December 1 - December 24, 1998

CHAPTER XVIII

JUANITA'S HEART

Back in real time, Julia was on her knees on the Walpi road. She was aware of Dewey warmly tourniqueting her in Juanita's sheepskin jacket. "What did you do to me?" she said. She was still rattled, still slightly giddy and filled with as much wonder as skepticism. "Was it hypnosis? Was there something in the coffee?"

Dewey threw his head back and laughed. Then he got to his feet. "Think you can stand?" he said. Without waiting for an answer, he pulled her up. She still felt light-headed, but it was fading.

"I don't believe in magic spells," Julia said. She put her arms through the sleeves of Juanita's sheepskin jacket.

"Magic----?" Dewey frowned at her. "I showed you a few old snapshots Paco found lying around and was keeping for you in his back pocket. That's all."

"Paco!" Julia said impatiently. "Then this was all sort of like a living history lesson."

"Yup," Dewey said. "Let's see what kind of student you are. What'd you learn?"

"I'm not sure."

Dewey seemed vaguely exasperated.

Julia raked her hair back. Whether she approved of this quiz or not, she didn't want to fail it.

"How about, there are other things besides fear that can eat the soul?" she said.

He nodded. "Like?"

". . . Anger."

"Yeah. There you have it," he said with approval, as though the matter was settled and no further explanation was required. "Getting hungry?"

"Wait a minute," she sputtered. "There I have what?"

"When someone's soul needs healing," Dewey said, "it's just like any other illness. You have to figure out what the problem is and to call it by its right name before you can cure it."

"Okay."

" Anger. That's what's wrong with you," he concluded.

"At who, and about what? Apart from myself for letting Paco down, that is?"

"You are angry at yourself, but that's just a symptom. So's all this fear of everything you say you're experiencing, like driving. What's really going on, is that you're angry at Paco . . . For abandoning you."

"But Paco didn't mean to abandon me."

"You think Juanita meant to fall in love with your father-in-law, meant to abandon me?"

Julia thought about this, summoned back those moments from a short while before when as Dewey she faced Juanita on the mesa, knew her as Dewey knew her. "No," Julia responded finally. "It wasn't intentional. Juanita didn't have any cruelty in her. "

"But all the same, anger is what I felt," Dewey said. "And wasn't what I was feeling familiar to you?" When Julia didn't respond, Dewey forged on. "You can deny it, but I know it was, because while you were inside of me, I was inside of you. You got mad the minute you found out Paco was sick. That's what was out there in the darkness you saw way way back then. But you didn't have a target for it until after Paco died. "

Julia was startled.

"My rage at Juanita nearly burned away everything I had left of her," Dewey said. "Memories, mostly, where at least in my heart she could've lived on, where we could've gone on together in the way I needed to. Instead, I let my anger at her, at them both, turn my whole life into ashes. Just like yours."

Julia blinked at him. "What happened then?"

"Just what you'd expect," Dewey said. "I kept it inside." He looked at her. "But rage is a dangerous animal: always hungry. When it's trapped, it'll do anything to gnaw its way out. It can eat right through you if you let it. On its way out, it makes you ask yourself a lot of questions, questions that are part of the acid in its spit, questions like; What was wrong with me? What could I have done differently. What more could I have done, and why wasn't I bright enough to think it up when it might've meant something, and then acted on it?"

Julia looked away.

"When it's done with you, you're a empty corn shuck, you're nothing," Dewey said. "The wind can blow you away like so much dust. Because you're nothing then, you don't want anyone around you, except for people you don't care about. The ones you do care about you don't want anything to do with because they might find out how worthless you are, and maybe then they'll abandon you, too."

Julia suddenly thought of the way she had withdrawn from her family and her closest friends, like Steve Quinn, but allowed Jay, whom she never got on with, didn't really give a hoot for, to stay in the picture.

"In your heart," Dewey asked, "you really think you could've saved Paco?"

All the awful wonder of Paco's last years--as she had so helplessly watched him fade-- flashed through her mind. She covered her hands with her face. "No," she whispered after a moment.

"Julia, look at me," Dewey said.

She dropped her hands to her sides.

"You were courageous then," he said. You have courage now. If you didn't, you wouldn't be out here with me. Lack of courage isn't your problem."

She wanted to believe that.

