Hour of the Hunter (12 page)

Diana wanted to point out that not wanting to work and not being able to were two entirely different things. "Sure," she said. "Why not?"

"The I-Hop puts me partway home," "No point in having to come all the way back here."

"You mean you live off campus and you don't have a car?"

She nodded.

"Like I said before, you're something." The gurney wheeled Rita down the hallway from the recovery room. When the movement stopped, Dancing Quail was standing beside a wagon in the broad, dusty street. She watched fearfully as a strange-looking Mil-gahn woman-the outing matron-moved toward the children.

She was tall and thin with short, bright-colored curls the color of red hawk's tail. Indian hair was usually long and black and glossy, like a horse's tail. Not only was the outing matron's hair red, it was curly, too. She peered sternly down at the children through two round pieces of glass that somehow stayed perched on her nose.

Big Eddie ordered the children out of the wagon. One by one, they tumbled down, taking their small bundles of belongings with them. They lined up alongside the wagon and waited expectantly while the outing matron examined each of them in turn. The woman stopped in front of Dancing Quail and glared down in disapproval. Dancing Quail shook under the white woman's fierce gaze. She stared at the ground, wondering what was the matter. What had she done wrong?

Beside her, some of the other children giggled and whispered. "Dancing Quail has no shoes," one of them said.

Instantly, the woman shushed the speaker, but by then Dancing Quail, too, knew what was wrong. Looking up and down the line, she could see that from somewhere in their bundles, all the other children had managed to find shoes. They were scuffed and ragged, but of all the children, only Dancing Quail still stood with her bare toes poking holes in the soft, dusty ground.

The woman spoke sharply in a strange language.

"She wants to know your name," Big Eddie said in Papago.

Dancing Quail swallowed hard. "E Waila Kakaichu," she began, but the woman cut her off saying something Dancing Quail didn't understand.

"Your papers at the agency say your name is Rita," Big Eddie explained.

"Here in Tucson and in Phoenix, that is your name."

Dancing Quail swallowed hard and tried not to cry. She didn't want another name. She liked her old name.

"Rita," someone was saying. "Rita. Wake up."

The old woman battled Effie Joaquin's summons. She didn't want to wake up. It would have been easier to stay where she was, back in that hot long-ago summer day with her toes warm and bare in the sandy dirt.

Rita's throat hurt. She felt sick. One arm wouldn't move at all.

It dangled uselessly above her head on some kind of rope and pulley.

"Wake up now. Would you like some ice?"

Effie held up a teaspoon filled with Crushed ice and ladled some of it into Rita's mouth. The cold slivers Of ice felt good as they slithered down her parched throat.

"Davy..." she whispered.

"He's all right," Effie assured her, "Dr. Rosemead is with him right now. So's his mother. She just got here a few minutes ago. They'll take him to a hospital in Tucson for stitches."

"He's not hurt bad?"

"No." Effie smiled. "Not nearly as bad as you."

Rita Antone breathed a huge sigh of relief. The pain it caused in her broken ribs brought tears to her eyes, but she didn't care. Davy was all right. Olhoni was all right.

Dancing Quail's long-ago tears, and Nana Dahd's new ones, coursed in matching tracks down Rita AntOne's weathered cheeks.

When Dr. Rosemead took Diana and David Ladd into an examining room, Brandon Walker made his way to the pay phone in the corner. It was almost nine, but even so, he had to wait his turn before he could use the phone. There were two Indians in line ahead of him.

His mother's answering voice was sharp and angry. He knew he was in trouble as soon as she picked up the phone.

"Hi, Mom," he said brightly. "How's it going?"

"Why did you take so long to call back?" LOuella demanded.

"I couldn't help it, Mom. I'm at work. We've been busy."

:'When will you be home?"

"That's hard to say. I'm out at Sells right now."

"Sells! Out on the reservation? Are those Indians busy killing one another again?"

"It's a car accident," he explained patiently. "I'm just helping out."

"Well, it's great that you have time to help those Indians.

What about your parents?"

"That's why I'm calling. What do you need?"

