Hour of the Hunter (23 page)

Every blow-job, every bloody submission, had its price.

Carlisle registered at the Reardon Hotel under an assumed name. The guys in Florence claimed the queers at the Reardon to be easy pickings for an apparently willing stranger. Prison gossip suggested that the closeted homos who frequented the place were always interested in a new piece of tail. Male-to-male prison trysts were a necessary evil, but legitimate fruits, people who lived that way because they chose to, were looked down on with absolute contempt by the convicted felons in the Arizona State Prison: Carlisle had listened avidly to tales about the Reardon and other such places. He listened and drew his own conclusions, deciding how such men might fit into his long-term planning. Now, he was ready to transform plan to action.

He dressed carefully, applying makeup and adjusting the wig in a practiced manner. He'd done it before, in Florence, at the behest of one of the prison's head honchos, a man the inmates called PS, short for Peeping Supervisor.

PS, a voyeur par excellence, enjoyed arranging private amateur theatricals. Scripts usually called for an ersatz conjugal visit in which inmates played both female and male roles. Brutally forced sex often came into play in these dramatic sketches, with PS and his buddies gaping from the sidelines.

PS was high enough in the prison hierarchy to be able to make suitable arrangements for the shows, including times, places, and appropriate costumes for all performers. Since PS was also in charge of inmate work assignments, plums of which were handed out on a strict patronage basis, his presentations never lacked for volunteer performers.

tarlisle, lusting after a choice inmate-clerk assignment that would give him access to both typewriter and postage, auditioned for PS in private. His enthusiastic performance allowed him to be drafted into the ensemble. Due to small stature, which made costuming him as a woman fairly easy, Carlisle was typecast in female roles. He enjoyed himself immensely. Not the sex per se. Women characters were, by definition, victims. What happened to the "wife" was often physically unpleasant, but Carlisle managed to discover certain psychic rewards.

one was a sense of kinship to his scholarly roots. He had always been struck by Elizabethan drama, by the complex female roles that, during Shakespeare's time, were performed by male actors. Carlisle considered himself capable of doing justice to King Lear's Regan or to Lady Macbeth.

He shrugged off typecasting, ragging from other inmates because he saw his performances as a challenge. It wasn't his fault that those other ignorant bastards were too dumb to realize he was playing a part in an ancient and ongoing tradition.

His relationship with PS and his theatrical accomplishments provided the cushy job as Mallory's inmate clerk that had been his initial objective, but there was one additional benefit as well. Seeing the effect the playacting had on PS and his like-his cronies gave Andrew Carlisle a powerful sense of validation. He found it amusing to observe the audience's reactions, to see the rapt attention on their stupid faces and hear their ugly sounds of approval.

They liked seeing someone stripped and brutalized before their very eyes. They probably would have liked doing it themselves if they'd just had guts enough, which they didn't.

And that was where the validation came in-from knowing there was no difference between him and those bastards in the audience, between the jailer and the jailed, between the acknowledged perpetrators of crime and violence and those who, theoretically, were dead set against it.

Not all the corrections folks were like PS and his pals.

Compared to PS, Mallory was a damned Eagle Scout, but between the bad apples and the criminals, there was hardly an iota of difference. If anything, the inmates maybe had a bit more guts since they had demonstrated the courage of their convictions and had balls enough to act on their baser impulses. But then again, they were also dumb enough to get caught.

Dumb enough to get caught once, Carlisle added to himself as he examined the effect of his cross-dressing in one of the Reardon's deteriorating bathroom mirrors.

Once, but not twice. He'd see to it.

For almost an hour, Diana joined Davy on the couch, and the two of them tried to pull together the center coil of Davy's basket, but the stick pieces of cactus sprang apart again and again. Diana had been in the same room while Rita started hundreds of baskets. Now, the Anglo woman berated herself for not paying closer attention. When Rita did it, the process seemed totally effortless. Finally, Diana gave up.

"How about some dinner?" she asked, stretching.

"What kind?" Davy asked. "The tortillas are gone. I already checked."

