Hour of the Hunter (36 page)

Each time the train slowed for a station, the Indians would jump off and hide so that when the railroad police-the boys called them bulls--checked, no one would be there. Then, as the train started up again, they would run and jump on it.

Sometimes the three were alone in the car. Sometimes other travelers-mostly Mexicans but also a few other Indians joined them.

For a long time, they rode and talked, but late that night, when the towns and stops got farther apart, Dancing Quail found herself growing sleepy. She was dozing when she felt something pressing against her.

Opening her eyes she found another Papago, smelling of alcohol and very drunk, tying to unfasten her pants.

"Stop," she hissed. "Stop now."

"Mawshch," he whispered back. "You are promiscuous.

You want it. If you did not, you would not be here."

But she didn't want it. What she had done with Father John was one thing. That she had wanted to do, but this was different. Struggling away from him in the swaying, noisy boxcar, she groped inside her shirt and frond the medicine basket. She pried off the tight-fitting lid as he came after her again.

In addition to the items that had been there originally and the ones she had added from the other basket, there was now one other item-4he owij, the awl, which Dancing Quail used to make her baskets. Her trembling fingers sought the awl, found it, and clutched it in the palm of her hand.

Her attacker reached for her again, grabbing her pants, fumbling them down over her hips, but as he leaned over her, thinking her helpless, he felt something hard and sharp press painfully into the soft flesh at the base of his throat.

He grunted in surprise.

"Pia'a," she whispered fiercely. "No!"

When he didn't back off, she increased the pressure on the awl. Any moment, she would cut him, and then what would he do? Cry out? kill her?

She should have been terrified, but Understanding Woman's spirit was still strong inside her.

For a long time, they stayed frozen that way in the darkened boxcar, with him above Dancing Quail pinning her down, and with the awl pricking his neck. Finally, he pulled away.

"Ho'ok," he said, backing off. "Monster."

But it didn't matter to Dancing Quail what he called her, as long as he left her alone. Once he was gone, she pulled her pants back up and refastened them. She lay there then, wide awake, waiting for morning, afraid to close her eyes for fear he would come after her again.

Finally, as the orange sun rolled up over the rocky, far horizon, she did drift off for a little while. She woke up with a start a few minutes later. The awl was still clutched firmly in her hand. Only later did she realize that the arrowhead had disappeared from the opened basket.

Andrew Carlisle waited until he was sure his mother was asleep before he crept out of the house. He drove until he found a pay phone at an all-night Circle K. His hand shook as he dialed the old, familiar number and then waited to see if it would ring. It had been so many years, perhaps the phone had been disconnected by now, perhaps the system no longer worked.

The telephone was answered on the third ring. "J.S. and Associates," a woman's voice said.

He plugged the required change into the phone. "I'm an insurance investigator," he said. "I'll be in town tomorrow, and I need a copy of a police report on the double. I don't want to have to wait around for it once I get there."

"Have you done business with our firm before?"

"Yes, but it's been several years."

"Are you familiar with our new location?"

"No.

"We're on Speedway, just east of the university, in a house that's been converted into offices."

Just the thought of being close to the university made Carlisle uncomfortable. He was always afraid of running into someone he knew.

"Will you be coming by in person?"

"No," he said. "Someone will be in to pick it up."

"Fine. What report is it you need?"

"The accident that happened on the Kitt Peak Road last Friday."

"Case number?"

"I don't have it with me."

"Anything else?"

"No. That's all."

"Very good. That'll be one hundred-fifty dollars, cash on delivery.

Please place the cash in an envelope. We'll have another envelope here waiting for you. What name should I put on it?"

"Spaulding," he said, suddenly unable to resist the joke.

"Myrna Louise Spaulding. She'll be in to pick it up around noon."

"Very good. Anything else?"

"No, ma'am," Carlisle responded cheerfully. "It's a pleasure doing business with you."

Fat Crack brought Looks At Nothing home to his house where Wanda Ortiz, the younger man's unfailingly cheerful wife, served them a dinner of chili, beans, and fresh tortillas.

She was mystified about her husband spending so much time with the old medicine man, but she said nothing. As a good husband and provider, Gabe was allowed his little foibles now and then.