"Five checks are missing from the checkbook. I've asked your father what he did with them. He says he doesn't know."

"Is it possible that you wrote checks and forgot to write them down?"

Louella Walker's response was as predictable as it was arch.

"Certainly not! I don't forget to write down checks.

You know me better than that."

"Maybe you should take my advice and close that account."

Brandon and his mother had had several heated arguments about his parents' joint checking account since the previous month, when it had been seriously overdrawn by several checks. Without consulting anyone else, Toby Walker had made a number of wild purchases, including an even dozen Radio Flyer wagons and two new couches and chairs. Sending back the couches and chairs had been easy. Returning wagons to a mail-order house had been far more difficult.

."You know I can't do that," Louella countered. "I couldn't possibly do such a thing to your father."

Then you're going to have to suffer the consequences, Brandon felt like saying. Sometimes his mother seemed like a willful child-both his parents did-and he was losing patience.

"Write down the missing numbers," he said. "We'll call the bank in the morning and put a stop-payment on them."

"But that'll cost too much money."

"Not as much as sending back another set of wagons."

"All right," she agreed reluctantly. "When will you be home?"

"I don't know," he answered. "Late probably."

"Should I leave your dinner out on the counter?"

"No," he told her. By the time he got home, Brandon Walker didn't think he'd be hungry.

Andrew Carlisle waited until he thought his mother was asleep. Then, clad in Jake Spaulding's red flannel robe, he tiptoed back down the short hallway to the cluttered bathroom. He rummaged through a drawer until he found what he needed-a pair of scissors as well as a razor and a new package of blades.

One careful handful at a time, he began cutting off his hair, shearing it off as close to his scalp as he could. He didn't hear or see his mother come up to the open doorway.

The option of leaving even a bathroom door open behind him was still a sensation worth savoring.

"Andrew," Myrna Louise said with a frown. "What in the world are you doing?"

"Cutting my hair."

"I can see that, but it's terrible. It's all clumpy."

This is just the top layer. When I finish with the scissors, I'm going to shave the rest of it off with a razor."

"Why?"

"Because I want to be Yule Brynner when I grow up.

Don't all women think Yule Brynner is sexy?"

"I don't. I don't like bald men."

"But you'll still like me, won't you, Mama?"

"I suppose," she sighed.

He returned to the haircut while she continued to watch.

"You know, I still have it," she said musingly, almost dreamily.

"Have what?"

She hesitated before answering. "Your baby curl. From your very first haircut. I've kept it in my music box all these years. No matter where I've lived, I've always kept that curl with me."

This revelation surprised Andrew Carlisle. "No shit," he said. "Why, Andrew!" Myrna Louise exclaimed indignantly.

"You know better than to speak to your mother that way."

"Sorry," he returned. "After a while, you get used to not having a mother around."

He hadn't deliberately set out to hurt her feelings, but instantly her eyes filled with tears.

"You know I would have come to see you if I could have. Florence is so far away from here, and you know how I hate to ride buses. Besides, tickets cost so much."

She was crying now, leaning against the doorjamb and sobbin brokenly.

Andrew went to her and took her in his arms. "It's all right, Mama. I didn't expect you to show up there. It was a terrible place. It would have given you nightmares."

"It did anyway," she responded. "I had nightmares the whole time you were gone."

Chapter Six

THIS IS DETECTIVE Walker, Davy," Diana Ladd said, introducing her son to Brandon when the sesTsion in the Indian Health Service examining room was finally over. "He's giving us a ride back to Tucson."

"Detective?" Davy asked. He looked warily up at Brandon Walker through long blond lashes. "Are you a real policeman?"

"Yes, I am." The detective nodded. Little kids were usually dazzled once they understood they were talking to the genuine article. As far as children were concerned, detectives were something rare and wonderful who existed only in the exotic worlds of television or the comics.

"Not only that," Walker added with a grin, "you're going to get to ride back to Tucson in a real police car."

David Ladd's reaction was diametrically opposed to what Walker expected.

The child scuttled away from both the detective and his mother, pausing only when he had planted himself firmly beside a bemused Dr. Rosemead, who was still standing in the doorway of the examining room' "No," Davy declared adamantly. "I don't want to."

