Dust Devil (40 page)

The snap of a twig warned Chase that Deborah had arrived, but he remained where he lay stretched, his sharp eyes riveted on the Blue Top.

"
Ahalani, deezi
— greetings, little sister,” Chase said at last when the small, slender young woman had dropped down beside him with her sketch pad and charcoal pencils. He cast a cursory glance at the oval face with its fine features framed by the coil of braids over each ear, then returned his interest to the Blue Top as he took another swallow of the powerful
tiswin
.

Deborah
DeBaca wrinkled her small nose at him in exasperation. “I wonder why I continue to meet you.  Old Clyde Barstow barely drops the dusty blinds over the laundry’s window come Friday and six o’clock, and I’m headed here.”

“I wonder, also.  You’d be much better off sketching the usual portraits of the leathery old Navajo men and women that the other art
students do.”

“It’d help if you’d pose for me.
  Really pose.”  She sighed as she rummaged through her purse. She found the package of cigarettes and lit one, sticking it between his lips. "It’s a Chesterfield,” she said. "A man left them inside the pocket of a suit he brought in to be cleaned.”

H
e quirked one brow. "Since when did you start to smoke?”

Deborah tossed her head with a disdainful gesture, but she could not conceal the ever-present curves that clung to the corners of her lips even in her rare moods of ill humor. "Stop playing Big Brother, Chase Strawhand. I’m old enough, eighteen
— almost nineteen.”

He
grinned, a rakish smile that sent delicious chills through every female who happened to be with him — all but Deborah. She and Chase, she had learned as a child — to her disappointment — were from the same Navajo clan — the
That-chini
. And that was practically the same as being brother and sister.

Chase inhaled, then blew the smoke out in a slow spiral. "Nice cigarette. Who in San Jose wears suits and smokes these?”

"Turn your face more toward me,” she said impatiently. "There — that’s it,” and she began to stroke the pencil across the pad,.  “Maybe this will be the Friday I’ll capture the elusive electric quality of your angular face — your mobile lips, the flaring nostrils that suggest sensuality, and the masked eyes.”

His squinted at her through the spiraling smoke.  “Your words, empty though they are, paint better pictures than your sketches.”

“It’s the eyes that always caught an artist’s imagination. Yours, now, most people would swear are blacker than Hades, but actually the pupils are a sky blue — the hue found in a good turquoise.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

"There are some in San Jose who wear suits,” she said, letting her words fall with each deliberate stroke of her pencil. "The banker’s son, Orville Barnham, for instance. He tipped me a dollar last week for having his suit ready early.” From beneath the tangled lacework of lashes she peered at him. "Do you think Harry will be jealous?”

Hi
s laugh was short as he recalled her brother-in-law’s cousin who had set up his own business, a shop of hand-woven blankets and rugs that was bringing in the tourists by the droves. Her father was urging her to marry the smart Indian.

He
rolled on his side and looked at her now, seeing the rose-hued skin, the almond-shaped eyes that teased, and the petite but shapely body. She reminded him of a playful kitten. "I don’t think you give a sheep’s turd about Harry Gray Fox.”

Deborah’s hand moved furiously across the page. The evening’s light was fading fast. "That’s not true,” she said, only half concentrating on her strokes now.
  Her small nose wrinkled.  “The
tiswin
you swill, how do you stand its bittersweet odor?”

He allowed himself a slight
sardonic smile.  “Because it distills the bitterness from life and leaves its sweetness.”

“You
could drink old Mary Two-Cows dry of her
tiswin
and still never show a sign of rowdy drunkenness as the other Indians do.”

“We weren’t discussing me but Harry Gray Fox.”

"It’s just that I wanted to finish art school first,” she continued defensively.  “Though now I am having doubts about my ability. Hold still.  If I can’t even capture your essence on my sketch pad no matter how many times this summer I’ve tried . . . well, maybe I’m wasting my time in pursuit of an art career.”

* * * * *

Deborah had come close to capturing Chase’s powerful male virility one time, back in July during the hottest part of the year.  He had shucked his shirt. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his corded neck and drained off into the channels created by the gray welts that crisscrossed his back — souvenirs of the Indian boarding school they had both attended. Her memories of him then, when she had been five and he eighteen, were of a much different man. Rail-thin, his young face had not yet evidenced the uncompromising features — the hard jaw, the mocking lips, the shuttered eyes. But his near-naked body last July had been sculpted by years of lumber-jacking into a network of sinewy muscles. She had gazed at the magnificent physique with open admiration until she remembered she was supposed to be sketching.

"Chase, do you recall that photographer in Santa Fe
— Roger Zamazloski, the one who asked me to pose for the jewelry advertisement?”

Chase raked a brow but said nothing. He waited patiently with those watchful eyes that never seemed to miss anything.

Deborah hurried on. "Well, he’s offered me a morning job — as a photographer’s assistant. I’m thinking of taking it. I’d work in a room that has a view to heaven and back, and he lights a fire every morning and serves Chinese tea in English bone china at 10:30 . . . then when I’m through inventorying his work and dry mounting and wrapping the photos, I’m free to work on my drawings.” She drew a breath. "Well, what do you think?”

Chase came lithely to his feet. "I think if you’re going to work in Santa Fe’s art colony, you better get rid of those bobby socks and dirty saddle oxfords. Come on,” he said, pulling her to her feet, "let’s get you back home before your father starts a war dance.”

Chagrined that he refused to take her seriously, Deborah gathered her purse and art supplies and fell in step with Chase’s longer stride. He never walked her any farther than the old part of the reservation where the blanket Indians lived, the ones who still preferred the hogan to the tinlike barracks and their modern conveniences; because her father, fat and wrinkled with age, thought Chase a malcontent who would bring only more trouble to the Navajo.

