The Almanac of the Dead

BOOK ONE. PROPHECY THE INTERNATIONAL HOLISTIC HEALERS CONVENTION

ANGELITA LOOKED AROUND the ballroom of the Tucson resort carefully. She was alert for familiar faces from the Freedom School in Mexico City. If the Israelis or Chinese had sent spies to the International Holistic Healers Convention that meant they were on to the plan. She saw none of the familiar faces, but that did not mean there were no spies. She had left Wacah and El Feo in the mountains with the people. Hundreds of people kept coming to listen to Wacah talk about the ancient prophecies and explain the future. German and Dutch tourists had witnessed Wacah’s sessions with the people, and soon a German television crew had trekked up the muddy paths with their equipment to record the odd new mystical movement among Indians in Mexico, who were growing their hair long and painting their faces again in imitation of the twin brothers, who served the macaw spirits, and who promised the people the ancient prophecies were about to be fulfilled.

The video cameras had recorded a slow but steady trickle of people, mostly Indian women and their children, trudging along muddy, steep paths and rutted, muddy roads. The people came from all directions, and many claimed they had been summoned in dreams. Wacah had proclaimed all human beings were welcome to live in harmony together. People from tribes farther south, peasants without land, mestizos, the homeless from the cities and even a busload of Europeans, had come to hear the spirit macaws speak through Wacah. The faithful waited quietly by their sleep shelters and belongings. After the German television report, the cash had started flowing in from “Indian lovers” in Belgium and Germany. They had received a large amount of cash from a Swiss collector of pre-Columbian pottery in Basel. A people’s army as big as theirs would not need weapons. Their sheer numbers were weapons enough. A people’s army needed food. Wacah said the people would eat as long as they were with him. All they had to do was walk north with him.

After the cable news report there had been trouble. Authorities heard rumors that the native religion and prophecies were a cover, and the true business of Wacah and his brother was to stir up the Indians, who were always grumbling about stolen land. The Mexican federal police had sent truckloads of armed agents to search the mountains for secret caves suspected to contain caches of weapons the Indians had allegedly received from the Cubans. But even the four-wheel-drive trucks the police drove could not cross the landslides which the mountains had shaken down in previous weeks. Straggling in to the villages on foot, the police had found nothing; all the able-bodied had followed the twins. Those too sick or weak to travel said the mountain spirits were shaking the earth and would not stop until the white man’s cities were destroyed.

The cable television news crew had still been at Wacah’s camp when the federal police arrived; the calm of the people and the frenzy of the police had been televised all over the world. But the police had soon realized they were greatly outnumbered and they had withdrawn. Wacah’s invitation to address the world convention of holistic healers had arrived within days of the federal police raid. But the spirit macaws would not permit Wacah or El Feo to leave. They had to walk with the people. Wacah and El Feo must not ride in automobiles or helicopters. The spirits required that the people walk. Wacah and El Feo had sent Angelita to the healers convention to make apologies for them, and to invite all those gathered to join them. All were welcome. It was only necessary to walk with the people and let go of all the greed and the selfishness in one’s heart. One must be able to let go of a great many comforts and all things European; but the reward would be peace and harmony with all living things. All they had to do was return to Mother Earth. No more blasting, digging, or burning.

Wacah’s message to the holistic healers assembly was to be prepared for the changes, welcome the arrival of the people, and send any money they could. All money went for food; the people were protected by the spirits and needed no weapons. The changes might require another hundred years, until the Europeans had been outnumbered and the people retook the land peacefully. All that might be okay for Wacah and El Feo, but Angelita had plans of her own. What Wacah and El Feo didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt them. Angelita was in charge of “advance planning.” From villagers in Sonora, Angelita had heard about certain people and families living in Tucson who might wish to help.

Wacah, El Feo, and the people with them believed the spirit voices; if the people kept walking, if the people carried no weapons, then the old prophecies would come to pass, and all the dispossessed and the homeless would have land; the tribes of the Americas would retake the continents from pole to pole. They did not fear U.S. soldiers or bullets when they reached the border to the north because they did not believe the U.S. government would bomb its own border just to stop unarmed religious pilgrims. But Angelita wasn’t so sure. The U.S. Treasury might be nearly empty, and the United States might be caught in civil unrest and strikes — but the white men would spend their last dime to stop the people from the South. The U.S. government might have no money for the starving, but there was always government money for weapons and death. The Mexican Treasury had been bankrupt for months, but still the federal police got paid. The U.S. was no different. The people themselves might be finished with wars, but their generals and business tycoons were not.

El Feo and Wacah had to obey the spirit macaws. What they might personally think did not matter. Wacah believed the spirits would protect them, but personally El Feo had agreed with Angelita La Escapía, his comrade-in-arms: the U.S. government might not wait for the twin brothers and the people to reach the border. The unarmed people would most likely be shot down before they even reached the border, but still they must have faith that even the federal police and the soldiers would be caught up by the spirits and swept along by the thousands. How long could the soldiers and police keep pulling the triggers? They might fall by the hundreds but still the people would keep walking; not running or screaming or fighting, but always walking. Their faith lay in the spirits of the earth and the mountains that casually destroyed entire cities. Their faith lay in the spirits outraged by the Europeans who had burned alive the sacred macaws and parrots of Tenochtitlán; for these crimes and all the killing and destruction, now the Europeans would suffocate in their burning cities without rain or water any longer.

El Feo told Angelita she must do what she felt was best. What was coming could not be stopped; the people might join or not; the tribal people of North America could come to the aid of the twins and their followers or they could choose not to help. It made no difference because what was coming was relentless and inevitable; it might require five or ten years of great violence and conflict. It might require a hundred years of spirit voices and simple population growth, but the result would be the same: tribal people would retake the Americas; tribal people would retake ancestral land all over the world. This was what earth’s spirits wanted: her indigenous children who loved her and did not harm her.

The followers of the spirit macaws believed they must not shed blood or the destruction would continue to accompany them. But Wacah did say the pilgrims would be protected by natural forces set lose, forces raised by the spirits. Among these forces there would be human beings, warriors to defend the religious pilgrims. These warriors were already waiting far to the north. Wacah believed that one night the people would all dream the same dream, a dream sent by the spirits of the continent. The dream could not be sent until the people were ready to awaken with new hearts.

Angelita did not see how any spiritual change could take place overnight, especially not in the United States where the people of whatever color had become desperate in the collapse of the economy. Angelita did not believe in leaving the people or the twin brothers defenseless, even if the spirit macaw had said the end of the Europeans in the Americas was inevitable.

Angelita did not care if El Feo teased her or called her by her war name La Escapía, all the time. She wasn’t taking any chances. She had come to the healers convention in Tucson to make contacts with certain people, the people with the weapons she needed to protect the followers of the spirit macaws from air attacks. Those amazing shoulder-mounted missiles worked as simply as holiday skyrockets. Angelita had fired one herself and it hadn’t been much different from holding a Roman candle. The missiles were purely defensive measures, of course, against government helicopters and Wacah and El Feo need never know. Angelita heard from spirits too — only her spirits were furious and they told her to defend the people from attack.

WILSON WEASEL TAIL, POET LAWYER

NO COP TROUBLES, no shootings, nothing was going to keep Lecha away from the International Holistic Healers Convention in Tucson that week. Newspaper ads for the convention had headlined native healers from all the continents, including medicine men from Siberia and Africa, and an Eskimo woman who might be her old acquaintance Rose. Lecha also did not want to miss the spectacle of Wilson Weasel Tail, who was on the convention program.

Lecha had met Wilson Weasel Tail on a cable-television talk show originating in Atlanta years before. Weasel Tail had gone out of control on the talk show; from the pockets of his powder-blue polyester suit, Wilson had taken a handful of index cards covered with the illegible scribbles of his “statement” in poem form. Studio technicians behind glass doors and behind the cameras had scurried and gestured frantically as blue, yellow, and red lights blinked. One of the Indians on the guest panel had seized the microphone! The talk show hostess had opened and shut her pink mouth like a beached fish, but no words came out. No one and nothing stopped Weasel Tail. His mission had come to him by virtue of where he had been born. Weasel Tail was Lakota, raised on a small, poor ranch forty miles from the Wounded Knee massacre site. Weasel Tail had dropped out of his third year at UCLA Law School to devote himself to poetry. The people didn’t need more lawyers, the lawyers were the disease not the cure. The law served the rich. The people needed poetry; poetry would set the people free; poetry would speak to the dreams and to the spirits, and the people would understand what they must do.

Lecha had never forgot the success of Weasel Tail’s rampage that afternoon on cable television. As soon as the producers realized they had another harmless nut case reading off greasy note cards, they had signaled security to stand by. The talk show hostess and studio audience were given reassuring messages on studio monitors and teleprompters. Privately the assistant producers had probably congratulated themselves for their shrewd choice of a militant Sioux Indian lawyer-poet for the guest panel. A crazed Indian who commandeered the talk show was exactly the true-life drama the home viewers endlessly craved.

Weasel Tail had introduced his poetry by explaining he had abandoned law school because the deck was stacked, and the dice were loaded, in the white man’s law. The law crushed and cheated the poor whatever color they were. “All that is left is the power of poetry,” Weasel Tail had intoned, clearing his throat nervously.

Only a bastard government

Occupies stolen land!

Hey, you barbarian invaders!

How much longer?

You think colonialism lasts forever?

Res ipsa loquitur!

Cloud on title

Unmerchantable title

Doubtful title

Defective title

Unquiet title

Unclear title

Adverse title

Adverse possession

Wrongful possession

Unlawful possession!

Cable television was an enormous beast consuming twenty-four hours a day; but even live television had to be choreographed. An assistant producer guided two huge blond women in security uniforms through the tangle of cables in the direction of Weasel Tail. Weasel Tail saw they were women cops with their revolvers drawn, so he could not resist blurting out, “There will be no happiness to pursue; there will be no peace or justice until you settle up the debt, the money owed for the stolen land, and for all the stolen lives the U.S. empire rests on!” A whole squad of cops had swarmed over the television studio but the studio audience had refused to be evacuated from their $50 seats and miss the drama and any violence. Still, Weasel Tail knew he would have to hurry if he was going to read the full text of his indictment against the United States of America and all other colonials.

We say, “Adios, white man,” to

Five hundred years of

Criminals and pretenders

Illicit and unlawful governments,

Res accedent lumina rebus,

One thing throws light on another.

Worchester v. Georgia!

Ex parte Crow Dog!

Winters v. United States!

Williams v. Lee!

Lonewolf v. Hitchcock!

Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe v. Morton!

Village of Kake, Alaska v. Egan!

Gila River Apache Tribe v. Arizona!

breach of close

breach of conscience

breach of contract

breach of convenant

breach of decency

breach of duty

breach of faith

breach of fiduciary responsibility

breach of promise

breach of peace

breach of trust

breach of trust with fraudulent intent!

Breach of the Treaty of the Sacred Black Hills!

Breach of the Treaty of the Sacred Blue Lake!

Breach of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo!

Res judicata!

We are at war.

“You of the turpis causa! Unlawful, unelected regimes! We the indigenous people of the world demand justice!” Just as Wilson Weasel Tail was saying “justice” four large male cops had lifted him off the studio floor, two on each side, and had carried him away. Wilson Weasel Tail had disappeared after his arrest on cable television, and now, years later in Tucson, he had reappeared, but this time not as a lawyer-poet. This time Wilson Weasel Tail had billed himself as “a Lakota healer and visionary.” Lecha wanted to hear what Weasel Tail had to say this time; as far as Lecha knew, Weasel Tail had no training of any kind in healing, Lakota or otherwise. Weasel Tail had sworn to take back stolen tribal land; he was a political animal, not a healer. Lecha wondered what new angle, what new scheme, Wilson Weasel Tail had up his sleeve. She wondered what someone from the Northern Plains was doing so close to the Mexican border.

• • •

Lecha wandered through a maze of dingy, carpeted hotel corridors that were lined with long Formica-top tables where hundreds of “the new age of spiritualism” converts displayed their services and wares for sale. Lecha had always tried to avoid “spiritualists” in the past; old Yoeme had taught them ninety-five percent of spiritual practitioners were frauds. Lecha was looking for Zeta or the little Asian who worked for her. Zeta claimed Awa Gee had intercepted coded fax messages from radical eco-terrorists who were planning to appear at the convention. Lecha had not asked what interest Zeta or Awa Gee had in the eco-terrorists or why the eco-terrorists wanted to address a world convention of natural healers.

