Fat Crack entrusts the medicine pouch to Lani

Fat Crack Ortiz’s handoff of Looks at Nothing’s medicine pouch is both a personal farewell and a possible passing of healing knowledge to Lani Walker. He gives it to Brandon Walker to carry home to her after the two men share Peace Smoke, turning an intimate exchange between old friends into a promise about a future Brandon Walker does not yet understand.

The farewell ritual

The transfer begins with a cigarette made from sacred tobacco. Brandon Walker rolls it clumsily into a ragged shape, self-conscious because Fat Crack Ortiz, though blind, cannot see how poorly he has done. Fat Crack Ortiz hands him a brass lighter, worn so thin that the grooves on its wheel have disappeared. It nevertheless lights on the first try. Brandon Walker holds the sagging cigarette to his lips, lights it, and passes it to his friend.

They pass the cigarette back and forth several times. When it is nearly burning their fingers, Brandon Walker grinds it out in the dirt. The silence that follows stretches between them; then Fat Crack Ortiz says that the women in their families are lost girls. He means Delia Ortiz and Lani Walker, his daughter-in-law and Brandon Walker’s daughter. Both are smart, he says, and will do good things for their people; eventually, he believes, they will become friends. Brandon Walker assumes they already are. Fat Crack Ortiz answers with a sigh and silence rather than an explanation, leaving the tension between the women unresolved.

The medicine pouch and its intended recipient

After the pause, Fat Crack Ortiz feels around beneath the blanket on his lap until he finds the lighter again. He gathers it and the remaining pieces of paper, puts them into the huashomi, and lifts out the medicine pouch. Instead of explaining its contents or how it is used, he places the decision in Brandon Walker’s hands: take it, and give it to Lani Walker when she comes home. He says that both he and Looks at Nothing, two blind medicine men, wanted her to have it.

Brandon Walker recognizes the significance of the request. He understands what the gift means, accepts it, and thanks Fat Crack Ortiz. The exchange gives the pouch a defined destination, but it also makes Brandon Walker its temporary guardian: the handoff depends on his keeping faith with his friend and delivering it to the absent Lani Walker. Fat Crack Ortiz then turns the moment back toward household routine, telling him to find Wanda Ortiz and see whether the tortillas are ready. The ordinary instruction does not undo the farewell; it sits beside it, as a final act of hospitality after a serious gift.

A gift made under a shadow

Wanda Ortiz comes outside because the day is hot and asks her husband to go indoors. Fat Crack Ortiz stays where he is. The chill he feels is not caused by the weather. He and Brandon Walker have shared Peace Smoke many times over the years, but this time Fat Crack Ortiz understands it as a friendly gift of thanks and goodbye. He has given away the medicine pouch and the sacred tobacco, and their departure leaves him with a strong sense of foreboding.

That unease matters because Fat Crack Ortiz has previously experienced glimpses of what is to come. When Leo Ortiz and Delia Ortiz told him she was pregnant, he knew that one baby would shrivel and die in the womb. He kept that knowledge to himself; he also foresaw that another baby, a boy, would thrive and grow tall and strong. Now, regarding Brandon Walker, he senses that something is wrong but cannot say what it is or stop it. He no longer possesses Looks at Nothing’s crystals, which might once have helped him clarify the warning. The gift therefore takes place not in calm certainty, but in the presence of a danger Fat Crack Ortiz feels without being able to name.

Delivery, succession, and meaning

Later, as Brandon Walker waits in his Suburban outside the supermarket for Andrea Tashquinth to finish work, his thoughts return to losing Fat Crack Ortiz. The pouch is with him. He opens the glove box, places it inside, and vows to make sure Lani Walker receives it before turning his attention to Andrea Tashquinth. That small act preserves the distinction between accepting the responsibility and completing it: the medicine pouch has left its former keeper, but its intended recipient has not yet received it.

Brandon Walker also considers what the transfer might mean beyond the two men’s friendship. He wonders whether the strained relationship between Delia Ortiz and Lani Walker helps explain why Fat Crack Ortiz was so intent on directing the pouch to Lani Walker. He understands the gift as a possible passing of the torch, a line of medicine knowledge that may extend from one healer to another and reach back to the ancient medicine woman Kulani O’oks. This is presented as a possibility, not a completed succession: Fat Crack Ortiz has chosen Lani Walker, but the future significance of the pouch remains open.

The handoff also presses on Brandon Walker’s difficulty reconciling Fat Crack Ortiz’s Christian Science faith with his power as a traditional medicine man. He wonders whether Lani Walker could return to the Tohono O’odham Nation as both a fully trained physician and a medicine woman. Neither Fat Crack Ortiz nor Lani Walker appears doubtful that these roles can coexist, even though Brandon Walker sees them as opposed. In this way, the pouch carries more than an object from one place to another. It holds the prospect of a tradition continuing through Lani Walker, while the act of entrusting it to Brandon Walker binds friendship, family tension, foreboding, and a possible future calling into a single delivery still to be made.