But her mother
— Deborah smiled at the thought of the wiry little woman—her mother, she suspected, had half-succumbed to that hard, virile quality that attracted women to Chase. And, damn it, Deborah didn’t know what it was herself. Maybe it was that after years of taking dole-out from the United States government, the Indian male seemed emasculated, while beneath Chase’s cold detachment flowed a fierceness that was almost tangible.

When
he paused to turn back at the edge of the Little Horse Camp, Deborah put out a restraining hand. "Chase, the part-time job I had in Santa Fe last year — the one with the American Indian Defense Association — it’s open.”

H
e jammed his hands in his pants pockets. "You’re suggesting I apply?”

'The AID’s attorney needs an assistant
— someone fluent in both English and the Indian languages—to do research and things like that. You’ve completed high school, and you’re intelligent — and it’d be a way to help our people.”

There it was—that mocking, cynical smile. "Why would I want to help out our people? They’re where they are because they were too ignorant and too trustful. Don’t attribute any noble motives to me, Deborah.”

"All right, I won’t! But you’re just as ignorant! You sit watching the white men every Friday with bitterness and hatred brewing like old Mary Two-Cows’s tiswin still. You want revenge. Oh, I know you do,” she said, shaking a finger up at his surprised face.

"But do you ever bother to do anything about it? No! In Santa Fe you could learn their ways and beat them at their own games. Why you could even go to law school. The University of Albuquerque has opened its night class. Sure, it’s sixty miles,” she rushed on, now that she had his complete attention for once, "but you could find a way to commute two or three times a week. You could do it, Chase. I know you could if you really wanted to!”

She was breathless now, her energy expended.

“You’re craze – both of us are – if we
even let ourselves consider such illusions. After all those years of being taken in by the white man’s honeyed words of promise, I’d have to be a fool to think about entering their world.”

She could tell she caught him by surprise, stan
ding on tiptoe and kissing him on the cheek. "Think about college and the job — and don’t tell me you’re a coward, Chase Strawhand!”

CHAPTER 43

Wilbur Fairchild, attorney for the American Indian Defense Association, sat at his notched, cigarette-burned desk. He looked at the man across from him and assessed him as quickly as he had assessed potential jurors over the forty-one years he had served on the bar.

Male Indian, late twenties or early thirties; ruggedly
healthy with the look and movement, a feline grace, of the outdoors; shoulder-length hair denoting a rebel; worn overalls and plaid shirt and brogans; intelligence . . . that was debatable, Fairchild thought as he tried to see past the hooded eyes.

He hooked his thumbs under his suspenders and tried to study the man more impartially, without Deborah’s idolatry
to bias him. In spite of her praise, he had been expecting a savage, and from the looks of the man he was. Yet behind that calm animal detachment  .. . yes, perhaps there was a gleam of intelligence.

* * * * *

"Deborah has told me you’d like to work for AID and go to college part-time. I assume you can read and write?”

Chase looked across at the old man with the shock of snowy lair falling across his forehead and the sharp blue eyes that nocked him, and he felt the heat of anger begin to beat at
his temples. How had he ever let Deborah talk him into this? He could break the frail man in two with his bare hands, but it was a white man’s job and he’d play it the white man’s way. His long lips turned up almost imperceptibly in a cynical smile. "You might say that, Mr. Fairchild.”

He watched Fairchild
eye him with mild surprise.  The attorney leaned back in his swivel chair. "If you were to work for me, Mr. Straw hand, you’d have to have some understanding of legislative policy, some knowledge of political science. You see, I was really hoping to find someone more qualified — ”

Chase flexed his brown hands, then met the old lawyer’s challenging glare. "Your job with AID, Mr. Fairchild
— as I understand it our Tribal Council hired you to protect us from our protectors, the Federal government’s Indian Bureau Agency. What have you done in the way of formulating new policy? Of investigation?”

Will’s seamed lips tightened. "I was under the impression that I was doing the interviewing, Mr. Strawhand.”

"Which proves that you don’t want to hire me any more than I want to be hired.” Chase rose to go.

"Then what are you doing here?”

He paused. His brow furrowed. "I don’t know. I suppose a wily young woman in braids and saddle oxfords tricked me into this,” he said with a sigh.

"Tell me, Mr. Strawhand
— by the way, does your surname have a Navajo equivalent? I haven’t heard the name before.” Chase’s brief moment of affability faded into his previously cold reserve like a New Mexican glacier. "Strawhand has no Indian derivative.”

No, he thought bitterly, the surname Strawhand was a constant reminder of the white man’s treachery. It was the nearest he could recollect to twenty-six years prior when a man with the first name of Cody and the last name with the sound of something like Strawhand had promised to return for him.

"Well, tell me — Chase —what reforms would you recommend if you were to bring suit against the Indian Bureau Agency?”

The memory of a large, drab gray truck rolling into the reservation, taking Chase and the other children away from the only home they had ever known, carting them two hundred miles to attend an Indian boarding school, flashed through his brain, searing it as it had that day.

Some of the children had not survived the internment at the boarding school. He distinctly remembered the nauseous odor, the horrible feeling of suffocation, as they were lined up against the walls of the huts and sprayed, like cattle, for lice, tics, and nits. Two children had died that evening.

"Whatever is attempted for the Indian betterment,” Chase said at last, "will come too late for the old ones. And they will find change hard as hell. Begin with the children. The Indians should be given schools on their reservations, near their homes. And no more messing around with their religious
— ” he broke off and shrugged. It was all hypothetical. "But all that’s your problem, Mr. Fairchild. You’re the one getting paid to help those poor sons-of-bitches.”