MEDICINE MAKERS — CURES OF ALL KINDS

LECHA COULD ONLY shake her head in wonder. She had never seen German root doctors or Celtic leech handlers before. But most of the new-age spiritualists were whites from the United States, many who claimed to have been trained by 110-year-old Huichol Indians. Lecha searched the schedule of conference events for familiar names. Scheduled in the main ballroom that morning had been the following lectures:

• • •

Tilly Shay, colonic irrigation therapist, editor of the Clean Colon Newsletter, discusses the link between chronic constipation in the Anglo-Saxon male and the propensity for violence

The cosmic Oneness of Red Antler and White Dove (adopted members of the Abanaki Tribe). “Feel the nothingness of being through the emanating light of the sacred crystal”

George Armstrong — Intuitive Training and Meditation Power Sites

Jill Purcee — Tibetan Chanting

Frank Calfer — Universal Experiential Shamanism

Lee Locke — Women’s Spirituality

Himalayan Bells — A Rare Concert at 2 P.M., Poolside, Donations

Soundscape, Rainbow Moods, Cosmic Connection, and the New Age: Where Next for Healing? 8 P.M., Tennis Courts

• • •

It would have been difficult to overlook Wilson Weasel Tail’s portion of the program schedule because it filled half the page. Lecha had to laugh; Weasel Tail really knew how to get people’s attention:

Stop time!

Have no fear of aging, illness, or death!

Secrets of ancient Native American healing

Hopi, Lakota, Yaqui, others

Kill or cripple enemies without detection

Summon up armies of warriors’ ghosts!

Lecha glanced at a clock: there was half an hour before Weasel Tail spoke. Lecha had felt her heart beat faster when she read the last line in Weasel Tail’s program about summoning armies of ghosts. Who had spiritual possession of the Americas? Not the Christians. Lecha remembered their mother had forbidden old Yoeme to slander Christianity in their presence, but of course that had not stopped Yoeme from telling Lecha and Zeta anything she wanted when their mother wasn’t around. According to old Yoeme, the Catholic Church had been finished, a dead thing, even before the Spanish ships had arrived in the Americas. Yoeme had delighted in describing tortures and executions performed in the name of Jesus during the Inquisition. In a crude catechism book Yoeme had even showed them pictures, wood-block prints of churchmen burning “heretics” and breaking Jews on the wheel. Yoeme said the mask had slipped at that time, and all over Europe, ordinary people had understood in their hearts the “Mother Church” was a cannibal monster. Since the Europeans had no other gods or beliefs left, they had to continue the Church rituals and worship; but they knew the truth.

Yoeme said even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal; thus the Europeans had arrived in the New World in precarious spiritual health. Christianity might work on other continents and with other human beings; Yoeme did not dispute those possibilities. But from the beginning in the Americas, the outsiders had sensed their Christianity was somehow inadequate in the face of the immensely powerful and splendid spirit beings who inhabited the vastness of the Americas. The Europeans had not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard. They had suffered from nightmares and frequently claimed to see devils and ghosts. Cortés’s men had feared the medicine and the procedures they had brought with them from Europe might lack power on New World soil; almost immediately, the wounded Europeans had begun to dress their wounds in the fat of slain Indians.

Lecha had not appreciated Yoeme’s diagnosis of Christianity until she had worked a while as a psychic. Lecha had seen people who claimed to be devout believers with rosary beads in their hands, yet they were terrified. Affluent, educated white people, upstanding Church members, sought out Lecha in secret. They all had come to her with a deep sense that something had been lost. They all had given the loss different names: the stock market crash, lost lottery tickets, worthless junk bonds or lost loved ones; but Lecha knew the loss was their connection with the earth. They all feared illness and physical change; since life led to death, consciousness terrified them, and they had sought to control death by becoming killers themselves.

Once the earth had been blasted open and brutally exploited, it was only logical the earth’s offspring, all the earth’s beings, would similarly be destroyed. The international convention had been called by natural and indigenous healers to discuss the earth’s crisis. As the prophecies had warned, the earth’s weather was in chaos; the rain clouds had disappeared while terrible winds and freezing had followed burning, dry summers. Old Yoeme had always said the earth would go on, the earth would outlast anything man did to it, including the atomic bomb. Yoeme used to laugh at the numbers, the thousands of years before the earth would be purified, but eventually even the radiation from a nuclear war would fade out. The earth would have its ups and downs; but humans had been raping and killing their own nestlings at such a rate Yoeme said humans might not survive. The humans would not be a great loss to the earth. The energy or “electricity” of a being’s spirit was not extinguished by death; it was set free from the flesh. Dust to dust or as a meal for pack rats, the energy of the spirit was never lost. Out of the dust grew the plants; the plants were consumed and became muscle and bone; and all the time, the energy had only been changing form, nothing had been lost or destroyed.

Lecha had to laugh to herself. The earth must truly be in crisis for both Zeta and Calabazas to be attending this convention. Calabazas must be getting old because he had been listening to his loco lieutenant, Mosca, who had wild stories about a barefooted Hopi with radical schemes, and new reports about the spirit macaws carried by the twin brothers on a sacred journey north accompanied by thousands of the faithful.

The hotel conference rooms and lobby areas were swarming with people of all ages and origins. Lecha could sense their urgency and desperation as they milled around ushers who collected ten dollars at the entrance of the ballroom where Wilson Weasel Tail was scheduled to speak. Lecha saw a hotel conference room full of women chanting over and over, “I am goddess, I am goddess.” In the next room freshly cut evergreen trees were tenderly arranged in a circle by white men wearing robes; it looked as if tree worship was making a comeback in northern Europe. In the corridors there were white-haired old hippies selling cheap crystals and little plastic bags of homegrown chamomile. There were white men from California in expensive new buckskins, beads, and feathers who had called themselves “Thunder-roll” and “Buffalo Horn.” African medicine men seven feet tall stood next to half-pint Incas and Mayas selling dry stalks of weeds wrapped in strips of dirty rag. Lecha watched for a while; she had watched the hands. The hands had gripped the cash feverishly as they waited for their turn; old Yoeme used to brag that she could make white people believe in anything and do anything she told them because the whites were so desperate. Money was changing hands rapidly; fifties and hundreds seemed to drop effortlessly from the white hands into the brown and the black hands. Some bought only the herbs or teas, but others had bought private consultations which cost hundreds of dollars.

Lecha had not been able to get close enough to the Incas or the Mayas to hear what they were saying. Two interpreters appeared to be attempting to translate for the crowd, but they had momentarily been involved in disagreement over the translation of a word. Lecha could not help noticing a short, wide Maya woman who seemed to be studying the crowd; suddenly the Maya woman had turned and looked Lecha right in the eye. Yoeme used to warn them about traveling medicine people, because witches and sorcerers often found it necessary to go to distant towns where their identities were not known. Lecha turned and saw a woman holding a walrus tusk, surrounded by spellbound listeners. Lecha’s heart beat faster and she felt a big smile on her face; she would have recognized that Eskimo anywhere!

Rose had talked to Lecha as if the crowd of spectators had not been there. The more Rose seemed to ignore the people, the more quiet and intense the crowd had become as they sought to hear each word between the two short, dark women. Rose had begun talking about the years since Lecha had abandoned the dogsled racer for warmer country and faster men.

Rose had learned to talk to her beloved little sisters and brothers who were ghosts in blue flames running along the river. Of course Rose did not speak to them the way she was talking to Lecha now. The blue flames burned with a loud blowtorch sound that would have made words impossible to understand even if her sweet ones could have talked. But no sounds came from their throats; when they opened their mouths, Rose saw the words written in flames — not even complete words, but Rose could understand everything they had to say.

Lecha had felt the crowd press closer, but at that instant, Rose stood up and caused the spectators to step back quickly and respectfully. Rose pointed at a big suitcase near Lecha’s feet. Rose lifted the lid; inside, all Lecha saw were white river pebbles and small gray river stones. Rose nodded at the rocks and then at the well-dressed young white people lining up obediently to buy whatever the Yupik Eskimo medicine woman had to sell. “Some of us are getting together later in my room,” Rose said, “after Weasel Tail and the Hopi speak. Room twelve twelve.”

THE RETURN OF THE BUFFALO

WILSON WEASEL TAIL strode up to the podium and whipped out two sheets of paper. Weasel Tail had abandoned his polyester leisure suits for army camouflage fatigues; he wore his hair in long braids carefully wrapped in red satin ribbon. Weasel Tail’s voice boomed throughout the main ballroom. Today he wanted to begin his lecture by reading two fragments of famous Native American documents. “First, I read to you from Pontiac’s manuscript:

“ ‘You cry the white man has stolen everything, killed all your animals and food. But where were you when the people first discussed the Europeans? Tell the truth. You forgot everything you were ever told. You forgot the stories with warnings. You took what was easy to swallow, what you never had to chew. You were like a baby suddenly helpless in the white man’s hands because the white man feeds your greed until it swells up your belly and chest to your head. You steal from your neighbors. You can’t be trusted!’ ”

Weasel Tail had paused dramatically and gazed at the audience before he continued:

“Treachery has turned back upon itself. Brother has betrayed brother. Step back from envy, from sorcery and poisoning. Reclaim these continents which belong to us.”

Weasel Tail paused, took a deep breath, and read the Paiute prophet Wovoka’s letter to President Grant:

You are hated

You are not wanted here

Go away,

Go back where you came from.

You white people are cursed!

The audience in the main ballroom had become completely still, as if in shock from Weasel Tail’s presentation. But Weasel Tail seemed not to notice and had immediately launched into his lecture.

“Today I wish to address the question as to whether the spirits of the ancestors in some way failed our people when the prophets called them to the Ghost Dance,” Weasel Tail began.

“Moody and other anthropologists alleged the Ghost Dance disappeared because the people became disillusioned when the ghost shirts did not stop bullets and the Europeans did not vanish overnight. But it was the Europeans, not the Native Americans, who had expected results overnight; the anthropologists, who feverishly sought magic objects to postpone their own deaths, had misunderstood the power of the ghost shirts. Bullets of lead belong to the everyday world; ghost shirts belong to the realm of spirits and dreams. The ghost shirts gave the dancers spiritual protection while the white men dreamed of shirts that repelled bullets because they feared death.”

Moody and the others had never understood the Ghost Dance was to reunite living people with the spirits of beloved ancestors lost in the five-hundred-year war. The longer Wilson Weasel Tail talked, the more animated and energized he became; Lecha could see he was about to launch into a poem:

We dance to remember,

we dance to remember all our beloved ones,

to remember how each passed

to the spirit world.

We dance because the dead love us,

they continue to speak to us,

they tell our hearts what must be done to survive.

We dance and we do not forget all the others before us,

the little children and the old women who fought and who died

resisting the invaders and destroyers of Mother Earth!

Spirits! Ancestors!

we have been counting the days, watching the signs.

You are with us every minute,

you whisper to us in our dreams,

you whisper in our waking moments.

You are more powerful than memory!

Weasel Tail paused to take a sip of water. Lecha was impressed with the silence Weasel Tail had created in the main ballroom. “Naturopaths,” holistic healers, herbalists, the guys with the orgone boxes and pyramids — all of them had locked up their cashboxes and closed their booths to listen to Weasel Tail talk. “The spirits are outraged! They demand justice! The spirits are furious! To all those humans too weak or too lazy to fight to protect Mother Earth, the spirits say, ‘Too bad you did not die fighting the destroyers of the earth because now we will kill you for being so weak, for wringing your hands and whimpering while the invaders committed outrages against the forests and the mountains.’ The spirits will harangue you, they will taunt you until you are forced to silence the voices with whiskey day after day. The spirits allow you no rest. The spirits say die fighting the invaders or die drunk.”

The enraged spirits haunted the dreams of society matrons in the suburbs of Houston and Chicago. The spirits had directed mothers from country club neighborhoods to pack the children in the car and drive off hundred-foot cliffs or into flooding rivers, leaving no note for the husbands. A message to the psychiatrist says only, “It is no use any longer.” They see no reason for their children or them to continue. The spirits whisper in the brains of loners, the crazed young white men with automatic rifles who slaughter crowds in shopping malls or school yards as casually as hunters shoot buffalo. All day the miner labors in tunnels underground, hacking out ore with a sharp steel hand-pick; he returns home to his wife and family each night. Then suddenly the miner slaughters his wife and children. The “authorities” call it “mental strain” because he has used his miner’s hand-pick to chop deep into the mother lode to reach their hearts and their brains.

Weasel Tail cleared his throat, then went on, “How many dead souls are we talking about? Computer projections place the populations of the Americas at more than seventy million when the Europeans arrived; one hundred years later, only ten million people had survived. Sixty million dead souls howl for justice in the Americas! They howl to retake the land as the black Africans have retaken their land!

“You think there is no hope for indigenous tribal people here to prevail against the violence and greed of the destroyers? But you forget the inestimable power of the earth and all the forces of the universe. You forget the colliding meteors. You forget the earth’s outrage and the trembling that will not stop. Overnight the wealth of nations will be reclaimed by the Earth. The trembling does not stop and the rain clouds no longer gather; the sun burns the earth until the plants and animals disappear and die.

