Free Day of the Dead by J. A. Jance

been given years earlier by an old blind medicine man named S’ab Neid Pi Has —Looks at Nothing. After the two of them had eaten together, Fat Crack had taken a stick and drawn a circle around both Lani and himself. Once they were both inside it, he opened the pouch, took out some wiw —wild tobacco—and rolled it into a crude cigarette, which he lit with Looks at Nothing’s old Zippo lighter. Sitting on the mountain with a beloved family friend who was not only the tribal chairman and a respected medicine man but also her godfather, Lani smoked the traditional peace smoke for the first time.
    The powerful smoke had left her light-headed, so some of what they said that night had drifted away from her conscious memory in the same way the silvery smoke had dissipated in the cold night air. Other parts of it she remembered clearly.
    “What’s the point of the e lihmhun ?” she had asked. “Why did I have to stay out here by myself all this time?”
    “What have you been doing while you’ve been alone?” Fat Crack asked in return.
    “I made a medicine basket,” she said. “I gave Nana Dahd ’s medicine basket to Davy because I knew he wanted it. I made a new one of my own.”
    “Good,” Fat Crack said. “What else?”
    “I kept thinking about the evil Ohb, ” she said, “the one who came after me, not the one who came after my mother. And about Oks Gagda —Betraying Woman, the woman who betrayed the Desert People to the Apache and whose spirit stayed in the cave along with her unbroken pottery.”
    “What did you decide about Oks Gagda ?” Fat Crack asked.
    Lani closed her eyes. “When Nana Dahd first told me the story, I thought it was just a ha’icha ahgidathag —a legend—like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.”
    “And now?” Fat Crack inquired patiently.
    “I know she was a real person once,” Lani replied. “As real as you and me. When I broke her pottery, I freed her spirit and let her go.”
    Fat Crack nodded. “That’s true, too. So you’ve put this time to good use.”
    “But I still don’t understand why.”
    “Because you took a human life,” Fat Crack explained. “Even though it was self-defense and justified, it’s still a terrible thing for you and for your thoakag —your soul. You need to come to terms with why it happened and to understand I’itoi ’s purpose in all this—why you’re alive and why Mitch Johnson is dead. Tell me now,” Fat Crack added, “who are you?”
    “Lani,” she replied. “Lani Walker.”
    “Who else? What did Nana Dahd call you?”
    Lani smiled, remembering. “Mualig Siakam,” she said at once. “Forever Spinning, because when I was little, I’d twirl around and around like the girl who turned into Whirlwind.”
    “What else did Rita call you?” Fat Crack asked.
    Looking at him in the starlight, Lani had realized he wasn’t smiling. These were serious questions that required serious answers.
    “Kulani O’oks,” Lani whispered. “Medicine Woman.”
    Unlike Forever Spinning, this name was not a happy one. As a child, Lani had been left alone by an elderly caretaker. After falling into an ant bed, she had nearly died from the hundreds of bites inflicted when disturbed ants had swarmed over her body. Her copper-colored skin was still mottled with faded patches from those bites. It was the ant bites and Lani’s presumed relationship to Kulani O’oks —the great Tohono O’odham medicine woman who had been kissed by the bees—that had caused Lani’s superstitious blood relatives to give her up for adoption.
    “And?” Fat Crack urged, staring at her intently across the darkness.
    Lani looked back at Fat Crack, studying his impassive face. She had yet to tell anyone about the new name she had given herself in the aftermath of the pitched battle in the limestone cave. What had saved her from Mitch Johnson was the timely intervention of a flying bat whose velvety wings had touched Lani’s skin in passing. That brief caress had