Hour of the Hunter

"How bad is it?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Very bad, Diana. I'm sorry. It's already metastasized. Completely inoperable. There's nothing to do but take her home and make her as comfortable as possible."

"How long does she have?"

"I don't know. A few months maybe. A year at the most."

Iona was still under sedation and wasn't expected to come out of it for several hours. In tears, Diana fled the hospital and drove like a maniac along the twisting road from La Grande to Joseph, wanting to fall into Gary's arms, to have him hold her and tell her that everything would be fine.

But when she got home, the house was deserted. She couldn't find the men anywhere. After waiting one long half hour and doing two days' worth of dirty dishes that had been allowed to accumulate in the kitchen sink, she finally thought to go check the bomb shelter behind the house.

Dug into a hillside, the shelter was Max Cooper's pride and joy. He had built it himself, cinder block by cinder block, with plans he had ordered by mail and which his wife had patiently helped him decipher.

And that was where Diana found them, both of them, father and husband, passed out cold on two of the three army cots. A litter of empty beer bottles covered the floor around them.

Sick at heart and without waking them, Diana turned on her heel and drove back to La Grande. She never told is, Gary she'd seen them like that, and if either one of them noticed that someone had come into the house and done the dishes while they were drunk and passed out, no one ever mentioned it.

"We're here," Brandon said quietly, pulling up under the brightly lit emergency-room canopy at St. Mary's Hospital.

Diana jerked awake from an exhausted sleep. She started to waken Davy, but Brandon stopped her.

"You go on inside and start filling out paperwork. I'll park the car and carry Davy in. He's way too heavy for you.

The detective eased the child out of the backseat, hoisting him up to his chest and wrapping his arms around the narrow, bony shoulders. The child stirred enough to look at him once, but he was far too tired to object. With a weary sigh. Davy snuggled his head against Brandon walker's neck, Scents of an improbable mixture of hospital disinfectant and wood smoke drifted up from Davy's sweaty hair, reminding Brandon of something missing from his own life-little boys and Cub Scout camp-outs.

carried Davy Battling the lump in his throat, the detective Ladd inside and sat with the boy cradled in his arms while Diana talked to the emergency room clerk. Walker missed his own boys right then with a gut-wrenching, almost physical ache. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd actually held either Tommy Or Quentin like this.

The boys were tiny when he went off to Nam, and Janie had taken them with her when she moved out and divorced him four years ago, claiming she was tired of playing second fiddle to the Pima County Sheriff's Department- LAlueUa Walker had raised her son right, Brandon was Only too happy to sop UP all the guilt Janie dished out. He agreed completely that the failure of their marriage must have been all his fault, accepting as gospel the idea that he had somehow let Janie and the boys down.

That, of course, was before he heard about the new expecting, about his own addition his former wife was who sons' soon-to-be half brother, Brian, a nine-pounder. Six months after Janie left Oregon. Brian's was born a scant s was also a full year and a half after Brandon Walker's birth vasectomy. Later, when he was back at the house getting it ready to sell, a neighborhood busybody had told him tie Janie and her second husband had been playing around the en off doing his duty to God whole time Brandon had be

and country in Vietnam. sometimes, but not often

He saw Tommy and Quentin enough. Eight and nine years old now, they barely knew him. He was the obliging stranger who showed up on the front porch periodically to take them to ball games or movies or to the Pima County Fair. Now that little Brian was old enough, he wanted to go along, too.

At first Brandon said absolutely not. No way! He did his best to hate the little bastard, but he wasn't able to keep that up forever. The sweet little sad-eyed guy, left crying on the porch once too often, had worn down Brandon's resistance. More of Louella Walker's guilt, perhaps, but after all, it sure as hell wasn't the kid's fault that his parents were a matched pair of creeps. So lately, Brian was usually the fourth member on the infrequent Saturday afternoon outings.

Afterward, Brandon would sometimes kick himself for being a patsy, for being too goddanned easy, but that's just the way he was. Besides, Brian appreciated going to ball games even more than Tommy and Quentin did.

When Andrew Carlisle finished shaving his head, his tender scalp was screaming at him, but as he examined himself in the mirror, he knew a sore head was well worth it. He looked like a new man, felt like somebody else completely. He'd have to be careful to wear a hat the next few days so he didn't blister his bare head, but no one would put this smooth-headed man-Phil Wharton, Andrew told himself-together with the bushy-haired Andrew Carlisle who had been released from prison early that afternoon. the previous afternoon. he corrected, glancing at his watch Jake Spaulding's watch, which was his now.