“The truth is the Ghost Dance did not end with the murder of Big Foot and one hundred and forty-four Ghost Dance worshipers at Wounded Knee. The Ghost Dance has never ended, it has continued, and the people have never stopped dancing; they may call it by other names, but when they dance, their hearts are reunited with the spirits of beloved ancestors and the loved ones recently lost in the struggle. Throughout the Americas, from Chile to Canada, the people have never stopped dancing; as the living dance, they are joined again with all our ancestors before them, who cry out, who demand justice, and who call the people to take back the Americas!”

Weasel Tail threw back his shoulders and puffed out his chest; he was going to read poetry:

The spirit army is approaching,

The spirit army is approaching,

The whole world is moving onward,

The whole world is moving onward.

See! Everybody is standing watching.

See! Everybody is standing watching.

The whole world is coming,

A nation is coming, a nation is coming,

The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.

The father says so, the father says so.

Over the whole earth they are coming.

The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming,

The Crow has brought the message to the tribe,

The father says so, the father says so.

I’yche’! ana’nisa’na’—Uhi’yeye’heye’!

I’yche’! ana’nisa’na’—Uhi’yeye’heye’!

I’yehe’! ha’dawu’hana’—Eye’ae’yuhe’yu!

I’yehe’! ha’dawu’hana’—Eye’ae’yuhe’yu!

Ni’athu’-a-u’a’haka’nith’ii — Ahe’yuhe’yu!

[Translation]

I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!

I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!

I’yehe’! we have rendered them

desolate — Eye’ae’yuhe’yu!

I’yehe’! we have rendered them

desolate — Eye’ae’yuhe’yu!

The whites are crazy — Ahe’yuhe’yu!

Again, when Weasel Tail had finished, the ballroom was hushed; then the audience had given Weasel Tail a standing ovation.

“Have the spirits let us down? Listen to the prophecies! Next to thirty thousand years, five hundred years look like nothing. The buffalo are returning. They roam off federal land in Montana and Wyoming. Fences can’t hold them. Irrigation water for the Great Plains is disappearing, and so are the farmers, and their plows. Farmers’ children retreat to the cities. Year by year the range of the buffalo grows a mile or two larger.”

Weasel Tail had them eating out of his hand; he let his voice trail off dramatically to a stage whisper that had resonated throughout the ballroom speaker system. The audience leapt to its feet with a great ovation. Lecha had to hand it to Wilson Weasel Tail; he’d learned a thing or two. Still, Weasel Tail was a lawyer at heart; Lecha noted that he had made the invaders an offer that couldn’t be refused. Weasel Tail had said to the U.S. government, “Give back what you have stolen or else as a people you will continue your self-destruction.”

GREEN VENGEANCE — ECO-WARRIORS

THERE WERE FORTY-FIVE minutes of recess before the Barefoot Hopi made the keynote speech. Lecha had searched until she located Zeta, sitting with her computer expert, Awa Gee. Awa Gee had intercepted a coded fax message that the eco-warriors planned to make a surprise appearance at the healers convention. Zeta looked exhausted and nervous. Neither of them had had much sleep since the shooting. Ferro had not known his lover was an undercover cop. But then Lecha had not known Seese had kept a kilo of cocaine in her closet either. Secrets and coincidences involving cocaine didn’t surprise Lecha anymore; how odd that Zeta seemed so upset. Lecha whispered in Zeta’s ear, “What’s the matter?” Zeta had looked around, then leaned close and whispered, “I killed Greenlee yesterday.” Lecha nodded. So the time had come.

Ferro was the problem now; Ferro had loaded a junker car with six hundred pounds of dynamite to park outside the Prince Road police substation. Zeta had tried to persuade Ferro to hold off retaliation at least until the preparations she and Awa Gee had been making through the computer networks had been completed. They only needed time for Awa Gee to run Greenlee’s access numbers, but Ferro had refused to listen. Still Ferro couldn’t make a bomb that size overnight. Awa Gee’s guess had been it would take a week for a competent bomb maker to load the car properly and wire it correctly to the detonation device.

Just when Zeta was beginning to think the holistic medicine convention was a bust, a great commotion had developed near the steps to the ballroom stage and podium at the far end. Zeta and Lecha had both stood up, but they were too short; Awa Gee leaped up on his chair where he could see over all the heads. “There!” Awa Gee said. He excitedly patted Zeta on the shoulder. “I told you they’d come!”

The two eco-warriors wore ski masks and identical camouflage jumpsuits; they did not appear to be armed and Zeta saw no bodyguards around the podium. The eco-warriors had motioned for the audience to take its seats, and there on the stage with the eco-warriors Zeta saw the Barefoot Hopi impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit and tie and wearing Hopi moccasins instead of boots or shoes. The Hopi stood close to the eco-warriors, who were listening intently to the Hopi. The rumors about the alliance between the Hopi’s organization and the Green Vengeance group apparently were true. Zeta was in agreement with the tactic. Green Vengeance eco-warriors would make useful allies at least at the start. Green Vengeance had a great deal of wealth behind their eco-warrior campaigns.

A convention organizer had announced the Hopi was going to introduce a special unscheduled appearance of Green Vengeance, who came with an urgent message. The noise in the main ballroom and in the corridors outside had hushed as the Hopi approached the microphone; a buzz of whispers began as the Hopi had pressed a button on the podium, and a giant video screen lowered to the center of the stage.

“Friends, you have all heard state and federal authorities blame ‘structural failure’ for the collapse of Glen Canyon Dam. Now you are about to see videotape footage never before made public by our allies in the struggle, Green Vengeance, eco-warriors in the defense of the earth!”

The ballroom’s overhead lights had dimmed, and a jerky sequence, videotaped from a moving vehicle, filled the giant screen. The sound track and any voices on the videotape had been deliberately removed. The brilliant burnt reds and oranges of the sandstone formations and the dark green juniper bushes flashing past appeared to be Utah or northern Arizona. Next came interiors of motel rooms with figures in ski masks and camouflage clothing standing by motel beds stacked with assault rifles and clips of ammunition. The camera had avoided the masked faces and focused instead on the hands carefully arranging black boxes in nests of foam rubber; the foam-rubber bundles were packed carefully inside nylon backpacks. A close-up of a black box before its lid was closed showed a nine-volt battery and wires. On the worn gold motel bedspread, the hands had strung the six backpacks together with bright blue wire. Awa Gee leaned over and whispered in Zeta’s ear, “I can’t wait to see this!”

Next, the screen had been filled with highway signs and U.S. park service signs; in the background was the huge concrete mass that had trapped the Colorado River and had created Lake Powell.

GLEN CANYON DAM; the sign had filled the entire screen. Next the concrete bulwark of the dam came into focus; tiny figures dangled off ropes down the side of the dam. At first none of the park service employees or bystanders and tourists appear to notice. Then the camera had zoomed in for close-ups of each of the six eco-warriors, each with a backpack loaded with explosives in the motel room. Zeta had been thinking the six resembled spiders on a vast concrete wall when suddenly the giant video screen itself appeared to crack and shatter in slow motion, and the six spiderlike figures had disappeared in a white flash of smoke and dust. The entire top half of the dam structure had folded over, collapsing behind a giant wall of reddish water. Zeta heard gasps from the audience.

“A massive structural failure due to fault asymmetries and earth tremors,” the eco-warrior said in mocking tones amid the excited voices and cheers. Zeta looked around; the audience was on its feet. “Your government lies to you because it fears you. They don’t want you to know that six eco-warriors gave their lives to free the mighty Colorado!” The audience cheered. The eco-warrior handed the microphone to his partner. Zeta glanced at Awa Gee, who sat motionless, spellbound by what he was seeing and hearing.

The eco-warrior who spoke next was a woman. She spoke calmly about the choice of when and how one was going to die. She continued calmly, relating the states of awareness she had passed through; for a time, she said, she had not wanted to resort to the destruction of property or the loss of human lives, but after their beloved leader had been murdered by FBI agents, her eyes had been opened. This was war. The new enemies, she said, were the space station and biosphere tycoons who were rapidly depleting rare species of plants, birds, and animals so the richest people on earth could bail out of the pollution and revolutions and retreat to orbiting paradise islands of glass and steel. What few species and what little pure water and pure air still remained on earth would be harvested for these space colonies. Lazily orbiting in the glass and steel cocoons of these elaborate “biospheres,” the rich need not fear the rabble while they enjoyed their “natural settings” complete with freshwater pools and jungles filled with rare parrots and orchids. The artificial biospheres were nothing more than orbiting penthouses for the rich. Three thousand eight hundred species of flora and fauna are required for each artificial biosphere to attain self-sufficiency. Eco-warriors had infiltrated the artificial biosphere projects at all levels; plans had already been made for the final abandonment of earth. At the end, the last of the clean water and the uncontaminated soil, the last healthy animals and plants, would be removed from earth to the orbiting biospheres to “protect” them from the pollution on earth.

The eco-warrior paused to clear her throat. People in the audience raised their hands frantically to ask questions, but she ignored them. “All orbiting telescopes and space stations will be turned back on the earth to monitor the human masses for as long as they survive. The orbiting biospheres will require fresh air and fresh water supplies from time to time; giant flexible tubes will drop down from the sky to suck water and air from the earth. If the people on earth attempt to destroy or sabotage the giant feeding tubes, lasers from satellites and space stations will destroy the rebels and rioters.” The eco-warrior paused, then shouted, “This is war! We are not afraid to die to save the earth!”

“Hard act to follow,” Lecha had whispered to Zeta as the eco-warriors left the stage.

Zeta had read the messages Awa Gee had intercepted from the eco-warriors. The eco-warriors had lost their beloved leader to a car bomb. They were determined to give him glory. They were determined to turn out the lights on the United States one night. They were determined to destroy all interstate high-voltage transmission lines, power generating plants, and hydroelectric dams across the United States simultaneously. Their scheme did not seem quite so improbable now that Zeta had seen the videotape. The six kamikaze eco-warriors disappearing into the collapsing wall of Glen Canyon Dam was a stunning sight, Zeta agreed. No wonder the U.S. government and Arizona state authorities had blamed the destruction of Glen Canyon Dam on “structural failure.” Naturally the authorities had feared copycat bombings of hydroelectric dams.

Awa Gee knew from the intercepted messages the government had begun sweeping arrests of all persons affiliated with environmental action groups; even people with the Audubon Society and the U.S. Forest Service employees had been accused of being “secret eco-warriors.” Awa Gee was always reminded of South Korea when he heard about mass arrests by police. The United States had been different when Awa Gee had first arrived from Seoul by way of Sonora. Awa Gee remembered that back then the world economy had still been riding on the big wave; to Americans, Awa Gee had looked Japanese. Back then, all the Americans had been able to talk about were Japanese cars this and Japanese cars that. Love-hate between Japan and the United States, two countries Awa Gee had despised for their racism and imperialism. Zeta had thought Awa Gee could not hope to get much help from the eco-warriors now that the government had begun to round up all of them for “protective custody.” But Awa Gee thought about the situation differently; the police had only caught the law-abiding eco-warriors with families and jobs. Awa Gee didn’t think people with jobs and families were worth much as subversives anyway.

Awa Gee had high hopes for these Green Vengeance eco-warriors. Green Vengeance was hard-core; one of the eco-warriors who had died blowing up Glen Canyon Dam had been a gay rights activist ill with AIDS. No wonder government authorities had denied all reports of sabotage or loss of human life at Glen Canyon Dam’s collapse. Awa Gee had intercepted the gay eco-warrior’s last message to his family, colleagues, and friends. Awa Gee had kept the computer readout of the eco-warrior’s message although he knew it was risky to keep such evidence.

Dear lovers, brothers, mothers, and sisters!

Go out in glory!

Go out with dignity!

Go out while you’re still feeling good and looking good!

Avenge gay genocide by the U.S. government!

Die to save the earth.

Mold long underwear out of plastic explosives and stroll past the U.S. Supreme Court building while the justices are hearing arguments. Bolt in the exit door and flick the switch! Turn out the lights on the High Court of the police state!

Awa Gee believed very soon these last remaining eco-warriors would push forward with their plot to turn off the lights. From messages he had intercepted he had concluded that a good many eco-warriors had gone underground at the time their leader was assassinated. Awa Gee decided he would help the eco-warriors turn out the lights, although they might never even know Awa Gee’s contribution.

The regional power suppliers had emergency generating plants and used sophisticated computer systems to deal with brownouts, storms, or other electric power failures by automatically rerouting power reserve supplies to black-out areas and by switching on emergency power-generating systems. But Awa Gee had already developed a protovirus to subvert all emergency switching programs in the computers of regional power-relay stations. Awa Gee’s virus would activate only during extreme voltage fluctuations such as might occur after the coordinated sabotage of key hydroelectric dams and interstate high-voltage lines across the United States. To destroy every last generator and high-voltage line would be doing the people a favor; alternating electrical current caused brain cancer and genetic mutations. Solar batteries were the wave of the future. The plan was a long shot; Awa Gee was counting on the “cost cutting” of the giant power companies to curtail or cancel auxiliary emergency systems. But if the plan worked, if the lights went out all over all at once, then the United States would never be the same again.