"Rita's not the only one who can cook around here, you know," Diana told him.

"Can you make tortillas?"

"No."

"Popovers?

"'Well, no."  "See there?" Davy returned glumly, and went back to working on the elusive basket.

Chastened, Diana retreated to the kitchen. Davy was right, in a way.

She had got out of the habit of cooking.

That was something Rita handled, and the older woman was much better at it than she was. There didn't seem to be any sense in rocking the boat.

Now, though, she looked through her larder, surprised by some of the things she found there. She settled on hot chocolate. She remembered hot chocolate as a cold-weather drink, one her mother would make for wintertime Sunday night suppers. Iona Cooper had served steaming mugs of hot chocolate accompanied by slices of toast slathered with homemade jam. There were always hunks of sharp cheddar cheese sitting on a platter in the middle of the table. Iona Dade Cooper's hot chocolate, cocoa as she called it, had been anything but ordinary. It wasn't remotely related to the new versions that came dried and in envelopes.

One at a time, Diana gathered the necessary ingredients chocolate syrup, sugar, salt, canned milk, and began mixing them as her mother once had, with a glob of this and a pinch of that. When the ingredients were all in the saucepan, she stood stirring it absently over the gas burner, remembering the sudden role reversal after her Mother's return from the hospital. She remembered the myriad cups of hot chocolate she had made for her mother, for both of them, in those last few months before the cancer had cheated Iona Dade Cooper of even that small pleasure.

After Iona's diagnosis, Gary returned to Eugene, while Diana dropped out of school-temporarily, she thought to stay home and care for her dying mother. Someone had to do it, and Max wasn't up to it. The process had taken two full semesters.

At first Gary came over on weekends to spell her a little, but that happened less and less often as the months wore on. It was too long a drive, he said. It took too much time away from his work. And Max Cooper didn't hang around much, either. On those rare occasions when he was there, Diana resented his being in the way and underfoot. When he started staying away, Diana barely noticed his increasingly prolonged absences. She was only too happy to have him out of the way.

Gradually, Diana's world shrank until it encompassed only her mother's room with its hospital bed and cot, the bathroom, and the worn path in the linoleum that led from the bedroom to the kitchen. The days and nights became almost interchangeable except that sometimes, during the day, the endless hours were punctuated by someone from town stopping by with a covered dish.

Iona Cooper. had always been a private person, but now the barriers between mother and daughter melted away, leaving them far more intimate than either of them wanted.

The forced intimacy deprived them both of dignity as Diana learned to do things she never thought herself capable of giving shots, caring for her mother's most basic needs, cleaning her, feeding her.

Pain, her mother's enemy, became Diana's mortal enemy as well. She fought it with whatever puny medications the doctors allowed her.

Hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, she battled the pain by engaging her mother in countless hours of conversation. Sipping hot chocolate, Diana and her mother talked for months, weeks, and days on end while the blessed periods of respite between one dose of pain medication and the next grew ever shorter and shorter.

"Why?" Diana asked one day. She had heard Max come in and stumble his way upstairs to his own room, bouncing off first one wall and then another, cursing drunkenly under his breath.

Iona's eyes opened and fixed on Diana's face. "Why what?" She had heard her husband, too. The lines of communication between them were all too open. Both mother and daughter knew what the other meant.

"Why did you stay all these years? Why didn't you leave?"

Iona shook her head. "Couldn't," she said.

"Why not?"

"Damaged goods," Iona answered. Turning her face to the wall, that was all she would say, and since turning away was all she had left, her only shred of privacy or self-determination, Diana respected the gesture. She didn't intrude, and she didn't ask again.

Rita ate a few spoonfuls An orderly brought d into her of watery vegetable soup before drifting back reverie.

The little adobe house the sisters made available to Rita and her grandmother was just outside the mission compound. one of the older nuns, Sister Mary Jane, set about teaching Rita the rudiments of Mil-gahn housekeeping, but the instruction process was hampered by Rita's poor gap of English. Sister Mary Jane also worried about the Indian religious training. When apprised of the girl's lack of formal situation, Sister Veronica, the sister in charge, declared Rita far too old to be placed in one of the mission's elementary classrooms or in one of the regular catechism classes, either.