He went into the living room and checked on his mother.

Myrna Louise was sound asleep in the rocker, head resting on her chin, mouth open, a thin string of spittle dribbling from one corner of her mouth. He waved his hand in front of her face to be sure she was asleep, then he went back into the bathroom and shaved his legs.

When he finished with that, he returned to his room and retrieved the gun, Margaret Danielson's automatic. Long ago, Myrna Louise had been known for going through her son's things. And even giving him the keys to Jake's old Valiant.

Besides, she had taken good care of it and he was welcome to She told him the tags were legal and could use it anytime he wanted. He went out to the garage and slipped the gun under the base of the jack in the links spare-tire well. That way it would be safe out Of the house should he need it.

The other key his mother had given him was to his storage locker, the place where he had directed her to leave all his furniture and belongings once she emptied his house in Tucson before selling it. At the time, Myrna Louise had questioned what he was doing with all that camping equipment in storage and what did he keep in the huge metal drum? He had reassured her that his survivalist gear was nothing more than a harmless interest in camping, a hobby he might want to take UP again once he got out.

Andrew was reasonably certain all his equipment was there, at least most of it. He'd have to go down to Tucson as soon as possible and do a thorough inventory to make sure everything was in working order.

Once he was sure everything he needed Was in the barrell, he'd be ready to go hunting again.

He could hardly wait.

After what she'd been through with her mother, the last thing Diana Ladd expected to happen in the emergency room was for her to get queasy when the doctor started to put stitches in Davy's head. The doctor asked her if she'd be alright. she nodded that she would.

While she sat in the lobby head dangling between her knees feeling both foolish and helpless, Brandon Walker hurried into the emergency ROOM and held Davy Ladd's hand while the doctor sewed the little boy's scalp back together.

It didn't seem like that big a deal, really, but when Brandon Walker carried a wide-awake Davy back out of the emergency room and delivered him into his mother's waiting arms, Diana's tearful gratitude warmed his heart.

No matter what Louella said, maybe Brandon wasn't such a poor excuse for a human being after all.

He waited patiently while Davy proudly showed his mother the shaved spot on his head and the straight line of caterpillar-leg stitches that marched from his temple down one cheek.

"Ready?" Brandon asked at last.

"Yes," Diana said. "Would you mind carrying him again?

You're right. He really is too heavy."

"I can walk all by myself," Davy said. "The doctor said I was real brave. I was, wasn't I?" He looked up at Brandon for confirmation.

"Yes, you were. You barely cried at all."

They walked to the waiting Ford three-abreast, with the boy between them holding each of their hands.

"Can I sit in the front now?" Davy asked, while they waited for Brandon to unlock the door.

“You bet," Brandon Walker replied. "Any kid with twelve stitches in his head ought to get to ride in the front seat."

In La Cantina, a dive of a bar in Rocky Point, Mexico' the driver of a red Grand Prix was sipping tequila and telling a buddy of his about the tough little boy he'd met earlier that day after a spectacular auto accident.

"That kid was something else," the man was saying"Here he was with all kinds of blood pouring out of his head, but all he could think about was this poor old Indian broad who was still pinned in the truck. I was about to take off in the wrong direction to get help, but he wouldn't let me. He kept dragging on my leg and insisting there was an ambulance up on top of the mountain, for Damned if he wasn't right. If we hadn't gone up the mountain after it right then, I don't think she would have made it. Maybe she didn't, for that matter."

"You say the woman was an Indian and the kid was an Anglo?"

"A regular towhead,,, the man answered. "And cute as a button."

"wonder if there isn't a story in this," his buddy said.

"you know, human interest. I'll talk to my features editor about it when I go back tomorrow. Maybe it's something I can use next week.

Once it gets hot around here, feature stories are tough to come by."

taking a patch of salt The speaker drained his shot glass, he wiped the excess from his hand with a napkin, and took a bite from the lime on the bar in front of him. "Ready for another?"

"You tell me. Is the Pope Catholic?"

Chapter Seven

BRANDON WALKER STRETCHED out full length on Diana Ladd's long but sagging couch, and wasn't sure which of the two woke him-the boy or the -dog which lay by the coffee table.

When the detective Opened his eyes, a pajama clad Davy was munching on a rolled-up flour tortilla and sharing an occasional bite with a grateful, tail-thumping dog. Bone lay with his bristly, sPike-haired head resting comfortably on the child's knee. Both the boy and the dog were staring intently, watching Brandon Walker's every move.