DESTINY’S PATH

MOSCA HAD INSISTED it was safe for him to drive Calabazas and Root to the holistic healers convention to hear the Barefoot Hopi. Mosca announced he wasn’t hiding or leaving town; he had some other tricks yet to play; Mosca was just getting started. The Tucson police believed Mosca had fled to Mexico; the Tucson police had ruffled some feathers and they did not want to think about the little Mexican Indian. Mosca enjoyed the stupidity of the Tucson police. To them he was a nothing, a coincidence, a sneak thief accidentally in the right place at the right time to snatch the briefcase.

Mosca could feel his life and his fate shifting inside him; the voice in his shoulder gave good advice and strategy. Mosca wasn’t the least worried. Something was happening, and the earth would never be the same again. So far, thanks to his genius, Mosca had the white men in Tucson fighting one another — all part of the Hopi’s strategy, all part of the coordinated effort. Mosca couldn’t stop himself; on the drive to the convention he had to brag to Calabazas and Root: the Barefoot Hopi had given Mosca a sneak preview of his keynote speech. One strategy the Hopi had emphasized had been the “international coordinated effort.” The Hopi had traveled to Africa and Asia; he had been around the world to meet with indigenous tribal people. The strategy was to ensure when the time came, the United States would get no aid from foreign allies to crush the uprisings in the United States. The Hopi believed the Europeans would be too concerned about their own civil unrest and the mass human migrations north from Africa, to care what happened inside the U.S.

In his lectures the Barefoot Hopi had emphasized the similarity between the tribal people of Africa and the tribal people of the Americas. Many in his audiences had been shocked that the Hopi dare refer, even indirectly, to the South African holocaust in which thousands of whites and Africans had died after white South Africa had refused to give back the land. The Hopi said black Africans talked about the price they had paid in blood to take back the land; the spirits had been furious and had demanded blood in retribution for the sacrileges the people had allowed against the spirits. Their lands had been reconsecrated to Ogoun and Damballah with European as well as African blood. The Hopi had got promises from a dozen African nations; if the natives of the Americas rose up, the African nations would not remain neutral. The Hopi’s plan depended upon the help of “foreign allies” in the Persian Gulf region also.

As they pulled into the hotel parking lot, Mosca had announced he was quitting Calabazas to work with the Hopi. Calabazas had looked relieved. Root knew Calabazas hated to fire anyone; Calabazas had hired Mosca in the first place because no one else in Tucson wanted the risk. Root thought Calabazas looked tired and older since Mosca had shot the British poet. There had also been the matter of Sarita and Liria with their secret meetings and mysterious two-day treks into the desert, and the vanloads of smuggled Guatemalan refugees driven by nuns and priests. All that worry might make even a young man old before his time, but Calabazas was no colt.

As they walked from the hotel parking lot, Mosca had asked Root to come with him and the Hopi. “Go where? Do what?” Root did not believe any of that spiritual horseshit. Mosca looked a little hurt at Root’s snippy reply. “Look, man, we use handicapped people in our army. You’re good enough for us — aren’t we good enough for you?” Mosca turned to Calabazas and ignored Root. I talked to the Hopi. The way we used to move dope — now we move supplies to the people across the border.” Calabazas laughed and shook his head. “Your Barefoot Hopi is crazy. The government will stop him.” Mosca began nodding his head excitedly. “But don’t you see? They can’t stop the Hopi because he is crazy. But a crazy man can get things done. Especially a crazy man like the Hopi.”

Calabazas had never seen anything like the natural healing convention; hundreds of people had filled the ballroom, and all or nearly all of them were young and white. Calabazas had been surprised at the prices these so-called native healers demanded and received from white people who looked too intelligent to believe in nonsense. But of course what could be expected of people who thought they could buy a cure in a tablet? Calabazas looked over the booths in the area; he saw slow brown hands receive cash from anxious white hands. “You know, all this time we were in the wrong business,” Calabazas had finally said, nodding in the direction of a display of rock crystals and wind chimes for a hundred dollars. Root had nodded. He was beginning to see what the Hopi had in mind; holistic medicine was a worldwide phenomenon that had generated billions of dollars. The Hopi planned to make thousands of white “converts” to aid and protect the twin brothers and their followers.

Angelita had never seen anything like it, not even at the May Day rallies they had celebrated at the Freedom School in Mexico City. She was relieved she did not actually have to address the convention but only had to say a few words, to relay the greetings from the twin brothers and their followers bound on destiny’s path north. Angelita felt the undercurrent of excitement in the audience. Were the twins right? Was the time ripe? But then came the Barefoot Hopi.

The audience settled into its seats as the Barefoot Hopi approached the podium. He was looking closely at the audience, but the expression on the Hopi’s face was serene. “The brave liberators of the Colorado River left a farewell message,” the Barefoot Hopi said. “Here’s what they wrote: ‘Rejoice! Mountains and valleys! The mighty river runs free once more! Rejoice! We are no longer solitary beings alone and cut off. Now we are one with the earth, our mother; we are at one with the river. Now we have returned to our source, the energy of the universe. Rejoice!’ ”

When the Hopi had finished reading, there was silence in the ballroom. The Hopi continued, “We know death awaits all living beings as part of a single continuing process. The brave eco-warriors focused all the energy of their beings to set free the river, and so they merged instantly in the explosion of water and concrete and sandstone. They are no longer solitary human souls; they are part of a single configuration of energy. Their spirits are close with us now as we all gather here. They love us and watch over us with our beloved ancestors.”

Lecha looked around at the audience; the Hopi’s performance had been flawless. Mosca was right; the Hopi seemed to know exactly what the audience had wanted to hear. Lecha was fascinated with the Barefoot Hopi; he was as tall as he was round. He weighed over three hundred pounds easily, but his flesh was solid, and he moved with the energy and odd grace of a bear. Lecha guessed his age to be somewhere around forty; her information had come from Calabazas, who had heard it from Mosca. The Hopi had spent more than a year with various tribal groups all across Africa. Mosca claimed the Hopi had been meeting with African leaders to get them to send money when the people began the final struggle to retake ancestral lands in the Americas.

The Hopi had paused to look the audience in the eyes, row by row. He cleared his throat and began, “The eco-warriors have been accused of terrorism in the cause of saving Mother Earth. So I want to talk a little about terrorism first. Poisoning our water with radioactive wastes, poisoning our air with military weapons’ wastes—those are acts of terrorism! Acts of terrorism committed by governments against their citizens all over the world. Capital punishment is terrorism practiced by the government against its citizens. United States of America, what has happened to you? What have you done to the Bill of Rights? All along we Native Americans tried to warn the rest of you; if the U.S. government kills us and robs us, what makes the rest of you think the U.S. government won’t rob and kill you too? Look around you. Police roadblocks. Police searches without warrants. Politicians and their banker pals empty the U.S. Treasury while police lock up the homeless and poor who beg for food. The U.S. government dares to outlaw the Native American Church religion. Butt out of our religion!” the Hopi’s voice boomed out. “You spiritual bankrupts! You breeders of child molesters, rapists, and mass murderers! We are increasing quietly despite your bullets and germ warfare. You destroyers can’t figure out why you haven’t wiped us out in five hundred years of blasting, burning, and slaughter. You destroyers can’t figure out what is going wrong for you. You don’t know how much the spirits of these continents despise you, how the earth hates you; now your cities burn from the sun, and millions abandon cities in the Southwest for lack of water. This is nothing! This is only the beginning!”

The people in the audience rose to their feet simultaneously. Lecha felt the hair on her neck stand up; the people had been mesmerized by the Hopi’s voice. Affluent young whites, fearful of a poisoned planet, men and women both, had fallen in love with the strong, resonant voice which promised that all human beings belonged to the earth forever. He promised a force was gathering that would counter the destruction of earth. Lecha could tell the Hopi knew when he had a winner; she imagined the Hopi had been able to raise a great deal of money in Europe and in Asia, because even in a dirt-water town that hated brown people as Tucson did, the Barefoot Hopi already had people fumbling for their checkbooks, and he was only getting warmed up.

“All the riches ripped from the heart of the earth will be reclaimed by the oceans and mountains. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of enormous magnitude will devastate the accumulated wealth of the Pacific Rim. Entire coastal peninsulas will disappear under the sea; hundreds of thousands will die. The west coast of the Americas will be swept clean from Alaska to Chile in tidal waves and landslides. Drought and wildfire will rage across Europe to Asia. Only Africa will be spared because the anger of the spirits has already been appeased by the rivers of blood in the great war that freed South Africa.”

Zeta had turned to Lecha to nod her approval of the Hopi; then Awa Gee tapped Zeta’s shoulder and began whispering excitedly in Zeta’s ear. Lecha could see that Mosca had jumped up from his chair he was so excited. Even Calabazas had sat up in his chair, wide-awake. Lecha could see the Hopi gather himself for his finale; he spread his short legs and held the podium with both hands.

“Now on the eve of the final destruction of mankind, now when all seems hopeless and the greed of the destroyers unstoppable, now in our time of greatest peril, the twin brothers who have always helped our people, the twin brothers are on their way!”

Lecha heard gasps all around her; the room began to buzz with excitement. The Hopi continued in an even voice, “In Africa and in the Americas too, the giant snakes, Damballah and Quetzalcoatl, have returned to the people. I have seen the snakes with my own eyes; they speak to the people of Africa, and they speak to the people of the Americas; they speak through dreams. The snakes say this: From out of the south the people are coming, like a great river flowing restless with the spirits of the dead who have been reborn again and again all over Africa and the Americas, reborn each generation more fierce and more numerous. Millions will move instinctively; unarmed and unguarded, they begin walking steadily north, following the twin brothers.”

The Hopi paused and motioned at the big Maya Indian woman Lecha had noticed earlier. “We are privileged to have with us today Angelita La Escapía, with a message from the twin brothers.”

As soon as the big Mayan woman reached the podium and looked out at the audience, Lecha had seen she was no ordinary envoy; in fact, Lecha saw the woman was at least as powerful as the twin brothers she claimed to serve. The Maya woman spoke calmly and clearly in Spanish, but the conference had provided no interpreter. Lecha wondered how many in the audience understood her. The message was quite simple. There was nothing to fear or to worry about. People should go about their daily routines. Because already the great shift of human populations on the continents was under way, and there was nothing human beings could do to stop it. Conflicts and collisions were inevitable, but it was best to start from scratch anyway. Nothing European in the Americas had worked very well anyway except destruction. All the people needed to remember was the twin brothers and the people from the south were coming to stop the destroyers. Converts were always welcome; Mother Earth embraced the souls of all who loved her. No fences or walls, would stop them; guns and bombs would not stop them. They had no fear of death; they were comfortable with their ancestors’ spirits. They would come by the millions.

MEETING IN ROOM 1212

LECHA DIDN’T CARE if she was the last one to Room 1212. She had to telephone to see how things were at the ranch. After the Barefoot Hopi’s speech, Zeta had told Lecha about Greenlee and his last joke; Lecha had felt her entire body tingle; even her scalp had prickled. Everyone had gone crazy: Mosca at Yaqui Easter, Seese at the Stage Coach, and now Zeta killing the gun dealer. Lecha spoke with Sterling and told him to tell Seese to start packing. The craziest one had been Ferro since the death of his lover. Ferro blamed the police, but he had also blamed Lecha for bringing Seese. Ferro refused to hear the truth: Jamey had been living on borrowed time, like any crooked undercover cop. No matter how many times Lecha or even Zeta had tried to talk to Ferro, to reason with him, he had exploded into a rage, screaming like a wild animal, not a human. Ferro had declared war on the Tucson police, and Zeta said no one would stop Ferro unless they killed him. Worse yet, Zeta had not been able to prevent Ferro from recruiting Awa Gee. Awa Gee refused to listen to Zeta after he learned Ferro wanted him to build car bombs. Awa Gee was even crazier than Ferro was, Zeta said. Awa Gee had babbled that the Tucson police were only a warm-up, only the beginning.

Year by year, Zeta had watched Tucson change. The years the snowfalls had fallen short in the Colorado Rocky Mountains had left the Southwest without water. Hundreds of fancy foothills houses in Tucson stood vacant. Block after block of small businesses in Tucson had closed or gone bankrupt. Affluent young professionals had been transferred out of Arizona or recalled to the safety of Phoenix, one hundred miles farther from the Mexican border.

The air force base in Tucson had been reopened, and military personnel were pouring into Tucson but without families. It was clear what the high command felt about the security of the U.S. border. Zeta remembered the Vietnam War and the names of the Vietnamese cities as they had fallen and the U.S.-backed forces had been forced back until at last they had been driven out of Saigon.