She enlisted Father John's aid.

As early summer came on, Rita spent an hour with him each afternoon.

During the worst heat of the day, his office was cool and quiet. Rita was happy to be there. She loved smelling the strange Odors that emanated from his skin. She loved listening to the rumbly, deep voice that reminded her of late summer thunder on distant loligarn.

At school in Phoenix, Rita Antone had been a miserably homesick, indifferent pupil, but in the mission at Burnt Dog Village, under Father John's tutelage, she made swift progress.

Understanding Woman was the first to notice the change in her granddaughter, the way she chattered constantly about Father John and all that he said or thought or did.

The older woman warned Dancing Quail to stay away from the priest, that thinking about him so much violated a dangerous taboo, but her wise counsel fell on deaf ears.

Dancing Quail wasn't listening.

Sister Mary Jane wasn't far behind the old Papago woman in developing her own misgivings. It was probably nothing more than a harmless schoolgirl crush, she decided, but in time her concerns were passed along to Father Mark, Father John's superior at San Xavier. Father Mark promised to address the situation as soon as he got back out to the reservation. He would be there, he said, in time for the rain dance at Varnori.

Unfortunately, he was one rain dance too late.

The Arizona Highway Patrol located Brandon Walker's car abandoned in a rest area in Texas Canyon east of Benson. The ignition was on, but the engine wasn't running. The car was totally out of gas when someone finally noticed it. Tobias Walker was nowhere in evidence.

Hank Maddern drove Brandon to the scene. Around them, huge bubbles of boulders loomed round and gray in the moonlight like so many fat, unmoving ghosts. The Cochise County Sheriff's Department was summoned.

The on-scene deputy reassured Brandon that a search-and rescue team complete with bloodhound was enroute as well.

Searching the car for clues, Hank came up with a partially used bottle of PineSol. "Why do you suppose he brought this along?"

"Beats me," Brandon returned. -I can't imagine it An hour later, the dog and his handler arrived. The hound picked up a trail almost immediately, and led off through the ghostly forest of rocks over rough, rocky terrain. The handler had ordered everyone to stay behind for fear of disturbing the trail. Brandon stood there in the shallow moonlight, listening for the dog and wondering what to do now. After this stunt, when they found his father, the consequences would be far more serious than just taking his name off the checking account.

At last the hound bayed, and a signaling pistol cracked through the night. They had found him. Sick with relief, Brandon took off in the direction of the sound, but he met the handler hurrying toward him.

"Where is he?" Brandon demanded. "Did you find him or not?"

"I found him, but you'd better send for an ambulance."

"He's hurt? Did he fall?"

"Probably. He may have had a stroke. He's paralyzed."

Without a word, Brandon turned and sprinted back toward the rest area.

He wanted to sit down and weep, but of course he couldn't. There wasn't time.

Little Bear and Little Lion were dead, but the spirit of Wise Old Grandmother called them home. She told them where to find her body and what they should do with it. They found it just where she said it would be, and they buried her in a dry, sandy wash the way she had told them.

Four days later, they went back to the place and found that a plant had grown up out of her grave, a plant with broad, fragrant leaves that we call wiw and that the Mil-galm call wild tobacco. Little Lion and Little Bear cut the leaves and dried them, just the way the Wise Old Grandmother had told them.

The people were worried when they saw the two boys they had killed were back home and living in their house just as they always had. The people called a council to figure out what to do. They did not invite Little Bear and Little Lion, but the boys came anyway and sat in the circle.

Coyote, who was also at the council, sniffed the air. I smell something very good," he said. "What is it?"

He went over to the boys, and Little Bear showed him some of the rolled-up tobacco. He lighted it and offered it to the man who was sitting next to him, but the man refused to take it.

Coyote crept close to Little Bear and said in the language of Fitoi, which all the animals and people used to speak, "Offer it to him again," Coyote said, "only this time say, Inawoj,' which means friend or friendly gift."