"We have to," his mother said. "You heard the doctor say you can't stay here."

Davy had listened while Dr. Rosemead explained why non-Indians couldn't be treated by the Indian Health Service. The boy couldn't understand why Big Toe Indians didn't count since that's what Rita said he was, but right then being a Big Toe Indian wasn't his biggest worry.

The alarming presence of a detective was.

"I'll go in Rita's truck," Davy insisted. "I'll go with my mom.”

"Rita's truck is broken, remember?" Diana explained patiently. "And I didn't bring my car."

The boy glared up at the tall detective with the funny short red brush of mustache marching across his upper lip.

"Are you going to take us to jail?" Davy asked.

"To jail? Of course not," Brandon Walker answered.

He wondered where Davy Ladd would have got such a strange idea.

Diana Ladd laughed outright. "Come on, Davy, don't be silly.

Detective Walker's just going to give us a ride back home, then I'll take you to the hospital in Tucson for stitches."

Davy didn't care about stitches. He remembered what the Indian women had said about him, speaking in Papago when they thought he didn't understand. If it was true, if he really was Killer's Child, then his mother must be a killer.

This tall, scary detective was probably going to arrest her, take her away to jail, and keep her forever. If his mother went away, what would happen to him? Other kids had two parents. Davy didn't. With his father dead and Nana Dahd hurt, how would he live? What would he eat?

How would he take care of Oh'o?

Davy stood his ground, shaking his head and refusing to budge. Diana lost all patience. "Come on," she ordered.

"Now! It's late, and I'm tired. This has gone on long enough."

She held out her hand. Rita had taught Davy never to disobey an adult's direct command. One tiny, reluctant step at a time, he inched toward her outstretched hand.

Dr. Rosemead smiled and nodded. "Good," he said. "I'm sure he'll be fine, but if you're worried about a possible concussion, Mrs. Ladd, you can always wake him up every hour or so for the next twenty-four, just to be on the safe side. We'll call on ahead so the doctors at St. Mary's are expecting you."

Diana and Davy led the way to the car, but Brandon could see that the boy was hanging back. He was clearly frightened, although the detective couldn't imagine why.

It offended him for little kids to be afraid of cops. Didn't they teach kids that policemen were their friends? Wasn't there some project called Officer Friendly working in the schools these days?

As he opened the car door, the detective tried once more to smooth things over with the boy. "Do you want to sit in front?" he asked.

"No," the boy asserted stubbornly, shying away from the detective's outstretched hand. "I'll ride in back."

Myrna Louise couldn't stand to stay there in the hallway and watch the entire hair-cutting process. It was too hard on her, brought back far too many painful memories. Even though Andrew was almost fifty-he would be in a few months since she had already turned sixty-five--she still thought of him as her little boy, her baby.

All her husbands had said she spoiled Andrew rotten, except the last one, Jake. He'd never met Andrew.

They'd fallen in love and married and almost got divorced while Andrew was-away. That's how she always thought of it-away. She never allowed herself to think about Andrew's last seven years in anything other than the vaguest of terms.

On reflection, she supposed it was true-she had spoiled Andrew, whenever she got the chance-That was her one regret in life, that she had seen so little of him after she lost custody. She'd never forgiven her first mother-in-law for that, for encouraging Howie Carlisle to go to court to take her little boy away from her, to have her-Myrna Louise an unfit mother. That was still a terrible blow even though the judge had softened it some by agreeing to let her see Andrew sometimes.

When she had a decent place to stay, she'd been able to have him with her during the summers for as long as a month or so and maybe again around Thanksgiving or Christmas, but that was all. In her mind, she'd never functioned as a real mother.

Myrna Louise leaned back in her rocker and closed her eyes, remembering Andrew as he had been when he was little-so cute, so smart, so mischievous. "Full of the devil," is what Howie used to call it.

Because of the tufts of soft gray hair spilling in a heap onto the bathroom floor, Myrna Louise recalled as if it were yesterday that long-ago time when Roger, her second husband, took her little boy to have his first haircut.