The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (126 page)

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.

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.

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: