Queen of the Night

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 12:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

Eight-year-old Gabriel Ortiz sat up straight in Dr. Lani Walker’s car and seemed to be studying the scenery as it whizzed by outside the windows of the speeding Passat. This was the first time Lani could remember his being tall enough to ride in the front seat. He evidently liked it.

“Where are we going again, Lani Dahd?” he asked.

Dahd was Tohono O’odham for godmother, and that was Lani Walker’s role in Gabe’s young life. She had been there to deliver him in the back of her adoptive mother’s prized Invicta convertible eight years earlier, and she had been there for him ever since, spending as much time with him as possible whenever she was home on breaks—first from medical school and later from her hospital residency in Denver.

She was doing her best to be Gabe’s mentor and to give him the benefit of everything she had learned from the mentors in her life, her own godparents, namely Gabe’s great-aunt, Rita Antone, and his grandfather, Fat Crack Ortiz. Of course, those people in turn had learned what they knew from the old people in their own lives, from a blind medicine man called Looks at Nothing, and from Rita’s grand-mother, Oks Amachuda, Understanding Woman.

“We’re going to stop by the house to pick up my mother,” Lani answered. “Then we’re going to a place called Tohono Chul.”

Gabe frowned. “Desert corner?” he asked.

Lani smiled at his correct translation. She was glad he was learning some of his native language, and not just from her, either.

“Not a corner, really,” she corrected. “It’s a botanical garden, devoted to preserving the desert’s native plants.”

“You mean like a zoo but for plants?” Gabe asked.

Lani nodded. “Exactly. There’s a party there tonight. My mother and I are invited, and I thought you should go, too. After all, you’re eight—that’s old enough.”

“What kind of party?” Gabriel asked. “You mean like a birthday party with candles?”

“More like a feast than a birthday party, but with no dancing,” Lani explained.

Gabe shook his head. A feast with no dancing clearly made no sense to him.

“There may be candles,” Lani added, “but they won’t be on a cake. People will be carrying candles around with them so they’ll be able to see in the dark.”

“Why not use flashlights?” he asked.

Lani smiled to herself. Gabe was nothing if not practical. From his perspective, flashlights made more sense than candles. Gabe wanted light, not atmosphere.

“Candles make for a better mood,” she said. Lani waited while Gabe internalized her response. After eight years, Lani was accustomed to answering the boy’s questions, and she did so patiently enough. That was a godmother’s job. As for Gabe’s parents? His father, Leo, was too busy running the family auto repair business, and his mother, Delia Cachora Ortiz, was too busy being the tribal chairman to take time out to provide thoughtful answers to Gabe’s perpetually complicated questions.

Besides, truth be known, Gabe’s city-raised mother probably didn’t know most of those answers herself anyway, at least not the traditional ones—the old ones— Gabe was searching for, the ones he wanted to understand. Delia could probably do a credible job of reciting the meteorological reasons for hot summer days like today when the horizon was dotted with fast-moving whirlwinds, but she didn’t know the vivid stories of Wind-man and Cloud-man, who were the mysterious Tohono O’odham movers and shakers, the entities who stood behind those dancing whirlwinds. Little Gabe Ortiz was always searching for the wisdom and the teachings of the old ways, and those were the ones Lani Walker provided.

“Will there be other Indians there?” Gabe asked now.

“Probably not.”

“Only Anglos and us?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

That was by far Gabe’s favorite question—the one for all seasons and all reasons. “But why does the ocotillo turn green when it rains? But why do rattlesnakes shed their skin? But why does I’itoi live on Ioligam? But why does it thunder when it rains? But why did my grandfather have to die before I was born? But why? But why? But why?”

Although Gabe’s parents were often too preoccupied to answer the curious little boy’s constant questions, Lani never was. He reminded her of Elephant’s Child in that old Rudyard Kipling story, where the baby elephant was forever asking questions of everyone within hearing distance. Gabe, too, was full of “satiable curiosity,” just as Lani had been when she was a child. She, far more than either of Gabe’s parents, understood how and why those questions needed to be answered, just as Nana Dahd and Fat Crack Ortiz had patiently answered those same questions for her.

“Because Tohono Chul is in Tucson,” Lani said firmly. “Not that many Indians live in Tucson these days.”

“Rita used to live in Tucson,” Gabe responded wistfully. “Now she lives with us. Not with us really. She lives next door.”

For a moment Lani thought he was referring to that other Rita, to Lani’s Rita, to Rita Antone, Nana Dahd, the wrinkled old Indian woman who had been godmother to Lani in the same way Lani was godmother to Gabe. Eventually she realized Gabe was referring to his thirteen-year-old cousin Rita Gomez. That Rita, sometimes called Baby Rita, had been named after her great-aunt, Rita Antone, who was Gabe’s great-aunt as well.

There was silence in the car for the next several minutes as Lani considered how the threads of the Ortiz family had frayed, drawn apart, and then seamlessly repaired themselves.

Charlotte Ortiz Gomez, Gabe’s auntie and Baby Rita’s mother, had been estranged from Gabe’s grandparents, Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz, for a number of years. During that time Charlotte had lived in Tucson with her jerk of a husband and her daughter. When Fat Crack died, Charlotte had adamantly refused to come to the reservation, not even for her own father’s funeral.

A year or so later, however, when Charlotte’s marriage had ended in divorce, she had come crawling back to the reservation, begging forgiveness. She and Baby Rita had moved into her widowed mother’s mobile home in the Ortiz family compound behind the gas station, where Charlotte had looked after her mother until Wanda’s death two years ago.

“Well?” Gabe prompted. “If there won’t be any Indians there, why do we have to go?”

“Because the Milgahn who are coming tonight want to hear the legend of Old White-Haired Woman,” Lani answered. “Tonight is the one night a year when the night-blooming cereus blossom all over the desert. They have a lot of those plants at Tohono Chul and a lot of people will come to see them. I promised the lady who organizes the party that I would come there to tell the story of Old White-Haired Woman.”

Gabe’s jaw dropped. “But you can’t,” he objected.

It was Lani’s turn to ask. “Can’t what?”

“You can’t tell that story,” Gabe replied. “It’s an I’itoi story,” he added earnestly, “a winter-telling tale. The snakes and lizards are already out. If you tell that story now and one of them hears you, they could hurt you.”

Lani had once asked Gabe’s grandfather, Fat Crack Ortiz, about that very same thing. The old medicine man had been invited to come to a party just like this one for the same reason—to deliver the story at Tohono Chul in honor of that year’s blooms.

“When they asked me to come, I wondered about that,” he said. “So I took the invitation they sent me, I rolled some sacred tobacco, some wiw, and I performed a wustana. By blowing the sacred smoke over the invitation, I knew what I should do.”

“And what was that?” Lani had asked.

“Some of the people have forgotten all about Old White-Haired Woman,” Fat Crack had told her. “Yes, the I’itoi stories are supposed to be winter-telling tales, but on this one night, I’itoi himself doesn’t object to having that story told.”

“The snakes and lizards won’t hurt me,” Lani told Gabe now. “I’itoi doesn’t mind if the story is told on the night the flowers bloom. It’s a good story. People need to remember.”

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

“Your hair looks great,” Nicole said, looking up at Abigail Tennant over the bubbling pedicure bath. “Is this a special occasion?”

Abby nodded. “Our anniversary,” she said. “Jack and I met five years ago today. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Where’s he taking you?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”