Free Nightfire! (The Corvette Nightfire Prequel) by Daniel Wetta Page A

at you, Rahui." His mother laughed, expecting
that he would be embarrassed.
    But he wasn't embarrassed. He told his
mother, "If she is called by a Spanish name, then I also want this.
She is 'Moon' and I am 'Light of the Sun'. From now on, call me
'Día.'"
    If his mother had examined his face at that
moment, she might have seen the nascent glow of comprehension in
Día's eyes: he was staring at Luna and instructing his destiny to
steal her.
    That year his father's team won the
rarajipari race that lasted two days. The men bulked up on the corn
beer and slept at intervals the day before the race while the women
cooked. The woman's race started when the men's race began, but
theirs lasted only a day. Their race day was merry and full of
conversation and giggles among the teams. The men were intense
because their race was important. The running was the meaning of
life for the Rarámuri. It marked their identity. It was their way
of communicating among their people so sparsely dispersed in the
forbidding canyons, mountains, and hills. The running Rarámuri
carried the Word.
    Along the path to the village that held the
finish line of the men's race, people placed torches to mark the
way for the nighttime running. Each team of men kicked a wooden
ball the entire route of the race. Día's father finished first. He
walked to a tree stump and sat, and young boys came up to him and
began to massage his legs and feet.
    The previous day, the team of Día's mother
also had won the women's race. So this was the special time that
Día remembered until the day that he died: He was old enough to
understand his coming manhood. He witnessed the triumph of his
parents in their prime. He saw Luna for the first time and stole
her heart with the look in his eyes.
    And this was the time that he received the
most impactful warning about the evil of the chobochi from his
mother: "There are those who come from Sinaloa. They climb into the
hills and take the lands of our people. They grow poppy and
marijuana, and then they enslave us and make us run the harvest
across the border to the gringo country," she told her son. "If
they approach you, run higher into the mountains. Do not let them
fool you with their sweet words or scare you with their guns. Do
not hear a word they tell you. They will trick you, because they
use bad or weak Rarámuri who have learned their Spanish to speak
for them."
    As she told him this, Día felt a stir of
cognition in his soul, portending a dark destiny: Luna would be his
light, and the chobochi were to be his night. His mother's
admonishment left him feeling privately terrified.
     
    He grew up looking more chobochi than
indigenous. When he married seventeen-year-old Luna at age
nineteen, Día was strong and filled out, not skinny like many of
his Rarámuri friends. He liked to wear his hair long and straight.
In a few years he wore a mustache. His mother told him that, at
sometime, one of his Rarámuri ancestors must have married a Mexican
with Spanish ancestry. He didn't have European features like a
Spaniard, but he was tall like some of the men from the north of
Spain and like many of the gringos whom they had seen. As Día
matured, his body and appearance grew to reflect the influences of
the outside world of Chihuahua, in Mexico, and of Texas and New
Mexico in the United States. It was because he got bit by the
chobochi and traveled their paths. Luna clung to him and went
everywhere he went.
    The seduction of the roads was what had drawn
Día into the foreign world. His family and generations of ancestors
had run the often faint paths of the mountains and canyons. They
had eluded the civilization that had kept coming their way. For one
hundred years the chobochi had been building the one passenger
railroad through the harsh stoniness or verdant thickness of their
land. It connected Chihuahua, the city, with the Pacific Ocean in
Sinaloa, and it passed through dozens of mountain tunnels and
bridges in the land of the