Already in Tucson and southern Arizona military and government vehicles patrolled the streets, ostensibly to seize illegal immigrants; but now they stopped everyone with brown skin and demanded identification. Any white people in Tucson who were not riding in health-spa limousines with bodyguards were also routinely stopped and questioned by Tucson police, who “advised” the homeless to leave town.

There were rumors the U.S. wasn’t worried about the civil war in Mexico because the U.S. had CIA all the way to the top. Rumor had it that the Arizona governor had requested military aid not against Mexicans, but to control the thousands of homeless and destitute Americans fleeing northern winters. It did Zeta’s heart good to see the white men so nervous. She had to laugh when Mosca told her about the squads of homeless veterans and the homeless families occupying vacant condominiums in the foothills.

When Lecha knocked on the door of Room 1212, she could hear a voice speaking English with a British accent. When Rose had opened the door, Lecha saw a blue-black African in bright yellow and red robes addressing the others seated around the room. Mosca had been sitting next to a black man in army fatigues wearing a green beret; Lecha saw by Mosca’s maniacal grin the African and the black man were probably Mosca’s guests. Zeta and Calabazas were on the sofa with the Maya woman sitting between them. Wilson Weasel Tail and the Hopi were sitting on the floor with their backs against the bed. Weasel Tail was tying knots in the shag carpet, but the Hopi was taking notes while the African talked. Rose had motioned for Lecha to sit down on the bed.

All night long in Room 1212 they had discussed a network of tribal coalitions dedicated to the retaking of ancestral lands by indigenous people. Europeans were welcome to convert, or they might choose to return to the lands of their forebears to be close to Europe’s old ghosts. The sun was just rising over the mountains as the meeting in Room 1212 ended. Only Calabazas looked tired, and that had been because he was skeptical. When the Hopi talked about a national or even multinational prison uprising coordinated with the activities of say the eco-warriors dynamiting power plants and high-voltage lines, Calabazas had shook his head. Calabazas feared the jail and prison uprising riots were likely to deteriorate into race riots with the whites and Hispanics and others against the blacks. The Hopi had listened to Calabazas’s doubts respectfully; the Hopi smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Of course it would not be an easy task because the prisons were designed to keep inmates at war with each other. The Hopi knew he had his work cut out for him, but the Hopi also had a growing number of disciples inside and outside jails and prisons all over the United States. At that point, Clinton spoke up; Clinton said he was skeptical too, but so far he had seen homeless white men and homeless black men work together for a common cause — survival — just as black men and white men had fought side by side in Vietnam.

Calabazas had been stubborn. They were crazy, he said; they had seen too many Hollywood movies. The minute there were prison riots and unrest in the cities the battle lines would fall along skin color. No, the Hopi had explained patiently, if anything happened, it would be more like the haves, whatever colors they were, killing the have-nots. Anyway, the African Americans would not be the focus of attention; the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans making their way north with the twin brothers would be. Calabazas had been skeptical of the Mexican Indian woman and her account of the spirit messages the twins claimed they got from the big blue macaws the people carried with them. But the Hopi said he believed it was necessary for the hundreds of thousands of Indians to appear from the South to prevent whites from turning on blacks in the United States. Almost immediately whites would look to blacks and Hispanics as buffers or shields, and mediators between themselves and the great migration of Native Americans. Calabazas was skeptical that the millions of U.S. citizens who called themselves Christians would even tolerate, much less support, a Native American religious movement to reclaim the Americas from the destroyers. Still, the heat waves and droughts had already driven thousands north to cooler temperatures. All the big shade trees in Tucson had died as the water table plunged precipitously.

Until the twin brothers and the people had reached the border, the Hopi advised they should all make preparations and then simply wait. As Wilson Weasel Tail’s Ghost Dance song had stated, white people seemed to be having nervous breakdowns and psychotic episodes in record numbers. The Hopi said perhaps the whites could sense the changes that were approaching. What they had done to others was coming back on them; the tables had turned; now the colonizers were being colonized.

Calabazas said he didn’t believe in miracle conversions of Christians or Jews or Moslems back to tribal religions, and the Hopi winked and said, “But you do believe in mass hysteria? The collective need to see drops of real blood on Church statues during Lent? You know something about mass hypnosis and subliminal messages.” The Hopi smiled. “Anyway, no one says it will happen right away tomorrow. No one says anything like that. Native American people have been on these continents thirty thousand years, and the Europeans have been here for five hundred.”

The Hopi had talked about peaceful and gradual changes as if he believed voting would become the solution as soon as millions more Indians became U.S. citizens. Lecha watched the expression on Angelita’s face as the Hopi had outlined the possibilities for peaceful changes. Each time the Hopi said “nonviolent free elections,” Angelita had grimaced. Lecha could see Angelita suspected the truth: there would be no elections; great struggles were about to sweep all through the Americas as far north as Alaska and Canada. Angelita La Escapía was one tough she-dog; Lecha could see that in the Mayan’s barrel figure and steely, dark eyes. Angelita only pretended to agree with the twin brothers and their followers, unarmed and humble as they walked northward to fulfill an ancient prophecy. Lecha had seen the twin brothers on satellite TV. They looked to be hardly more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, and easy to manipulate by the likes of Angelita. Lecha wasn’t fooled; it was that big Mayan woman who was behind the twin brothers. Lecha had watched Angelita whisper to Zeta, and Zeta had made a lengthy reply. Later when Lecha asked her, Zeta admitted Angelita had asked about buying a few army surplus Stinger missiles. Lecha thought Angelita was right. The Hopi and the twin brothers might sincerely believe their recovery of the Americas could take place without bloodshed, but Lecha had her doubts especially since the hideous slaughter that had occurred in South Africa. These American continents were already soaked with Native American and African blood; violence begat violence, but if the destroyers were not stopped, the human race was finished.

Calabazas took the words of the Hopi to heart. He believed the change was in motion and was a process that had never stopped; it would all continue with or without him. Calabazas could sit back and do nothing if he wanted to and still the changes were inevitable. All the same, Calabazas felt uneasy. He had trusted the men who had been in Room 1212, but he wasn’t sure about the women, especially not the Eskimo or the Maya woman. Those two looked like troublemakers; they looked like killers if a man didn’t cooperate. The Eskimo woman said “quality, rather than quantity,” and she had been talking about the Indigenous People’s Army of the North. They might be few, but they were fierce and well armed. The Army of the North would sweep down behind the U.S. forces along the Mexican border. Before Weasel Tail knew it, his Lakota armies had been absorbed into the Army of the North. Weasel Tail was a smart man because he didn’t object. No objections or resistance would stop the Maya woman or the other one, the Eskimo. Fire. All the Eskimo woman had talked about was fire. Forests and tundra burning. The earth burning. La Escapía — why, just her name — she was no better. She had talked about the fire macaw who brings destruction.

Wilson Weasel Tail and the Hopi could talk all they wanted about peaceful revolutions, but Calabazas had seen the Maya La Escapía talking to Zeta, and he knew what that meant. For years Zeta had been buying and stockpiling weapons in the old mine shafts. Calabazas was content to retire from smuggling, politics — everything; he had put in his time and had earned a rest in the shade with his little mule and burros. Calabazas would sit back and let the others make the decisions and give the orders, the way he always had, since he was a child with the old-time people in the Yaqui mountain strongholds. They had told him what must be done and he had done it. Since he was an old man now, maybe the women would give him something easy to do, something that wasn’t too strenuous or too dangerous — maybe answering the phone or mailing letters.

RISE UP!

THE TUCSON POLICE had used SWAT teams to raid the homeless camps. They had used armored vehicles to smash down the cardboard and tin lean-tos and tents pitched under mesquite trees. The SWAT team had hit the camp with the women and children too, and the screaming children had been taken from their mothers to “protective custody” in State foster homes. But at the war veterans’ camp, the SWAT team had stopped as if by hypnosis. They had seemed paralyzed by the sight of the homeless war veterans standing at attention in their raggedy army-surplus uniforms without any weapons. Clinton would never forget that moment. Rambo-Roy had addressed the men: “You didn’t fight and almost die for the United States to end up like this. You didn’t crawl on your belly through bullets, blood, and poison snakes in foreign countries just to starve and sleep in a ditch when you got back home!”

Other homeless men and women had witnessed the face-off between the SWAT team and the veterans; in their faces Clinton thought he had detected a flicker of recognition. Clinton had listened to the Barefoot Hopi, and he had talked day and night with the African. Both had preached patience, the patience of the old tribal people who had been humble enough not to expect change in one human lifetime, or even five lifetimes. Maybe not tomorrow or next week, but someday Clinton knew, the other homeless people would remember the defiance of the homeless vets; the dumpy, pale women and their skinny, pale men would remember the absolute surge of pride and power the veterans’ defiance had given them. Like little seeds, the feelings would grow, and the police violence that had rained down on the people would only nurture the growing bitterness.

Clinton had been headed out anyway when the police came looking for him and Rambo-Roy. Naturally the Tucson police had got the details confused and had arrested the first white man and black man they had located wearing camouflage clothing. Clinton had not been sure if it was right for him and Rambo-Roy to let two other “brothers” take the rap for Trigg’s murder. The police claimed they had genetic evidence from the crime scene that linked the two men in police custody to the killing. Clinton and Rambo-Roy both knew any genetic evidence found at the crime scene belonged to them, not the men in police custody. So actually the Tucson police had found no evidence at the scene, but after they had arrested the two men, the police detectives had taken hair and skin-cell samples from the men to put in the evidence bags with other material collected at the murder scene. Rambo said once the police had planted your hair or skin cells at the scene of the crime, you were finished. There was nothing that could be done. So even if Clinton had turned himself in, it wouldn’t be his hair or his skin cells in that police evidence bag. Rambo-Roy said the brothers were doing their part by taking the rap for them. Clinton had to get back to the big cities. He had to try to reach the black war vets before they got misled by fanatics or extremists screaming “Black only! Africa only!” because Clinton had realized the truth: millions of black Indians were scattered throughout the Americas. Africans in the Americas had always been “home” because “home” is where the ancestor spirits are. From the gentle giants, Damballah and Quetzalcoatl, to the Maize Mother, and the Twin Brothers and Old Woman Spider, Africa and the Americas had been possessed.

Clinton was heading for Haiti after he visited some of his black Indian cousins in New York City. Black Indians living in Manhattan had long been supplying aid and arms to the Mohawk nations at war with Canada and the United States. The African had been discreet about the modest financial aid certain African nations had sent to the Mohawks. The African had called the aid a “symbolic gesture” of the solidarity between the African tribal people and the Native American tribal people. Now that black Africans had finally recovered their ancestral land the spirits would not allow the Africans to turn their backs on the tribes of the Americas as they fought to take back their land.

Clinton wasn’t going to waste time with the whiners and complainers who had made wine or dope their religion, or the Jesus junkies, who had made religion their drug. Talking to Weasel Tail and the Barefoot Hopi had given Clinton so many more ideas than he and Rambo-Roy had ever got by themselves. Rambo-Roy and he had been right about the homeless and their plan to organize the homeless poor around an army of homeless war vets. On the Indian reservations the surviving war vets were at the core of the preparations. As Weasel Tail and the Hopi said, they might kill and cripple thousands, or even millions, of us, but those who did survive would indeed become a power to be reckoned with. All around them, all their lives they had witnessed their people’s suffering and genocide; it only took a few, the merest handful of such people, to lay the groundwork for the changes.

Ignorance of the people’s history had been the white man’s best weapon. Clinton had continued to fill his notebook with fragments of the history the people had been deprived of for so long. The Hopi had given Clinton a book that the Hopi said might shine some more light on black Indians. Clinton had written in bold letters at the top of the notebook page Thank you, Herbert Apthekerl

1526

Pee Dee River, South Carolina: Negro slaves rise up, flee to live with the Indians.

1663

Gloucester County, Virginia: Indians aid black and white slaves.

1687

Westmoreland County, Virginia: Negro slaves rebel.

1688

Maryland: “Sam,” slave belonging to R. Metcalfe, leads uprising.

1690

Newbury, Massachusetts: Mysterious white man from New Jersey leads Indian and black slaves to French Canada.

1691

Middlesex County, Virginia: “Mingo” leads other black slaves on rampage.

1702

New York, South Carolina: Mild unrest among slaves.

1708

Newton, Long Island: Indian and black slaves rebel and kill seven whites.

1709

Counties of Surry, James City, and Isle of Wight in Virginia suffer rebellions of Indian and black slaves.

1711

South Carolina: Great terror among whites as “Sebastian” leads other black slaves in uprising.

1712

New York City: Indian and Negro slaves kill nine white men during uprising.

1713

South Carolina: Slave rebellion plot blamed on slave preacher recently arrived from Martinique.

1720

South Carolina: Slave uprising coincides with drought, economic depression, and Indian troubles.

