Lucy felt Jojola's strong hands on her shoulders and wondered how he could have found his way into the car in time to save her. She forced her eyes open and discovered that she was not buried inside a car at all. In fact, she sat next to Jojola on a cliff of a mesa high above the New Mexican desert, wrapped in a Navajo blanket. It was daylight, but not the burning sun of a summer afternoon, just the setting sun of a chilly evening in late October.
The beauty of her surroundings slowly shooed away the horror of the burial. Nearby, Taos Mountain reached into the sky, its deep green, pine-clad slopes splotched with canary yellow and burnt-orange stands of aspen. The sky to the west was painted gold and purple, with the colors growing stronger as the sun slipped peacefully toward the horizon.
A strong hand gently turned her face from the sunset, and she found herself looking at the lined, bronze face of John Jojola. His dark brown eyes peered deep into her own, as if he were reading the fine print of a newspaper ad.
Jojola took her hand and placed something into it. "Sand," he said, "to bring you back to the reality of this earth." He then turned over her other hand and poured water onto it. "Wash with the waters from our sacred lake and be reborn."
Lucy felt the sand trickle through her fingers, aware of each grain. She splashed the water on her face and felt refreshed. "Where…where have I been?" she asked.
"Your body was here all along," Jojola replied as he picked up a piece of smoldering sage and waved it around Lucy, chanting something under his breath. "But your spirit has been far away."
The sage, she knew, was for cleansing. Then she remembered that the bitter, metallic flavor in her mouth was the aftertaste of peyote, a powerful hallucinogen found in the fruit of a cactus that grew in Mexico. It all came back to her-the dreams and going to the mesa with Jojola on a spirit quest.
Lucy had known that Jojola was a practicing member of the Native American Church, which had been organized by American Indian tribes so that the U.S. government could not stop them from taking peyote as part of their religious rights. He'd explained that peyote had been used by Indians of Mexico, where the plant grew, for thousands of years. Only in the past hundred years or so had American Indians used it as a path to the spirit world.
As such, peyote was considered sacred-not a toy for Anglo hippies who wanted to see a kaleidoscope of colors and go "on a trip." When Lucy broached the subject of using it herself, Jojola had at first rejected the request.
"Why do you want it?" he demanded.
Lucy replied that she wasn't some college kid looking for a high. "I'm searching for answers," she told him. She'd been having dreams in which she was suffocating and dreams in which she was burning, dreams filled with smoke and three triangular-shaped mountains. The dreams had filled her with fear and a sense that she couldn't trust anybody outside of her family and small circle of friends. But the worst dream of all-one she'd had with increasing frequency-was the one with Ned lying on the ground and a man pointing a rifle at him as his finger pulled back on the trigger.
"I think the answers might be important," she'd added.
Jojola hadn't replied right away. He knew that Lucy was different from most people and in tune with the spirit world. A few of the Taos Pueblo people had labeled her a bruja, a witch, and wanted her banned from the pueblo because she'd learned their secret language as if by magic. But most in the tribe who knew her as he did argued that her heart was pure, as were her intentions. And so an unspoken understanding was reached that no one would teach her the language, but if she learned it simply by listening, then the spirits must have wanted it to be so.
More than a year had passed since they'd met and Jojola found himself cast into the role of spiritual advisor to Lucy and her mother, Marlene. While it seemed an accidental meeting, he was sure it was not; the spirits had wanted it to happen and so it had. But even if he was willing to teach them his understanding of spirituality, the secret traditions of his people he would not reveal. His tribe was one of the few in the United States living on their ancestral lands instead of having been moved to a reservation. As such, they'd been able to keep most of their customs and language intact, in part because they did not allow outsiders to usurp them.
However, he reasoned, peyote was not a Taos custom; not everyone in his tribe or the other tribes belonged to the Native American Church. He himself had come to it only out of desperation.
After two tours in Vietnam, Jojola had returned in 1969 to the Taos Pueblo only to discover that he had not entirely found his way home from the war. He became an alcoholic and deadbeat, especially after his wife, herself an alcoholic, left him with a young son to raise. Only his love for his son had saved him from drinking himself to death. But he couldn't overcome his addiction to alcohol by himself. Then one of the tribe's elders, who was a member of the Native American Church, suggested that he might ask the spirits to help by participating in a peyote ceremony.
Jojola was willing to try anything and begged the elder to set it up for him. But the elder said that his was a special case, and he would have to travel to Mexico and find the ancient roots of the peyote cult.
So he had gone with a letter from the elder introducing him to the Huichol people, the original practitioners of the peyote ceremony. He was in luck: they were preparing to go on their annual trek to find peyote, which they called hikuri, and invited him along.
Led by a mara'akame, or shaman, Jojola had to first pass through the rite of confession and purification. For each offense that he confessed, the mara'akame made a knot in a string. Some of the knots represented the guilt he felt over killing other men, even if it had been in combat, but mostly the knots represented mistakes he'd made as a husband, a father, and as a member of his tribe. Either way, his string was particularly long by Huichol standards, and filled with knots.
At the end of the ceremony, the shaman burned the string. When he woke the next morning, Jojola felt as if a weight had been lifted, but the shaman told him that his journey was not over.
In fact, it had only just begun. He traveled with the tribe to the sacred mountains of Wirikuta, where they prayed to the spirits and washed themselves in the waters of a holy stream. Only now, the shaman warned him, were they ready for the perilous crossing into the otherworld.
The tribe had then searched for hikuri. When they were through harvesting and ready to partake, Jojola was given twelve pieces of the mescal fruit that contained the peyote. It was considered a light dose for the more practiced Huichol, some of whom consumed as many as fifty pieces. But it was enough.
The journey began innocently enough with colorful lights and gentle hallucinations, as well as a general feeling of well-being. But that afternoon, the sky had grown dark, nearly as black as night, with frenetic blasts of lightning and thunder.
Coming out of the storm, he saw a dark warrior approaching from across the desert carrying a war club. The demon ran as fast as the wind, and Jojola could tell that it was coming to do battle and that if he failed, he would literally die on that mountainside.
Looking about for a weapon, Jojola saw the sharp-ended rib bone of a coyote and picked it up. Then the dark spirit was upon him. They struck each other with terrific blows, and then circled before striking again, before repeating their terrible dance.
Bloody and dazed, Jojola realized that the spirit was alcohol and it intended to devour him body and soul. Then it would take his son, and his people. Anger welled up inside of him and he raised the coyote rib, then plunged it into the demon with all of his might. The dark warrior collapsed to his knees but refused to die.