"Did your mom let you sleep over?" Davy asked.

The question brought Brandon Walker fully awake and put a rueful smile on his lips. "Not exactly."

By now, his mother would have discovered her thirty-four-year-old son's overnight absence and would be absolutely ripped. Louella had never come to terms with the idea that her son was a fully grown man.

Brandon had returned to the family home as a temporary measure in the bleak financial aftermath of his divorce.

Because of his father's failing health, that stopgap measure had stretched into a more or less Permanent arrangement.

There was no longer any discussion about Brandon moving into his own place, and most of the time he didn't mind.

After all, his parents needed him-his physical presence as well as his regular financial contributions. The only major drawback was the fact that his mother continued to treat him like an errant teenager.

"If your mom didn't let you, how come you're here then?" Davy asked thoughtfully.

"Because of your Mom," Walker answered. "She was worried about you and asked me to stay.

Just then the tiny travel alarm clock Diana had placed on the coffee table beside him went off with a shrill jangle.

Brandon quickly silenced it, hoping not to waken Diana.

They'd both had very little sleep.

"What's the clock for?" Davy asked.

"To wake me up," Brandon replied. "So I could wake VI you.

The detective sat up and put both feet on the floor. At once Bone raised his head and regarded the man warily. Brandon reminded himself not to make any sudden movements. Remembering the dog's violent attack on the Galaxy.

"Why?" the boy asked. "I'm already awake."

"I noticed," Brandon Walker responded, struck by Davy's precociousness.

The boy had to be around six, but he sounded older. His long, lank hair, so blond it was almost white, flopped down over one eye in sharp contrast to the other side with its round pink patch of bare, skin and ladder of stitches. The combination gave him an almost comic appearance, but the expression on his face was serious.

"How come you did that?"

"Did what?"

"You and Mom, woke me up all night?

"The doctor said not to let you sleep too long, or you might not wake up.

"He was wrong," the boy pointed out. "Are you hungry?

There's tortillas in the kitchen."

"Sure," Walker told him. "A tortilla sounds great.

The boy and dog trotted off to the kitchen, while Brandon Walker Stumbled into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. He was happy not encountering Diana anywhere along the way. He was puzzled by what had happened between them during the night, and he wasn't sure what to Say to her when next they met. Davy was back in the living room sitting On the couch with the dog at his feet when Brandon returned from the bathroom. A rolled tortilla on a paper towel lay on the coffee table.

"Hope You like peanut butter," Davy said. "That's what I like for breakfast- Tortillas with peanut butter."

Brandon tried a bite. The tortilla---delicious, delicate, and thin-was as transparent in spots as a piece of tissue paper.

"Will Rita be okay?" Davy asked.

Brandon tried to answer, but the very first bite of peanut butter had glued itself to the roof of his mouth. At the same time, a stony-eyed Diana Ladd entered the room on her way to the kitchen. “Coffee?" she asked on her way past.

Much to his dismay, all Brandon Walker could do was nod helplessly and point to his mouth. There's nothing like making an awkward moment impossible, he thought miserably. Nothing like it at all.

When Hunter returned, once more looking like a human being, the people were afraid of him.

and his sister lived together in peace, For a time, Hunter went to Wind Man, a powerful medicine man, and asked him to do something to Hunter. Wind Man blew and blew until he made a mighty dust devil.

Hunter's sister was out gathering firewood when Wind Man's dust devil caught her and took her far away. Hunter wailed for his sister for a long time. Finally, he went looking for her, but he couldn't find her anywhere.

Hunter called to his uncle Buzzard for help. Buzzard looked for her forfour days. He couldn't find her either, but he told Hunter that he had heard something strange up on Cloud-Stopper Peak, which the Mil-gahn call Picacho.

The next day Hunter and Buzzard together went to the mountain. The woman was up there, but she was crying.

The mountain was very steep, and she didn't know how to get back down.

When he heard that, Buzzard remembered that there was a medicine man in the east who was good at getting women. He flew off and returned with Ceremonial Clown.

Clown called to the woman. He looked so funny and said such funny things that the woman stopped crying and started laughing. Then Clown got some seeds out of his medicine bag, planted them, and he began to sing. While he sang, the seeds began to grow into a gourd plant, which grew up the side of the mountain. After four days, when it was tall enough, Clown climbed up it and carried the woman down.

So Hunter had his sister back, and the people who hated them stayed away. But one day Hunter said, "Let's go far away from this place. I will become Falling Star. When people see me, the earth will shake, and people will know something terrible is going to happen."