1722

Rappahannock River, Virginia: Slave unrest and conspiracies.

1723

Gloucester and Middlesex, Virginia: Slaves plot to flee to Florida and freedom promised by Spanish officials. Boston, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut: slaves set fire to numerous buildings.

1727

Louisiana: Captured Indian slave reveals secret outlaw village of “Natanapalle” where runaway black and Indian slaves live.

1729

Virginia: Black slaves flee to Blue Ridge Mountains with guns and agricultural implements.

1730

Louisiana: French arm adult black slaves to fight Chonachee Indians, but blacks conspire with Indians against the white men.

Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana: Unrest and rebellion blamed on rumor among black slaves that the king had freed all baptized slaves.

1733

Unrest among black slaves increases everywhere after the Spanish government announces all slaves of the British who reach Florida will be free.

1738

Charles Town, Virginia: Conditions approach guerrilla warfare as black slaves try to reach Florida, which they call “the promised land.”

1739

Stono, South Carolina: Uprising of black slaves blamed on Spain’s war with England.

1740

New York City: Slaves poison their masters’ water.

1741

New Jersey: Arson blamed on black slaves.

1747

New York City: Uprising among black slaves.

1751

South Carolina: Law enacted against slaves poisoning masters.

1755

Virginia, Maryland: the French and Indian War causes slave unrest.

1765

South Carolina: “Maroons” hiding in mountains grow more troublesome.

1767

Alexandria, Virginia: Rebellious black slaves.

1771

Georgia: British agent blamed for stirring up black slaves.

1772

Perth Amboy, New Jersey: In the center of the slave trade, a rebel conspiracy is uncovered.

1774

Boston: Black slaves rise up and seek aid of British and Irish. St. Andrew’s Parish, Georgia: Slaves rise up.

1775

North Carolina: Black slaves plot to rise up and join British forces.

1776

Bucks County, Pennsylvania: Black slaves rise up to aid British.

1778

Albany, New York: “Tom” arrested again for stirring up minds of Negro slaves against their masters.

1782

Spanish Louisiana: Rebellious “maroons” and Negroes led by one “St. Malo” make trouble for whites.

1786

Savannah River, Georgia: Negro slaves calling themselves “soldiers of the King of England” carry on guerrilla warfare from a stockaded village in Bell Isle swamp.

1791

Santo Domingo (Haiti): Successful black slave uprising. News does not reach U.S. slaves for a year or two.

1791

Western Virginia: Indians defeat General St. Clair and unrest stirs among black slaves while militia is gone fighting Indians.

1793

North Carolina: Cherokee Indians fight whites and black slaves threaten to rise up.

1793

Richmond, Virginia: Black slaves discuss successful rebellion in Santo Domingo.

Charleston, South Carolina: Mysterious fires sweep the city, and black slave unrest is blamed on revolt in Santo Domingo.

1796

Massive sell-off of black slaves by white masters such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington due to economic hard times.

1797

Charleston, South Carolina: Three black slaves executed for “plots” and arson.

1800

Denmark Vesey buys his freedom. Nat Turner is born. John Brown is born.

1800

Henrico County, Virginia: “Gabriel,” slave of T. Prosser, leads a conspiracy.

1804

New Orleans: Slaves are restless and cruelly punished during war between France and Spain.

1804

Philadelphia: Whites attack blacks, but blacks rally together shouting, “Show them Santo Domingo!”

1810

Virginia: Slaves rise up and kill four whites.

1811

St. John and St. Charles Parish, Louisiana: Charles Deslondes, a free mulatto from Santo Domingo, leads a rebellion of black slaves.

1812

War with England stirs up slave unrest.

1813

Washington, D.C.: When British are near, black slaves rebel.

1815

Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana: Widespread unrest among black slaves.

1819

Florida, a Spanish territory, is “annexed” by the U.S. to wipe out nests of hostile Indians and runaway slaves who use Florida as a base camp for guerrilla raids on plantations across the border.

1819

Severe droughts and starvation in Virginia and South Carolina lead to numerous slave revolts.

1822

Charleston, South Carolina: Denmark Vesey’s plan for a Great Revolt is betrayed. Vesey was counting on aid from blacks in Haiti and in Africa. Of 131 black slaves arrested, 38 were hanged.

1826

Louisville: Seventy-seven slaves being transported by five white men rise up, kill the slave traders, and escape.

1828

Richmond, Virginia: Nat Turner hears the voice of God tell him he must lead his people to rise up when the signs come from God.

1829

Virginia: Free-born Negro Christian Tompkins writes pamphlet foretelling the coming of a mulatto savior who is huge, bearded, and invincible and comes from Grenada to destroy slavery in the U.S.

1829

Slaves bound for sale in New Orleans from Norfolk rebel and only after great struggle are controlled.

1829

Rains in Louisiana damage crops and cause famine and slave revolts.

1830

David Walker, a free man, publishes his “Appeal,” which Nat Turner may have read.

1831

The signs from God come and Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Southampton County during which fifty-seven whites are killed. Hundreds of black slaves are killed without trials across the U.S. as whites panic and give way to hysteria.

1835

Texas: Black slaves escape and join Mexican forces against Texans.

1846

Pensacola, Florida: Martial law declared after slave rebellion plans revealed.

1861

Arkansas: Slaves rise up and kill enslavers on July 4.

1862

Richmond, Virginia: Slave named Bob Richardson executed for plotting uprising.

1862

Yazoo City, Mississippi: Slaves rise up and burn courthouse and homes of fourteen whites.

Clinton knew racism had made people afraid to talk about their Native American ancestors. But the black Indians would know in their hearts who they were when they heard Clinton talk about the spirits. The people had to be reminded that the spirits were all around, and the tribal people torn from Mother Africa had not been deserted by the spirits. Rather the people had deserted the spirits; overwhelmed by their losses, the people had no longer prayed or believed because they blamed the spirits for their slavery on alien soil.

Clinton was heading for the remote mountains in Haiti. He didn’t care if everyone was dead and all traces were gone. He wouldn’t be surprised. The white man and white-man imitators had tried to destroy all traces of the mighty spiritual forces that had united in Haiti’s mountains five hundred years ago. Clinton just wanted to set his feet on the soil where the spirits of three continents had been manifested, where the first black Indians had been born and their descendants had triumphed against the French fleet.

Clinton suspected many African Americans secretly grieved for the spirits they believed had been lost or left behind in Africa centuries before. That would be his main work, to explain to the people that many of the African spirits also inhabit the Americas too. Clinton reclined his seat after take-off from Tucson International Airport. He didn’t bother to look down or say adiós because he knew he’d be back. Nothing could be black only or brown only or white only anymore. The ancient prophecies had foretold a time when the destruction by man had left the earth desolate, and the human race was itself endangered. This was the last chance the people had against the Destroyers, and they would never prevail if they did not work together as a common force.

Clinton had promised the Barefoot Hopi he would spread the word among the brothers and sisters in the cities. He would tell them to prepare; a day was coming when each human being, man, woman, and child, could do something, and each contribution no matter how small would generate great momentum because they would be acting together. The Barefoot Hopi’s plan called for a nationwide jail and prison uprising to be triggered by the execution of a prisoner or the outbreak of riots in the cities. The people had to make their moves while the police and military were busy trying to put down the prison riots. Once the people had hit the streets, the authorities would call military and police units back into the cities to protect the government from the people. The secret was for the people to park themselves smack in the middle of the rich man’s backyard, so any firebombing the city police did would burn out the rich man for a change. At this stage the people would suffer immense casualties; the government would firebomb the crowds of angry citizens as they marched from the ghettos down Madison Avenue, State Street, and Sunset Boulevard.

Clinton had talked with brown people, mostly women, because so many men were sick or dead. Talk about casualties and all you got was laughter, jokes, and more laughter. Two hundred or three hundred dead from police bullets or firebombs? That was funny! Hundreds more of the people died every year from starvation and its complications, which were slow and painful. They weren’t afraid to die. Clinton had heard it said again and again, mainly by the women. Black women, Hispanic women, white women, homeless with starving children; they all said they’d rather fight. They’d rather burn down the city, take a police bullet, and die quick, because that way they died fighting, they died warriors, not slaves.

Roy was going to lie low until cooler weather came, maybe contact camps of eco-warriors in the mountains of Montana or go to the homeless veterans’ camps Clinton had visited in the winter. Roy had a scheme for a big November Veterans Day celebration. All over the country, Roy hoped to persuade homeless veterans to contact local authorities for permission to build authentic firebase camps to show the public. The scheme called for the model firebase camps to be built just outside military bases where Veterans Day activities were held.

Everything would be exactly as it had been in Vietnam; they would bury and sandbag mortar and missile launchers and dig underground bunkers for protection from counterattacks. The catch was that when Veterans Day festivities were over, a few of the homeless vets would continue to occupy the model firebases. Roy was realistic. Not every city in the U.S. was sentimental and guilty about homeless war veterans, but Roy figured most cities would not bother to evict the homeless veterans from their model firebases once Veterans Day had passed. The ploy was a long shot. They had no mortar shells or little missiles, and there was no guarantee they’d be able to get any, but the Hopi had some promising leads. Still, firebases manned by a few vets and the young would-be’s could draw fire from the police and military and buy time for the prison uprising and the rioters in the cities. The Barefoot Hopi’s plan depended upon coordination and timing. Ideally, just as the Florida State electric chair was about to be used, the eco-warriors would conduct their “simultaneous hit” on significant interstate power-transmission lines and power generators. The Hopi had dreamed that when the warden threw the switch, the lights would go out and the condemned man would be unharmed, then prison and jail inmates would begin their riots. Emergency generators had fuel for at most seventy-two hours.

The night the lights went out and didn’t come back on, the tables would turn. The poorest, those living on the street or in the arroyo, they would laugh at the others because the homeless and poor lived everyday without electricity or running water. Turn out the lights and the police had no computers, no files, no names, no spy cameras, and police radios went dead. As Wilson Weasel Tail had pointed out, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Hidatsa, as well as the Navajo and Apache — none of their people depended much on electricity. The same for the Eskimos. But they all had weapons and they all were ready to fight. Because if they didn’t fight, they would be destroyed and Mother Earth with them.

Poor Engels and Marx! Angelita La Escapía had to smile at the two old white men who had waited and waited, year after year, for the successful revolution until their time ran out. They had been close, but they hadn’t quite got it. They had been on the right track with their readings on Native American communal economies and cultures. For Europeans, they had been far ahead of their time; they had been close, but they still hadn’t got it quite right. They had not understood that the earth was mother to all beings, and they had not understood anything about the spirit beings. But at least Engels and Marx had understood the earth belongs to no one. No human, individuals or corporations, no cartel of nations, could “own” the earth; it was the earth who possessed the humans and it was the earth who disposed of them.

Now it was up to the poorest tribal people and survivors of European genocide to show the remaining humans how all could share and live together on earth, ravished as she was. Angelita La Escapía was confident. All hell was going to break loose. The best was yet to come.

SMOOTH SAILING

LEAH BLUE SAW only smooth sailing once Judge Arne had dismissed the last of the injunctions and lawsuits to stop her from pumping her deep-water wells. Leah’s lawyers had argued that since the U.S. banking collapse and the crash of Arizona land prices, Arizona had been losing population. Of course the political turmoil in Mexico and the thousands of refugees massed along the border had not helped. Leah’s lawyers maintained that Arizona’s loss of population as well as the shutdown of the copper industry had suddenly changed the entire outlook for water resources in Arizona. Water was plentiful, expert witnesses had testified for Leah Blue. Of course the environmentalists and the Indians had brought in their own experts, who had testified that Leah Blue’s deep wells would destroy shallow wells throughout the valley. Leah Blue had got a kick out of watching Judge Arne pretend to weigh both arguments.

As for the trouble between the Tucson police and Sonny and Bingo, Leah felt confident the senator could clear up any misunderstandings. Everything was coming up roses. Preliminary estimates showed that construction costs had plummeted because so many skilled workers were unemployed. Leah had paid next to nothing for the land because it had been worthless without water. Every morning Leah drove to the wellheads. She was pleased to see the security service had assigned four armed guards in the day as well as at night. Terrorist ecologists had made threats to dynamite the deep wells, and to fill them in with concrete.

Leah had a way with the construction foremen and crews that was friendly but distant, and she liked things that way. She liked to step on the concrete pedestal at the deep wellhead, to gaze out over the brownish desert shrubs and grayish desert gravel and visualize the sleek, low villas of pale marble with red bougainvilleas and even water lilies for the floating gardens in the canals. She could not understand why the Indians or the environmentalists had bothered to sue even if her deep wells did harm other wells or natural springs, which her deep wells did not; what possible good was this desert anyway? Full of poisonous snakes, sharp rocks, and cactus! Leah knew she was not alone in this feeling of repulsion; most people who saw the cactus and rocky hills for the first time agreed the desert was ugly. In her dream city, the water lilies and cattails, the giant cypress trees and palms, would soothe their eyes, and people could forget they were in a desert.

