Mary was smiling. “Well,” she said. “I guess that’s a version of a little bit of it. The way people in the Bear Clan tell it, anyway. What else have you heard?”
“I read in the book Frank Waters wrote that when Masaw met the people emerging from the underworld, his face was all bloody. That he was a fearsome-looking kachina. And that he taught you not to be afraid to die. I think you called him the Death Kachina.”
Mary nodded. “Or sometimes the Skeleton Man. And some of the old people tell us that in another way,” she said. “In those dark first three worlds we were forced out because of horrible crowding. People kept making babies but nobody ever died. We were jammed in together so tight, they say, that you couldn’t spit without spitting on somebody else. Could hardly move. People just kept creating more people. Twin brothers were leaders of the people then. They found a way to grow a reed through the roof of the first dark world for us to the second one, and then, when it got too crowded, on into the third one, and finally into this one. But still nobody ever died until Masaw taught people not to be afraid of death.”
Bernie had heard something like this in one of her anthropology classes, but not this version.
“How did he do that?” she asked.
“One of the clan leaders had a beautiful daughter who was killed by another little girl. Out of jealousy. And that caused trouble between families. So Masaw opened the earth so the clan leader could see his daughter in the world beyond this one. She was laughing, happy, playing, singing her prayers.”
“That sounds like the Christian heaven,” Bernie said. “Our Navajo beliefs—most of them, anyway—aren’t so specific. But you were going to tell me why it’s dangerous for me here.”
“Because up there…” She paused, shook her head, pointed up the canyon. “Up there, they say, is where the Skeleton Man lives. Up there in the biggest canyon that runs into this one. Comes in from the left. They say he painted a symbol on the cliff where it enters. The symbol for the Skeleton Man.” Mary knelt, drew in the sand with her finger. The shape she formed meant nothing to Bernie.
“Is the danger because that place is where Masaw, or the Skeleton Man, is living?” Bernie asked, feeling uneasy. “Is that spirit dangerous to people like me?”
Mary shook her head, looking troubled. “Everything gets so mixed up,” she said. “The Supai people have their ideas, and the Paiutes come in here with different ideas, and the priests and the preachers and even the Peyote People tell us things. But I’ve been hearing that it might be some man, even older than me now. Nobody knew who his parents were. He used to come to Peach Springs and kept telling stories about how Masaw was the one who caused all those bodies to come falling down here into the canyon. Said Masaw made those planes run together. And this man was trying to get people to change their religions around and believe like him. I think he’s the one who started calling Masaw the Skeleton Man.”
Mary stopped, shook her head, laughed. “When I was just a young woman, he came around to the village and showed us tricks. He had this little deer-skin pollen bag he’d hold up in the sunlight. Like this.” She held her right hand high above her head and pinched her thumb and fingers together. “He told us to notice how ugly and brown the pollen pouch looked. That’s how this life is, he’d say, but look what you get if you’re willing to get rid of this life. To get out of it. And then the pollen sack would turn into this glittering thing sitting on the end of his fingers.”
She stared at Bernie, her expression questioning, looking for Bernie’s reaction.
“Amazing,” Bernie said. She was thinking how the trick might have been done—the thumb and forefinger squeezing the diamond out of the pouch, the pouch disappearing into the palm.
“I saw it myself,” Mary said. “That sack just glittered and glittered as he turned it in the sunlight.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t remember exactly. But in a little while, he was holding the pollen pouch again, and it didn’t glitter anymore.”
“Fascinating,” Bernie said.
“My uncle told me he thought it was some sort of trick, but this man said the Skeleton Man gave it to him to prove to people they should be willing to die. The ugly brown pollen pouch was like the life they were living now. After they died, it would be bright and shiny.”
“Where did this man come from? Does what he was telling you fit in with what they teach in your kiva?”
“I don’t remember as much about the old times as I should,” Mary said, looking sad. “I know I was taught them when I was little, but all those years up at Peach Springs talking with all kinds of other people, I forget them. And they got mixed in with other stuff. But I know that even though Masaw looked horrible—they say his face was all covered with blood—he was a friend of the people in some ways.”
“Like teaching them not to be afraid to die?”
“Like that,” Mary said, smiling. “I remember my mother used to tell that to me. That just two things we know for certain. That we’re born and in a little while we die. It’s what we do in the time between that matters. That’s what the One Who Made Us thinks about when he decides what happens to us next.”
Bernie considered that. Nodded. “I think all of us are pretty much alike, whatever our tribe and whatever color we are,” she said.
“Everybody also has sense enough to stay away from places that are dangerous,” Mary said, staring at Bernie. “Like not poking at a coiled snake with your hand.”
Bernie nodded.
“Like not trying to go up where the Skeleton Man lives,” Mary added.
“Unless you really need to go. To see if you can save a man who will get locked up in prison if you don’t find something there,” Bernie said.
Mary took a very deep breath, exhaled it. “So you’ll go up that canyon anyway?”
“I have to.”
Mary pointed up the canyon. “There’s a narrow slot in the cliff wall to your left around that corner. Then on the right, farther up, you’ll find another slot, a little wider, and a trickle of water sometimes is flowing out of it. But it’s blocked with rocks where part of the cliff fell down, and around those rocks there’s the thick brush of the cat’s claw bushes. You can’t get through that without getting all bloody.”
Bernie nodded.
“Girl,” Mary said. “You should not go. But be very careful. If you need help, no one would ever find you.”
17
Joanna Craig sat on a shelf of some sort of smooth, pale pink stone about two thousand feet above what she guessed must be the Colorado River. It was putty-colored, not the clear blue she had always imagined, and the cliffs across it (and behind her, and everywhere else) soared upward to a dark blue sky, partly crowded with towering clouds—dark on the bottom. Joanna’s mood was also at its bottom at the moment, and like the clouds, dark blue.
Joanna was admitting to herself that she had screwed up. She was facing the fact that Billy Tuve, while brain-damaged, had outwitted her. He was gone. She was alone. Worse, due to her own foolishness, she seemed to be walking into a trap. She was leaning forward, elbows on knees, head down, resting everything but her mind, ticking off the mistakes she had been making and looking for solutions.
Maybe the first mistake had been even coming here. But that was no mistake. It was something she had to do. Something, call it her destiny, had caused that damned diamond to appear out of the distant past. Maybe her prayers had caused it. Too many years of praying for a way to get revenge. To see justice done. And finally the diamond had appeared, had been given to a childlike Hopi, had set off a chain of events, led to her lawyer, and had drawn her here, two thousand miles from home, to sit, exhausted, two thousand feet above a dirty river, not knowing what to do.