"We will need some clay," Looks At Nothing said, "white clay from Baboquivari to make the gruel."

Fat Crack nodded. "Right. I know where to find such clay."

"And the singers?" Looks At Nothing asked.

'I know nothing at all about singers."

:,The best ones for this come from Crow Hang. It will be expensive.

You must feed them all four days."

Fat Crack nodded. "My aunt says she will pay whatever it costs from her basket money. The singers can stay here at my house. Wanda will do the cooking. I will see about them tomorrow when I pick my aunt up from the hospital to take her home."

"Your wife is a good woman," Looks At Nothing said.

"You are lucky to have her."

"I know," Fat Crack agreed.

They were sitting outside under the stars. Looks At Nothing lit another crooked cigarette from his seemingly endless supply. He took a puff and passed it. "Nawqj," he said.

"Nawoj," Fat Crack replied.

Far away from them, across the horizon, a bank of clouds bubbled with lightning. The rains were coming, probably before the end of the week.

"You would make a good medicine man," Looks At Nothing said thoughtfully. "You understood how the enemy could be both Apache and not Apache long before I did.

Perhaps I am getting too old."

"You are old," Fat Crack returned, "but not too old.

Besides, in my religion I am already a medicine man of sorts, a practitioner."

"What kind of religion is this? White man's religion?"

"Christian Scientist."

"Christian I understand. That is like Father John. What is Scientist?"

Fat Crack considered for a moment. "We believe," he said, "that God's power flows through all of us."

Looks At Nothing nodded. "You are not a practitioner," he insisted firmly. "You are a medicine man."

Fat Crack smiled into the night at the old man's stubborness. "Perhaps you are right," he said laughing.

"A medicine man with a tow truck."

Chapter Fourteen

WITH BRANDON WALKER gone and Davy fast asleep in his room, Diana was wide awake and stewing. It had been easy to turn on the bravado when the detective was there, to act as though she were ten feet tall and bulletproof, but it was a lie. She was petrified.

Having Walker confirm that he, too, believed Carlisle was coming for them gave form and substance to a once vague but threatening specter.

Walker's fear added to Rita's as well as her own created in Diana a sense of fear squared, terror to a higher power. What before had seemed little more than a fairy tale was now disturbingly real.

Brandon Walker wasn't in the business of fairy tales. Cops, particularly homicide cops, didn't joke about such things.

Diana went to bed and tried to sleep, but found herself tossing and turning, hounded by a series of waking nightmares, each more terrifying than the last. What was it like to die? she wondered. What did it feel like? Did it hurt?

When her mother had died, it had been a blessing, a release from incredibly agonizing pain and worse indignity. But Diana wasn't terminally ill, and she wasn't ready to die.

Not yet.

That hadn't always been the case. In those first black days right after Gary's death, she hadn't much cared if she lived or died. She was so physically ill herself that sometimes death seemed preferable.

that was before she found out the cause of her raging bouts of nausea, before she knew she was pregnant-newly widowed and newly pregnant.

Max Cooper didn't come to Gary's memorial service for the simple reason that he and his second wife were neither notified nor invited. Gary's folks flew in first class from Chicago and took over. Gary's mother, Astrid, wanted a big funeral at home in her home church with all attendant pomp and circumstance. Diana respectfully demurred. All she could handle was an unpretentious and poorly attended memorial service at the faded funeral home on South Sixth. Afterward, Gary's parents left for Chicago and the real production number of a funeral, while Diana skulked back home to the reservation and shut herself up inside the trailer.

By the time the authorities finally got around to releasing the bodies, Gina Antone's funeral was scheduled two days after Gary's hurried memorial service. With no one to offer guidance, Diana Ladd spent the two days agonizing over what she should do about it. Should she go or stay away?

Would her appearance be considered an admission of guilt or a protestation of Gary Ladd's innocence?

For Diana Ladd believed wholeheartedly in Gary's innocence. She believed in it with all the ferocity of a child who clings desperately to his soon-to-be-outgrown belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

She could not yet look at who and what her husband really was.