Leah had been driving back from her deep wells when the call came over her car phone. It was Max, and the instant she heard his voice she knew someone was dead. Not Sonny! Sonny had been talking about getting even with the cops. Leah had worried about the boys. Max had never spent more than five minutes with either of them, even when they were babies.

No, Sonny, Bingo, and Angelo were all right as far as Max knew. It was Trigg. Trigg had been found with his skull smashed, neatly arranged in an organ-freezer compartment in the basement of the Bio-Materials headquarters. Leah had started to protest; she had just seen him late yesterday afternoon, but Max cut her off. That was yesterday. Today Trigg was dead. The police chief still had a hair up his butt over the deal with Sonny and Bingo; now the police had another excuse to come sniffing around. The police claimed they had to check out all leads, including the theory of the jealous husband. Max already had his lawyers mobilized.

“I thought the senator had all that cleared up,” Leah said. “Isn’t he supposed to set the police straight?” Leah talked to Max, but another part of her mind had been racing at the same time. Trigg had been her lover, but Leah didn’t feel anything — she wasn’t even surprised he was dead. Trigg had always been in a lawsuit or a dispute with someone. Leah wondered if something was wrong with her because she wasn’t sad and she didn’t cry, even after Max hung up. She drove to her office for business as usual. If the police wanted to talk to her, she would cooperate because that young police chief was really quite sexy. Maybe the transplant doctors had got him. Trigg used to say not even the lowest street addicts were as greedy as surgeons. His “silent partners” at the medical school had made millions with their heart and lung transplant racket, but routinely they had accused Trigg of skimming profits. For some reason, the thought of Trigg’s empty wheelchair brought tears to Leah’s eyes. Poor stupid Trigg. He had always believed he would walk again before he died.

Trigg had told Leah the trouble had started when the surgical team had transplanted the wrong lungs and heart in a patient who had later died. Trigg said his partners had come begging and pleading first; then they had gotten nasty. They had wanted to shift liability for the error to Bio-Materials, Inc.; after the court judgment, they would declare bankruptcy and form a new corporation. Trigg had refused. The police were looking for motives; here were some motives. With Trigg out of the way, the surgeons could fix the blame any way they wanted; they could testify the lungs and heart had arrived from Bio-Materials incorrectly labeled. Of course Leah had understood later when she learned the police detectives had not questioned the “silent partners.” After all, except for fat farms and tennis resorts, Tucson’s only booming business these days was human organ transplants. Tucson police had wisely concluded Trigg had been killed by two homeless men, a black and a white man who had both worked for Trigg as night watchmen.

Leah had thought she might cry for Eddie Trigg later; the loss might suddenly hit her later, in a week or two, but it never did. She didn’t cry for Eddie and she didn’t cry for Max either. How odd it had been. Suddenly they were both gone, one right after the other. Luckily Max had been struck by lightning on the golf course; otherwise, the stupid Tucson police would probably have made her a suspect in both deaths. She had to fight an impulse to laugh. The lightning had melted the putter in Max Blue’s hand on the sixteenth hole. Max’s bodyguard had cried when he told Leah Max had refused to leave the course to take shelter because he had almost finished the game. Leah had pretended to dab her eyes as she listened, but she felt relief, not loss.

Leah asked the boys and Angelo to give her some time alone; she asked Angelo to make the funeral arrangements and to notify the family. She felt restless indoors. She sat by the pool and watched the sun disappear behind the mountains. The violent thunderclouds and lightning had dispersed, leaving swirls and strands and fluffy masses of clouds to catch the colors of the sunset — silvers and golds becoming chrome-yellow, fire-orange, fire-red, fire-purple. Max had been right about one thing; the Arizona sky was spectacular. The Arizona sky would make her a billionaire.

ADIÓS, TUCSON!

STERLING HAD NEVER been the same after the time he had spent in Tucson. Loud noises such as firecrackers or gunshots or thunder sent him straight up in the air, ready to run again the way he had that afternoon the gunmen had come to the ranch. After the gunshots, Lecha’s old white Lincoln had come careening down the hill. Seese had flung open a car door so Sterling could throw in his shopping bags and suitcases. The car had still been moving as Sterling jumped in the backseat. Lecha had gunned the big engine, and they had left a big rooster’s tail of dust behind them as the Lincoln plowed down the driveway. Sterling was certain they would crash the security gate, but then he saw the gate was already open, and ahead there was something dark lying in the middle of the long driveway.

Lecha never hesitated. The big Lincoln had surged over the dead dog. Sterling had gasped and tried to look back through the car window to see which dog they had run over. Then Lecha had pointed out the other dogs. They were lying scattered near the outer security gate; their swollen tongues hung from their mouths. Lecha had slowed to look at the dead dogs. They had been shot with little silver darts. Sterling had been impressed that Lecha could remain so calm with gunfire behind her and the dead guard dogs in front of her. Seese had hidden herself crouched down in the front seat; Sterling could hear Seese crying. Lecha had not looked back. She drove eighty miles an hour all the way to the New Mexico border.

Sterling had so many questions. How had the gunmen got past the alarm devices and the TV cameras? Maybe Paulie had forgot to activate the system as he left for town. Paulie had become more and more upset. The last week, after Ferro’s friend had been killed, Paulie had drowned all but one of the pups nursing the red Doberman bitch.

Lecha talked as she drove and didn’t seem to care if anyone was listening. Seese had fallen asleep slumped low in the front seat. Sterling had been too upset at the time to follow everything Lecha had said during the trip, but later much of it had come back to him. Lecha had said it was a good time to get out of Tucson for many reasons. She had had a dream about war. She had dreamed hundreds of big green helicopters, U.S. gunships flying in low from the south over the saguaro cactus forests outside Tucson. The cargo doors of the helicopter gunships had been wide open; and inside, Lecha had seen dozens of wounded soldiers in U.S. army uniforms. Lecha said she knew the helicopters were evacuating wounded U.S. troops from Mexico. Very soon the U.S. would send troops and tanks across the border to help the white men who ran the Mexican government keep all those Indians under control. The U.S. had always feared Mexico might fail to control her Indians. Sterling didn’t know what to think about such a dream. He thought it sounded more like a nightmare. When the shooting started, women and children, the old and the sick, the innocent and the weak, would die first. For all the trouble Sterling had had with the Tribal Council, he still respected the Tribal Council and the people; because they had all met and discussed Sterling’s offenses, and they had at least let Sterling speak before they had voted to banish him.

Lecha had stopped for gasoline in Willcox. Sterling was glad to get to the men’s room. He had been careful not to drink any of the coffee in the thermos Lecha had brought along because of his aging bladder. Seese seemed exhausted; she had hardly stirred in her sleep even when the car door slammed. Out of Willcox heading for the New Mexico state line, Lecha had talked about the gunmen. Ferro had got the drop on two of the gunmen right away. Zeta had shot the third gunman through the back of the head as he had tried to flee across the patio. The gunmen were coyote food now. Lecha was taking Seese and leaving Arizona for a while as a precaution. They would return when the heat was off — Lecha had laughed at her pun. Would the heat be off for Sterling with his own people? Lecha had invited Sterling to come along. She and Seese were headed for South Dakota to the secret headquarters where Wilson Weasel Tail and the others were making preparations. Lecha wanted Sterling to join up because they could use him. Weasel Tail had plans to ally his Plains army with Mohawk forces.

Sterling had thanked Lecha for her kind offer. He told her he thought his grandnephews might let him live in the stone shack at the family sheep camp. The next time the Navajo sheepherder quit to celebrate the Navajo Tribal Fair, Sterling thought he could probably have the job. Sterling didn’t care to return to Aunt Marie’s house in Laguna village. It wasn’t the banishment order from the Tribal Council that stopped him. Sterling knew if a person stayed away for a year or so, the way he had, usually no one mentioned the banishment, unless of course there was trouble again. To return and see Aunt Marie’s empty armchair by the window would have caused Sterling too much sadness, and Sterling was not sure he could endure much more sadness.

He knew he could never again live as he had before. Aunt Marie and the other old folks used to scold Sterling when he came home from Indian boarding school to visit because he wasn’t interested in what they had to say and he wasn’t interested in what went on in the kivas. Sterling had only been interested in his magazines and listening to the radio as he did at boarding school. Sterling had never been disrespectful of the old folks’ beliefs, he just had not cared either way about religion. This indifference had been used against Sterling during the banishment proceedings of the Tribal Council. Before, it seemed Sterling had not known enough and had not caught on fast enough, and that had got him in deep trouble with the Tribal Council over the movie crew. But now, after Tucson with all the violence and death, after everything Lecha had revealed, Sterling felt as if he knew too much, and he would never be able to enjoy his life again.

On the long drive, Sterling had awakened and for an instant forgot where he was and what had happened. But the instant he saw Seese huddled in the front passenger seat, Sterling had remembered. Somehow Seese had been crushed by whatever had happened the night of the shoot-out at the bar. All Sterling knew was two others in the room with Seese had been killed by the police. Since that morning, all Sterling had said to her was “Can I bring you anything?” and “I hope you’re feeling better” because even the most simple words seemed to break Seese down, and tears had welled up in her eyes whenever she tried to speak.

Lecha had stopped in Albuquerque for gas before they headed west. Albuquerque still looked normal, as if nothing were happening because Albuquerque was five hours by car from the border — a distance safe enough that those fleeing Tucson and El Paso had relocated there. Albuquerque appeared to be booming. Sterling looked out the window at people walking to their cars from the shopping malls and from the K marts. The faces he saw were placid. The shoppers didn’t seem to have a clue about what was happening. Maybe they had noticed a few more U.S. government cars on the street, or increased military-helicopter flyovers, but that was all. On the West Side, Sterling could tell the people didn’t know either, because the faces had been excited, happy, even joking. They didn’t know, and Sterling knew even if someone told them, they would not believe it. Sterling had not believed the old prophecy either, but he had seen what was happening in Tucson with his own eyes.

Lecha had claimed certain human beings sensed danger and began reacting without being conscious of what they were preparing for. They had no idea others like themselves existed as they worked alone with feverish plots and crazed schemes. But all that mattered was, they were making preparations. When the time came, all these scattered crazies and their plans would complement and serve one another in the chaos to come. The people would be smarter this time. They had learned from Watts and from police bombs in Philadelphia; the people would head for the fancy high-rent districts so when police firebombed the protest marchers, the Ferraris and the fur coats would go up in smoke too.

What would these people in Albuquerque do when they heard about the twin brothers and their followers? How would the Native Americans and Mexican Americans in New Mexico react when the U.S. military opened fire on the twin brothers and thousands of their followers, mostly women and children? How many of these Chicanos and these Indians had ever heard the old stories? Did they know the ancient prophecies? It all seemed quite impossible, and yet one only had to look as far as Africa to see that after more than five hundred years of suffering slavery and bloodshed, the African people had taken back the continent from European invaders. Sterling shuddered when he remembered the terrible price the tribal people of South Africa had had to pay while the nations of the world had stood back and watched.

Lecha warned that unrest among the people would grow due to natural disasters. Earthquakes and tidal waves would wipe out entire cities and great chunks of U.S. wealth. The Japanese were due to be pounded by angry earth spirits, and the world would watch in shock as billions of dollars and thousands of lives were suddenly washed away. Still there would be no rain, and high temperatures would trigger famines that sent refugees north faster and faster. The old almanac said “civil strife, civil crisis, civil war.” Allies of the United States would decline to intervene or send military aid. England and France would cite the distances and the costs and point out that no “armed force” threatened the U.S. border, only thousands of defenseless and hungry refugees from the war-torn South. Lecha’s reading of the old book had Canada alone proclaiming herself a U.S. ally in this last big Indian war. The Germans would follow the lead of the Japanese, who wanted to watch and to wait until the dust settled. Of course all of the northern European nations would find themselves in similar predicaments with massive onslaughts of refugees from the South. Lecha had even dreamed the streets of downtown Amsterdam were full of Indians from all the tribes of the Americas. She had seen only Indians crowding the streets of Amsterdam and no Dutch; many of the Indians had looked pale, as if they had been born there.

When Sterling caught a glimpse of the distant blue peaks of Mt. Taylor, his throat tightened and tears ran down his cheeks. Woman Veiled in Rain Clouds was what the old people had called the mountain. Sterling was home. Sterling asked Lecha to drop him off near Mesita Village where Interstate 40 cut through the red sandstone. Seese had been crying too hard to say good-bye; she had clung to Sterling. “It’s all right,” he heard himself say over and over, “don’t worry,” but the roar of the vehicles that sped past had obliterated his words. The emergency lane of Interstate 40 was no place for long good-byes. Lecha had pulled an envelope from her purse. “You might need some money,” she said. They shook hands. Seese had hugged Sterling one last time, tears streaming down her face, and then Sterling had slammed the car door, and the old white Lincoln had roared off.

