“Are
you sure this is where you are to meet?” asked Michelin.
“I
am,” insisted Hans.
“Then
why isn’t he here yet?” asked Fanny
“There
must have been a mistake in coordinates,” suggested Alois, “or a mistaken
time.”
“You
planned to meet at the most southerly point on the western Key, Key West? Well, here it is.” Michelin wanted
confirmation from his brother Leon.
“We
did, damn it!” barked Hans, turning to Earl in Michelin’s face, disgusted by his
constant doubt.
“When?”
“Now!”
“When
is now?”
“Do
you think I’m stupid, Earl?” Earl stood his ground, hands folded over his
chest, daring Leon, in Hans’ diminished strength, to hit him. He knew in his
heart that the time was right but couldn’t prove it.
“Okay
you guys; break it up,” called Fanny, and got between them. The sun was setting
behind the landmark buoy. “Let’s go back to the bar and have a bite to eat.”
“And
no lobster guys; we can’t afford it,” cautioned treasurer Alois Gail. “We don’t
know how long it will be and we have a hotel bill to consider.” Michelin
hesitated as the brothers stared each other down. “Just go,” said Alois pushing
Michelin off balance.
Through
the waves of Caribbean heat, they could make out the red sails of fishing boats
leaving the harbor. They could imagine Cuba ninety-six miles southeast, over
the waves of the turquoise sea, but only Hans could hear Tcakwaina on the
approaching vessel saying, “Wait for me.” Both he and Hans shook their heads in
unison; two heads and one mind, as their hearts passed in the dark of night. The
next day Tcakwaina would be dockside in Key West. After a month’s wait, there
was no time to lose; a hurricane would be approaching wrecking their plans into
stardust on the unforgiving waves.
They
returned the next day, at sunset, and there he was; you couldn’t miss him in his Native American garb. They
led him to their hotel room to the stares of the bellhops and pointed out the
opulent lavatory at his disposal, but he didn’t bath. He refused to leave his
sack in the room when they led him out and walked Duval to the café at which
they had made themselves home.
“I
see you have a sack with you,” said Hans to his soul brother. Tcakwaina opened
it slightly to give him a look, reached in, and grabbed a gold pebble in the time dust.
Michelin
took it from his hand. “Not only does he have the dust but the key to our
high-priced lifestyle as well.”
“I must meet my master and go with him.”
Tcakwaina was somber. “Only then will I be able to lead.” He spoke in Hopi; Hans
understood and translated for his fellow travelers.
“Ask him if he speaks Spanish,” said
Fanny.
“Spricht er Spanisch?” Hans telepathed
in Hopi; he looked in Tcakwaina’s eyes for a response.
“I
speak Hopi, little Spanish, and some English,” Tcakwaina
replied quietly.
“Where are you going?” asked
Fanny.
“Havana”
“When?”
“1525.”
They all laughed at the
misunderstanding. “Estevanico
was the slave Tcakwaina before he became a Hopi kachina,” Fanny explained. “Bought
in Seville, stolen and enslaved from a Moroccan Berber town named Azemour,
he was Andres Dorantes de Carranza's slave that was taken with him on the
Panfilo de Navaez expedition of 1527.”
“Estevanico's
was Kachina’s time-traveling rendezvous spirit: Tcakwaina could meet and merge
with his doppelganger in Havana before their expedition headed to disaster
in Florida, right?” asked Michelin reviewing the itinerary.
“Estevanico
was one of the eighty survivors of the original six hundred men that split up into search parties after landing
near Sarasota Bay,” added Hans, “He escorted his master's party over the Gulf of
Mexico and washing up onto Galveston. Estevanico was one of the four in the party
to survive eight years wandering through the Southwest reaching Mexico City
where he was hooked up with an expedition accompanying Friar Marcos de Niza
as a guide in search of the Seven Cities of Gold and misdirected them.” He took
a long drink of beer. “He could be the reason the Hopi survived.”
The German they all knew would be
useless but Fanny’s Peg knew Spanish growing bilingually in Phoenix; Alois studied
it in night school and had a working knowledge thanks to Gail. Earl only spoke
English and some Hebrew from Bar Mitzvah study. Hans absorbed Hopi from
cross-metempsychosis with Tcakwaina. They would absorb Spanish and Taino
from future transmigration.
“If
we are successful he won’t have to go meet his master,” Michelin said.
“But
what if we aren’t successful? What if history cannot be changed?” All the while
Tcakwaina looked down somberly, tapped Hans on the shoulder and spoke in
English:
“History
cannot be changed,” he said.
“How
do you know that, Tcakwaina?” asked Fanny.
“So
all we did in Germany to Hitler was a waste of time; is that what he’s saying?”
said Michelin shaking his head with a smirk on his face. Fanny didn’t translate
that but Tcakwaina felt the tone in Michelin’s voice.
“We
tried to stop World War II and the holocaust,” Hans informed his alter spirit
non-verbally.
Tcakwaina
spoke: “There is no war where I come from.” They looked at him penetratingly. He
went on: “What is a holocaust?”
