel better now that she was out of the cave. More herself. More inside her own skin.

“We’ll camp here tonight,” Ban said, “and make our descent in the morning.”

“Sí,”
Abuela said. “Tonight you will rest.”

“But I’m feeling much better.”

“Bueno.
Still, humor your old grandmother. Tell us, what else did you see?”

So while her grandmother and Ban readied the camp, Bettina sat on a blanket and related the whole of her adventure, from when she first heard
los cadejos
singing, to when they leapt into her chest and brought her back to I’itoi’s cave.

“Cadejitos,”
Ban murmured thoughtfully.

Bettina corrected him.
“Cadejos.
That’s what they called themselves.”

They had been small and cute, but somehow the diminutive felt disrespectful.

Ban smiled. “Still, I’ve never heard of such creatures.”

“I have,” Abuela said. “In Guatemala. But I know little more about them than what Tadai told you.”

As they continued to talk, Ban brought out the food Loleta had sent along with them. He didn’t build a campfire, but rather took a small Coleman stove from his pack on which he heated the beans and shredded meat that his mother had cooked earlier. Garnishing them with diced tomato and cilantro, he rolled them up in soft tortillas. Bettina liked watching his hands move, shadowy shapes in the faint glow cast by the stove. He rolled two tortillas for each of them which they washed down with cups of one of Abuela’s herbal teas.

Though insisting she wasn’t at all tired, at Abuela’s request, Bettina lay down after they’d eaten. She shifted about until the jut of her hip and shoulder settled into the small depressions Ban had shown her to dig. It was more comfortable than she’d thought it would be, lying there with a blanket pulled around her against the chill of the desert night. She heard Ban settle down as well, but her grandmother sat up, a small shadow against the starred sky, saguaro uncles and aunts rising up on the slope behind her.

“Did you know this would happen to me, Abuela?” she asked.

She couldn’t see her move, but she could feel her grandmother’s gaze find her.

“I brought you here to introduce you to
los pequeños misterios,”
Abuela said after a moment. “The spirits you must come to know for your
medicina
to be potent. But I had not thought they would take you away. I always meant to accompany you on your first visit to that other realm.”

“So these
cadejos”
Bettina said. “They’re to be my guardian spirits?”

Her
abuela
made a
tcbing
noise in the back of her throat.
“¿Quién sabe?
They are a mystery to me.”