"There's never any logic in who's going to love who, just like there's none when it comes to who's going to die young, like Paco, and who's going to be spared."

Julia was very disturbed. "This is just making me feel worse."

"Because it seems wrong to be this angry with a dead person?"

"Wrong and . . . demented."

"You're still trying to apply logic to something that isn't logical. That's one of your tribe's biggest flaws."

Julia regarded Dewey with uncertainty.

"And what do you want to bet the anger's where all your guilt comes from," he said. "You're the one who’s doing the punishing."

"How do you mean?" she said.

"By not coming up here to fulfill Paco's dying wish. It was the only revenge you could take. "

This thought sickened Julia.

"Paco's been trying to help you like he's helped the others all along. You're too mad at him to listen."

She shook her head.

"You don't see it."

Julia didn't know if she saw it or not. She looked at him. "So after Juanita left, how did you heal yourself?"

"I started taking responsibility for things," Dewey said. "I had to pretend at first. Go through the motions. After a while I wasn't pretending. I figured out that the things I had before she left me, I still had. I also figured out there were certain other things Juanita left me with."

"What other things?"

"Like the knowledge I was good at loving somebody," Dewey said. "As well as the need to feel again the happiness you get from loving somebody. Eventually, I found somebody as special in her own way as Juanita. I married her. We had a good life, and a daughter. Rose. My wife died of pneumonia the winter before Juanita returned to the Mesa.

"Paco left you with certain things, too." Dewey went on. "That same capacity for the happiness you had when you were with him? That's still inside of you. Look for it. Besides, you and Paco shared a kind of love lots of other people are hardly ever lucky enough to know. What a gift the two of you gave each other!" He smiled at her. "That didn’t happen strictly because of who Paco was. It was also because you are who you are."

Julia was beginning to feel better; stronger physically, but also as though one of the layers of ice encasing her heart since Paco’s death was beginning to warm and melt.

Dewey studied her. "You will live a long life. You will again know something like what you had with Paco. I promise you that--Paco promises you that. He also promises he'll be there to help you whenever you need him--if you let go of your anger."

Julia felt that first layer of melting ice slip away. Only two or three layers to go. But with the first one gone, she felt something she hadn’t felt in a year; optimism.

"Paco also says," Dewey said, "that you have to stop acting so sans serif. Whatever that means."

Julia almost fell over. She regarded Dewey with shock.

Dewey grinned. "What you saw and felt here today is just the first step in getting your life back, your soul back, if you want to call it that. It was a baby step. But I'd like to think you're going to give it a try."

"What if I fail?" she whispered.

"In the end, you might. And in any attempt you make you can count on stumbling, losing your nerve, backsliding--all the obstacles you run into when you've lost your grip and you're trying to find it again." Dewey eyed the hovering, frail and hungry puppy. "If you took him home with you, getting him situated in with all those cats you say you have will give you something better to do than be mad at Paco."

The idea still seemed preposterous to her, yet . . .

"Believe me, all this fuss is making Paco heavy, and if he's heavy he can't float the way a Cloud Person has to float to be of any use."

"That's something like what my mother says: 'that those mourned too long are kept from their rest.'"

"Nice to know your tribe does get some things right."

Julia chuckled.

Dewey put an arm around her shoulders and began to walk her back in the direction of Sichomovi. The puppy followed.

"It's not the same dog is it? I mean, that's not Juanita's dog?" Julia said.

"Juanita's dog would be about thirty now, Julia. That's a lot in dog years."

She laughed.

"Look at him. This one's brand new. So he couldn't be, could he?"

Considering everything she experienced in the last hour, although she wasn't sure just what exactly that had been since it seemed more and more like a dream with each passing moment, Julia was no longer sure about what was possible and what wasn't.

"What happened to Juanita's dog?" Julia said.

"Unnawiy is what she called him. That's the Hopi word for heart. He was Juanita's heart." Remembering, Dewey smiled. "Unnawiy was a good friend to me, too. It was because of him I knew she'd return someday. If I didn't see him for a while, I knew I'd find him out on Walpi where she used to fire her pots, or on the hill near the road off the mesa; the last spot he saw her. I'm sure that those times, because he was her heart, were the times Juanita was most homesick. He could sense it, and he knew she'd come back someday."

"Did Juanita see her dog again?" Julia asked.

Dewy grinned at her. "Let's go eat," he said.

(to be continued)

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