“The
murder of six million Jewish people, that’s all; did it happen?” asked Michelin
anxiously. To the waiter: “Senor; another cervesa.”
“What
is Jewish?” Tcakwaina asked looking at his contacts. Michelin took a pocket
knife out from his pants and adding a Star of David to the worn wooden table top.
Tcakwaina saw the star and jumped, startled, to his heels.
“You
recognize this sign?” asked Fanny.
Tcakwaina
hesitated. He sat back on the chair wearily, and removed the mask covering his
yellowed eyes. “It is on the aircraft.”
“What
aircraft?” asked Alois.
“Ask
him if he saw or heard any news on TV,” said Michelin leaning in on his chair.
The patrons in the café involved with their parties didn’t pay attention to the
Tower of Babel beside them, but looked over when they heard English spoken.
Tcakwaina looked puzzled.
“I
think you don’t follow the news, right?” Hans interrupted.
“What’s
a TV?”
Michelin
was incredulous. “You didn’t spend your life in that Kiva staring at the walls,
did you?”
“He’s
still a man under that outfit,” Alois reminded them.
“Yeah
but he’s like a rabbi,” suggested Michelin
“Even
rabbis close their Talmud once in a while,” said Hans, looked at Tcakwaina
without words. “I explained; they call it a kol-mahsahkh.”
“In
the desert near Tuba City,” Tcakwaina said
loudly, agonized. Patrons in the café under the whirring ceiling fans looked. Victoria
owner Juan Farto, previous owner of Joe Russell’s Sloppy Joe, asked them to
keep it down.
“The
aircraft landed.” Tcakwaina said quietly. “It is the end of the Third World.
Leon is a legend to my people; he found the missing tablet. It was written. You
met Mary and Joseph in 1979; I have found you.”
“Why
do you say ‘the end of the Third World?’” asked Alois.
“We
heard a rumbling explosion from the northeast. The earth trembled for many
hours. The sky blackened!”
“But
why were the aircraft with the Star of David on the tail there?” Hans was perplexed.
He turned to Tcakwaina.
“Yes, it is true I met you in 1979, but there
were no aircraft near Tuba City.”
“Not
your time,” revealed Tcakwaina. “In my time; 2212.”
The
four travelers looked at each other in disbelief.
“It
was in the oracle. Go back to 1979. Find you. You would know what to do. Tcakwaina
has returned with powder!” They looked at the large linen flour bag at his
side. “Mary and Joseph knew.” The fellow travelers were dumbfounded.
“Listen,”
interrupted Fanny, “we don’t need to know what the world will be like in 2212
to change past atrocities. If fixing a fallacy results in a greater problem, it
is not our concern.” Alois nodded her head emphatically in agreement.
“No,
I don’t agree with you on that,” responded Hans. “If one correction leads to a
new fuck-up, it is us who fucked it up, for sure. Look where we are now. Isn’t
this the United States of America populated by Anglos with Hispanic speakers to
the south, or not? What happens will change history if we adjust Columbus’s. We
can stop or forestall the annihilation of the indigenous people, even delete
Cortez and the rest of those conquistadors by dissuading Columbus,” Hans
concluded, Tcakwaina in full agreement.
“Or
it is Tcakwaina’s doings as Estevanico that might affect that?” said Michelin
in German so Tcakwaina wouldn’t hear.”
“Whatever
it is,” Hans went on, “we shall follow our original mission.”
“But
Tcakwaina wasn’t in our original plans,” Alois reminded.
“I
think he probably was; am I correct Hans?” Fanny looked at him. “You set this
ball in motion visiting the kiva in New Oraibi. We wouldn’t have had enough
time dust to go back to Columbus if Tcakwaina wasn’t a part of the original
plans. You yourself said we cannot change history; therefore, he must be a part
of it.”
“Which
means we should continue to do what we were going to do,” said Michelin and
Alois loudly, almost in unison.
The
travelers looked at each other in silence. They realized their intervention in history,
but not in which way. A long explosion, earthquake, darkened skies; what did it
mean? How would further intervention with Columbus change history; for better
or worse?
After
a good night sleeping off the rum moonshine, the travelers fetched Tcakwaina
and returned to the café, all but Alois who had detoured to the docks to do
some inquiry.
“There’s
a mail ship leaving for Havana in a few days,” she said when she returned.
At
the table, Hans looked longingly into Tcakwaina’s eyes that squinted and
widened as they telepathically conversed. He heard the details and interpreted trancelike
to his fellow travelers:
“When
the ground first started to rumble and the sky filled with gray soot,
getting dark as night day after day, a red hot yellow glow from the
northeast, the villagers all went to the medicine man's hut. There, the family
had kept the oracle alive in prayers to the gods. There the dances were
organized for the special occasions dictated by the position of the stars.
There the gourd of time dust was guarded and passed down, the gourd Tuane
Gorgonsen had left in Leon's care, the gourd he left with Mary and Joseph in
1979 before leaving to find you; his brother and the rest. Years passed. The
oracle said only they knew the source; they knew because Leon had told them
through Tuane. The medicine man knew approximately how much dust would
send Tcakwaina back three hundred years to meld with the savior. He entered the
kiva and the ritual commenced. The medicine man gave him the solution
under the cover of night and left. The villagers stayed in their homes as ash,
falling like snow, covering the adobe roofs and earthen roads; not a lamp lit
with electricity shone through windows.”