HOME

STERLING HIKED over the little sand hills across the little valley to the sandstone cliffs where the family sheep camp was. The windmill was pumping lazily in the afternoon breeze, and Sterling washed his face and hands and drank. The taste of the water told him he was home. “Home.” Even thinking the word made his eyes fill with tears. What was “home”? The little stone shack seemed to be deserted although Sterling had found an empty Vienna sausage can on the little wood-burning stove. On the shelf there were two coffee cans; inside he had found dry pinto beans and some sugar.

Sterling didn’t think what he was experiencing was depression; it felt more like shock. For three days Sterling lay stunned; he could barely swallow water. On the fourth day Sterling awoke and no longer felt exhausted, but he had felt different. He didn’t have the heart to look at his magazines anymore. He didn’t even glance in the direction of his shopping bags. The magazines referred to a world Sterling had left forever, a world that was gone, that safe old world that had never really existed except on the pages of Reader’s Digest in articles on reducing blood cholesterol, corny jokes, and patriotic anecdotes.

Sterling cooked beans in the tin coffeepot and went for a walk in the field of sunflowers below the windmill. He had never spent so much time before alone with the earth; he sat below the red sandstone cliffs and watched the high, thin clouds. Far in the distance, he could hear jet airplanes, Interstate 40, and the trains. But Sterling found it was easy to forget that world in the distance; that world no longer was true. He purposely kept his mind focused on the things he could see or touch; he avoided thinking about the day before or even the hour before, and he did not think about tomorrow. He watched the tiny black ants busily gather food for the ant pile. Aunt Marie and the old people had believed the ants were messengers to the spirits, the way snakes were. The old people used to give the ants food and pollen and tiny beads as gifts. That way the ants carried human prayers directly underground. Sterling had spooned out a few cooked beans on the ant hill, but he couldn’t think of a prayer to say, or even a message to send to the spirits of the earth. But the ants didn’t worry about prayers or messages; they swarmed excitedly over the beans. Sterling watched them work for a long time; sometimes the ant workers had almost been crushed under beans they were carrying. The ants worked steadily, and by sundown they had taken all the beans underground. Sterling did not understand why, but the success of the ants had lifted his spirits. He wished he had listened more closely to Aunt Marie and her sisters, for he might have understood better the connection between human beings and ants.

The next day Sterling got up before dawn and took a bath in the shallow creek Laguna people call “the river.” Sterling gasped as the cold river clay squeezed between his toes and the cold water reached his ankles. He washed his hair with soapweed root left behind by some sheepherder too poor or too stingy to buy real shampoo. The day after that, Sterling had walked for two or three hours along the river enjoying the smell of the willows. When he stopped to rest, he realized he had walked north almost as far as the mine road. The open-pit uranium mine had been closed for years. Sterling walked away from the shoulder of the road in the weeds although there were no signs of any traffic, or other human beings for miles.

Sterling knew what was at the mine, but he wasn’t afraid. Without realizing what he was doing, Sterling had been walking in the exact direction of the mine road where the shrine of the giant snake was. Sterling knew the visit to the giant snake was what he must do, before anything else, even before he went to buy food.

Sterling felt stronger as he walked along. The wild purple asters were blooming, and Sterling could smell Indian tea and bee flowers; in the distance, he heard the field larks call. As long as Sterling did not face the mine, he could look out across the grassy valley at the sandstone mesas and imagine the land a thousand years ago, when the rain clouds had been plentiful and the grass and wildflowers had been belly high on the buffalo that had occasionally wandered off the South Plains. Lecha had talked about the Lakota prophecy while they were driving from Tucson. Lecha said that as a matter of fact, the buffalo were returning to the Great Plains, just as the Lakota and other Plains medicine people had prophesied. The buffalo herds had gradually outgrown and shifted their range from national parks and wildlife preserves. Little by little the buffalo had begun to roam farther as the economic decline of the Great Plains had devastated farmers and ranchers and the small towns that had once served them. Sterling had to smile when he thought of herds of buffalo grazing among the wild asters and fields of sunflowers below the mesas. He did not care if he did not live to see the buffalo return; probably the herds would need another five hundred years to complete their comeback. What mattered was that after all the groundwater had been sucked out of the Ogalala Aquifer, then the white people and their cities of Tulsa, Denver, Wichita, and Des Moines would gradually disappear and the Great Plains would again host great herds of buffalo and those human beings who knew how to survive on the annual rainfall.

Sterling still had two miles to walk, but already the mountains of grayish-white tailings loomed ahead. He had not understood before why the old people had cried when the U.S. government had opened the mine. Sterling was reminded of the stub left after amputation when he looked at the shattered, scarred sandstone that remained; the mine had devoured entire mesas. “Leave our Mother Earth alone,” the old folks had tried to warn, “otherwise terrible things will happen to us all.” Before the end of the war, the old folks had seen the first atomic explosion — the flash brighter than any sun — followed weeks later by the bombs that had burned up a half a million Japanese. “What goes around, comes around.” Now he was approaching the shrine of the giant snake.

Sterling tried to remember more of the stories the old people used to tell; he wished he had listened more closely because he vaguely recalled a connection the giant snake had with Mexico. Tucson was too close to Mexico. Tucson was Mexico, only no one in the United States had realized it yet. Ferro had called the exploding car bomb outside Tucson police headquarters his “announcement” that Tucson wasn’t United States territory anymore. Sterling had been terrified of Ferro from the start because Aunt Marie and the old people used to talk about how fierce the Mexican tribes were — how quickly and casually they had killed.

Long time ago, long before the Europeans, the ancestors had lived far to the south in a land of more rain, where crops grew easily. But then something terrible had happened, and the people had to leave the abundance and flee far to the north, to harsh desert land. Hundreds of years before the Europeans had appeared, sorcerers called Gunadeeyahs or Destroyers had taken over in the South. The people who refused to join the Gunadeeyahs had fled; the issue had been the sorcerers’ appetite for blood, and their sexual arousal from killing. Aunt Marie and the others had been reluctant to talk about sorcery in the presence of young children, and Sterling had not paid much attention to what his playmates had told him about the Gunadeeyahs. Still Sterling knew the Destroyers robbed graves for human flesh and bones to make their fatal “powders.” Aunt Marie had cautioned Sterling and the other children always to be careful around Mexicans and Mexican Indians because when the first Europeans had reached Mexico City they had found the sorcerers in power. Montezuma had been the biggest sorcerer of all. Each of Montezuma’s advisors had been sorcerers too, descendants of the very sorcerers who had caused the old-time people to flee to Pueblo country in Arizona and New Mexico, thousands of years before. Somehow the offerings and food for the spirits had become too bloody, and yet many people had wanted to continue the sacrifices. They had been excited by the sacrifice victim’s feeble struggle; they had lapped up the first rich spurts of hot blood. The Gunadeeyah clan had been born.

Sterling wished for a drink of water. No wonder the blood sacrifices and the blood-spilling had stopped when the people reached this high desert plateau; every drop of moisture, every drop of blood, each tear, had been made precious by this arid land. The people who had fled north to escape the bloodshed made rules once they were settled. On the rare occasions when the sacred messengers had to be dispatched to the spirit world, the eagles and macaws had been gently suffocated by the priests; not one drop of blood had been spilled. Permission had to be asked and prayers had to be made to the game animals before the hunters brought them home. The people were cautioned about disturbing the bodies of the dead. Those who touched the dead were easily seduced by the Gunadeeyahs, who craved more death and more dead bodies to open and consume.

Now the old story came back to Sterling as he walked along. The appearance of Europeans had been no accident; the Gunadeeyahs had called for their white brethren to join them. Sure enough the Spaniards had arrived in Mexico fresh from the Church Inquisition with appetites whetted for disembowelment and blood. No wonder Cortés and Montezuma had hit it off together when they met; both had been members of the same secret clan.

Sterling made his way up a sandy hill and then slid down the crumbling clay bank of a small arroyo. He tore a cuff on his pants crawling through the barbed-wire fence that marked the mine boundaries. Ahead all he could see were mounds of tailings thirty feet high, uranium waste blowing in the breeze, carried by the rain to springs and rivers. Here was the new work of the Destroyers; here was destruction and poison. Here was where life ended. What had been so remarkable about the return of the giant snake had been how close the giant snake was to the mountains of tailings. Two mine employees from Laguna had discovered the giant stone snake on a routine check for erosion of the tailings. Sterling had heard Aunt Marie and the others talking excitedly about a giant stone snake. At first Sterling had thought a fossil snake had been found, but then he had realized the stone snake was only an odd outcropping of sandstone. Sterling remembered his skepticism about the giant snake. He had not believed the mine employees who swore there had never been anything at the foot of the tailings before — nothing but sand and a few weeds. Sterling had thought that probably the strange sandstone formation had been lying there for hundreds of years and no one had noticed it; or if they had, the people had lost track of the rock formation after the mining began. But Aunt Marie and the others had pointed out the sheep camps nearby and the road that passed within a hundred yards of the giant stone snake. Rabbit hunters familiar with the area had come to agree with the miners, sheep-herders, and the others. No way had they overlooked a sandstone snake thirty feet long! Overnight, the giant stone snake had appeared there. The old folks said Maahastryu had returned. Sterling had forgotten all about the stone snake after that. He had heard Aunt Marie talk about the stone snake from time to time with her nieces; but back then, talk about religion or spirits had meant nothing to Sterling, drinking beer with his section-gang buddies. Back then Sterling used to say he only believed in beer and big women bouncing in water beds. For Sterling, the stone snake had been a sort of joke, and he had forgot all about the snake until the Hollywood film crew had tried to film it and all hell had broken loose.

Sterling was not sure how much farther he had to walk; he had been to the snake shrine only a few times, and the last time, Sterling had been in the backseat of a tribal police car as they had raced to stop the movie people from filming the stone snake. Suddenly there it was. The stone snake’s head was raised dramatically and its jaws were open wide. Sterling felt his heart pound and the palms of his hands sweat. The ground near the snake’s head was littered with bits of turquoise, coral, and mother-of-pearl; there were streaks of cornmeal and pollen on the snake’s forehead and nose where those who came to pray had fed the spirit being.

Sterling had no idea what to do; he had no idea why he had walked all that distance to the stone snake. He sat down near the snake to rest. He had to think. What had happened to him? What had happened to his life? Education, English, a job on the railroad, then a pension; Sterling had always worked hard on self-improvement. He had never paid much attention to the old-time ways because he had always thought the old beliefs were dying out. But Tucson had changed Sterling. In Africa the giant snakes talked to the people again, and the buffalo ran free again on the Great Plains. Sterling felt haunted — he would never forget the child Seese had lost. Marching through his brain day and night were Lecha’s “armies” of Lakotas and Mohawks; Sterling saw them over and over in dreams; ghost armies of Lakota warriors, ghost armies of the Americas leading armies of living warriors, armies of indigenous people to retake the land. Sterling tried to forget the blood and the gunshots. He tried to forget everything Lecha had told him because she and the others at the meeting in Tucson were crazy. “Rambo of the Homeless,” “Poor People’s Army,” the Barefoot Hopi and Wilson Weasel Tail — the world was not like that. Tucson had only been a bad dream.

When the giant stone snake had first reappeared, Aunt Marie and the old folks had argued over the significance of the return of the snake. Religious people from all the pueblos and even the distant tribes had come to see the giant stone snake. The snake was so near the tailings it appeared as if it might be fleeing the mountains of wastes. This had led to rumors that the snake’s message said the mine and all those who had made the mine had won. Rumors claimed the snake’s head pointed to the next mesa the mine would devour, and Sterling had believed the mine had won. But the following year uranium prices had plunged, and the mine had closed before it could devour the basalt mesa the stone snake had pointed at.

Sterling sat for a long time near the stone snake. The breeze off the junipers cooled his face and neck. He closed his eyes. The snake didn’t care if people were believers or not; the work of the spirits and prophecies went on regardless. Spirit beings might appear anywhere, even near open-pit mines. The snake didn’t care about the uranium tailings; humans had desecrated only themselves with the mine, not the earth. Burned and radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to desecrate her.

Sterling didn’t show himself in Laguna for a long time, and then only to buy food. He had held his breath, but the Tribal Council had ignored him. His grandnephews and grandnieces let him stay at the sheep camp, but they didn’t trust him with sheep right away. There was gossip and speculation about what had happened to Sterling in Tucson. Sterling didn’t look like his old self anymore. He had lost weight and quit drinking beer. The postmaster reported Sterling had let go all his magazine subscriptions. Sterling didn’t care about the rumors and gossip because Sterling knew why the giant snake had returned now; he knew what the snake’s message was to the people. The snake was looking south, in the direction from which the twin brothers and the people would come.