Accepting the burden of his guilt, the only option offered her by Brandon Walker, the detective on the case, would have forced the issue.

Instead, she took the line of least resistance. Gary's three-word, equivocal statement transformed itself into full-fledged denial. "I don't remember," became "I didn't do it," guilt became innocence, and fiction became truth.

With all this boiling in her head, Diana peeked out between threadbare panels of drapes and looked across the muddy quagmire that separated the Topawa Teachers' Compound from the village proper. The church parking lot was filling rapidly with cars and pickups as Indians gathered to pay their final respects. It was time for Diana to make a decision, and she did.

Dressing quickly, she put on the same blue double-knit suit she had worn to Gary's memorial service, the same suit he had picked out as her going-away dress for their honeymoon. She pulled her hair back in a bun and fastened it up with hairpins the same way Iona used to wear hers.

Wearing it that way made Diana look older, much older.

It made her look like her mother.

Dressed in the suit, but with sandals on her feet because of the mud, Diana Ladd started across the hundred yards or so of no-man's-land, the vast gulf between the Anglo Teachers' Compound and the Indian village, between her home and Gina Antone's funeral, between Diana's past and what would become her future. Once she set foot on that path, there was no turning back.

The mission church was filled to capacity, but people in the back row shifted aside just enough to let her in. She wanted to be small, invisible, but her arrival was greeted by an inevitable and whispered notice. Everyone knew she was there. She felt or maybe only imagined the stiffening backs of people around her. She flushed, sensing that they disapproved of her presence although no one had the bad manners to say so outright.

Topawa mission itself was small and plain and reminded Diana of the church back home in Joseph, Oregon. There was no side room where Gina's mourning relatives could have grieved in private. They sat stolidly, shoulder to shoulder, in the front row next to Rita. In addition to the grandmother, there were two couples, an older one and a younger.

Were two of them Gina's parents? Did they know she was here in church with them? Diana wondered. What would they do when they found out?

Spit at her? Throw her out?

The service started. Gradually, Diana allowed herself to be caught up in the familiar strains of the mass, the sounds and smells of which came back from the dim reaches of her childhood.

Iona Anne Dade Cooper's daughter, Diana Lee Bernadette, had been a devout child growing up in Joseph, but she had left the church without a backward glance in early adulthood, not only over the issue of birth control, but also over her marriage to a non-Catholic. Garrison Walther Ladd, III, the only son of staunch Lutherans, never would have consented to his child being brought up in the Catholic Church.

Somehow, in a way Gary's memorial service hadn't, Gina's funeral became a requiem for everything Diana had lost-her childhood as well as her marriage, her husband, and her mother. When the mass was over, instead of bolting out first as she had intended, she was too overcome to leave until after Rita and the others had already trudged down the aisle and were waiting at the door to greet the attendees.

There was no escape. As soon as she stood up, the people parted around her as though she were a carrier of some contagious, dread disease.

And that was how she arrived in front of Rita Antone, isolated and alone, in the midst of the crowd.

The old Indian woman held out a leathery hand and grasped Diana's smooth one. The younger woman looked up and met Rita's fearsome bloodshot gaze. "I'm so sorry," Diana whispered.

Rita nodded, pressing her hand. "Are you coming to the feast?" the old woman asked.

"The feast?" Diana stammered uncomprehendingly.

"At the feast house after the cemetery. You must come.

We will sit together," Rita said kindly. "You see, we are both hejel wfithag."

"Pardon me?"

"We are both left alone. You must come sit with me."

Behind them, people in line shifted impatiently. Stunned by such kindness and generosity, Diana could not turn it down. "I'll come," she murmured. "Thank you."

Detective G. T. Farrell arrived in Florence in the late evening and set about putting the Arizona State Penitentiary on notice. Farrell was a man unaccustomed to taking no for an answer. When one person turned him down, he automatically moved up to the next rung on the ladder of command and turned up the volume. By two o'clock in the morning, he had done the unthinkable-Warden Adam Dixon himself was out of bed and working on the problem. When the warden discovered that Ron Mallory's home phone was either conveniently out of order or off the hook, he sent a car to fetch him.