They returned to the hotel in the late
afternoon and enjoyed the mambo in the evening, all but Tcakwaina who returned
to his room. The next day, in the late morning, they returned again to the café.
No one stirred as Hans went on:
“By dawn, Tcakwaina was gone, back to meet the apostles Mary and
Joseph, and they did show themselves, in the same bodies they were born into,
twenty years before Tuane would arrive, and so they waited, they lived their
lives according to Hopi tradition and they waited. When Joseph met Leon Tuane
in Tuba City, he knew the wait was over; the oracle was true. Mary handed Tuane
the gourd which he refilled and entrusted to them before he went to meet his
brother in Page, but not before he exchanged with the kachina the met dust
chemically changed through the radioactive uranium in the test grounds off
Craters of the Moon, entering the ground water in one particular cave that the
kachina could see through the eyes and brain Leon saw through Tuane.
It was part of the oracle. Tuane had only scratched the surface of the missing
tablet buried there. It hadn't been transplanted to the kiva yet. They were
going to get it but it hadn’t been adulterated yet.”
By the end of the Kachina’s
transmission, they were all in tears. Their burden fell heavily upon them.
“We
must go back,” concluded Hans. Tcakwaina nodded. “Our mission is only partially
accomplished. We must go back and make it complete.”
“His
world depends on our doing so,” added Fanny. “And what will happen in 2212 is irrelevant.”
The
travelers lifted their glasses. “L’chaim!” Michelin shouted, without a hint of
irony. The traveling party raised their mugs and toasted, all but Tcakwaina who
stood alarmed at what they were doing.
He heaved his sack over his shoulder, dropping
a gold nugget on the counter as he passed, and went out.
“There’s a ship leaving for the Bahamas in two days, said
Alois
confidently scanning the schedule she’d gotten from the maritime officer on the
Overland. “We can beat the hurricane and be well-rested to meet Admiral
Columbus when he arrives.”
“But they’re not sure which island he
sighted first,” said Fanny insecurely. “It’s all conjecture; plus, when we
arrive there and go back to 1492, we will all stick out like sore thumbs to the
natives.”
“Before I traveled back from
1992, there was a program I saw on PBS TV in Tetonia from National Geographic
that, for the five hundredth anniversary of the landing, spent a million
dollars to study just that question and their conclusion was that the landing
site was the island of Samana Cay, but there was some disagreement.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
asked Alois with her head on her chin. “There is probably a lot of tourist
dollars waiting on that decision.”
“Some said the Plana Cays, Mayaguana, or Conception
Island,” Hans recalled them saying like it was yesterday. “The key is
uninhabited now but they said they found figurines, pottery pieces, and other
stuff there belonging to the Lucayans.”
“We can’t
help the Tainos in the Bahamas.” Fanny said forlornly. “They’d all been
infected with diseases; all of them. At least it was only an isolated
population on one island.”
“But what if
some Taino travel to other islands?” Hans fretted. “The people who leave are
infected, too. I hate to say this but perhaps they’d be better off dead. We
must stop Columbus before his crew disembarks in Cuba.”
“Let me tell you; it would take good
boatmen to sail from the Bahamas to Cuba,” added Michelin knowingly.
“Whichever it is,” Alois dismayed, “we must be there after
August 31st, the day the worst hurricane hit the Bahamas, but before
September 18th, the date another crippled Miami; it wiped out the
railroad to Key West for months.”
“Right; four pale-faced Germans on a
Club Med vacation in the Cuba in 1492,” said Michelin courageously. “We better
hurry up with those tans.”
“You’ll have to change more than your
skin color,” chided Fanny. “Tainos were at least a foot shorter than us and not
as muscular.”
“You’ll have to do a lot of ego
shrinkage, too,” joked Hans to his brother.
“Not to mention some penis shrinkage,
mein lieber herr,” said Alois playfully, knowingly. “The ladies were tiny
then.”
“We’ll hide out until the ships arrive,”
said Michelin quickly changing the subject.
“And risk being barbecued by the Caribs?
No thanks,” Fanny waned. “Even the Tainos lived in fear of them. We have no
weapons or feel for the terrain.”
Tcakwaina kept
to himself on the veranda, chanting low tones, dancing in place, lifting one
leg and then the other on the creaking wooden plank sidewalk. Snowbirds and
real estate investors that made it that far south, thanks to Mr. Flagler,
strolling Key West at dusk, crossed to the other side when they saw him. Tour
buses from the hotel stopped. Children tugged their parents’ sleeves saying,
“Look at the zombie!” But Tcakwaina danced earnestly, never flinching, never
revealing his face. Finished, he trotted stiffly southward down Duval to the
point near the sea, facing the red sun as it dipped beneath the western sky
over the Gulf of Mexico. There, he dropped his sack and chanted some more.
When
the German-Americans finished their beer, they went out to fetch him. He was
gone. Hans knew where he was.
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