His sister agreed "I will be Morning Star, and come up over there in the east. If people are alert and industrious, they will be up early enough to see me and say to each other, 'It is morning. Look, there is the morning star."' And that, my Friend, is the story of Falling Star and Morning Star.

Like Margaret Danielson, Ernesto Tashquinth had been laid off six months earlier from the Hecla mining operation on the Papago Reservation southwest of Casa Grande. The bottom had dropped out of the copper market. Mines all over Arizona were closing for good.

From the time he was a baby, Ernesto's mother, a Papago married to a Gila River Pima from Sacaton, had called her son S-abamk or Lu&y One.

Stories about Ernesto Tashquinth's continuing good fortune followed him everywhere--through his sojourn at the Phoenix Indian School and during his stint in the army. That luck was once again holding true back home on the reservation.

Ernesto had been laid off from the mine along with many Others at a time when job opportunities were scarce, but he had somehow managed to finagle his way into a Position with the Arizona Highway Department.

it wasn't a particularly wonderful job by some standards, but it paid reasonably well, and the work was steady. With truck and tools provided for him, Ernesto's job was to clean rest rooms, tidy up the grounds, and empty trash cans at rest areas along 1-10 between Tucson and Cottonwood.

Ernesto much preferred this kind of solitary work to the dusty hubbub of the open pit mine. He enjoyed being by himself and setting his own pace. Of all the rest areas on his route, he liked the one at Picacho Peak best. For one thing, it was off the road by a few hundred yards.

Without such easy access, it was usually less crowded than the others.

Occasionally, the Parking lot stayed empty the whole time Ernesto was working there. When that happened, he was likely to let his mind wander back through the old stories his great-grandfather used to tell him, especially tales about Cloud-Stopper Mountain.

During those hot early summer days, while cleaning up other people's garbage and Wiping down the Shit they Sometimes smeared On rest-room floors and walls, Ernesto' Tashquinth was dealing with some Pretty heavy shit of his own.

Straight out of high school, he had been drafted into the army and shipped off to Vietnam as an infantryman.

The fact that he had returned home without so much as a Scratch on his body had also been attributed to his incredibly good luck.

Unlike some of his buddies, Ernesto hadn't been physically hurt, but he had seen plenty. His scars, none of which were visible, came in Part from luck-from being one vital step away from the land mine that had blown away his best Pal's limbs and life. They came from seeing a tiny dying child, enemy or not, burned to a crisp by napalm. They came from. the sounds and smells of a faraway war that still haunted his dreams and disturbed his sleep.

As the year's summer sun warmed the Arizona desert, it warmed Ernesto as well---cleansing him somehow, driving the horrors he had experienced out of his heart and mind, gradually singing his spirit back to life.

There was much to be said for the old ways his great-grandfather had told him about, and much to be learned from them as well.

By midmorning that June Saturday, Ernesto finished cleaning the two rest rooms and was coming outside to empty the trash when he saw a pair of buzzards circling high over one of the springs near the base of the mountain.

As his desert forbears would have done, Ernesto wrinkled his nose and sniffed the air. If something was dead or dying up there on the mountain, the odor had not yet reached the picnic area. That was good.

It would be better for him to go investigate now, to find whatever it was and get rid of it right away, rather than waiting until someone told his supervisor about it.

Assuming the carrion to be from a dead animal, Ernesto armed himself with a shovel and a large plastic trash bag. He had played on this mountain as a child, and knew the series of hidden springs that dotted Picacho Peak's forbidding and seemingly barren flanks. He hurried to the concealing grove of trees with no trouble. Reaching them, he was surprised to find there was still no identifiable odor.

That told him the kill was relatively fresh. If the putrid odor of dead flesh had permeated the hot desert air, those buzzards would no longer be circling.

The first thing Ernesto saw through the sheltering curtain of mesquite trees was a glimpse of bare, sunburned leg. Thinking he'd stumbled upon a devoted sunbather, Ernesto's first instinct was to turn quickly and go back the way he'd come, but something about the leaden stillness of that bright pink leg told him otherwise.

"Hello?" he called. "Anybody here?"

There was no response, no answering movement.

Puzzled, he pushed his way through the leaves until he could see more clearly. A naked woman lay faceup on the rocks before him, empty eyes open to the sky, her skin burned a fierce red by the blistering sun.

In a rush, all the horror of Vietnam flooded back over Ernesto Tashquinth. Sickened, he wasn't able to look again for several long moments. When he did, he found himself unable to turn away. He moved toward the body like a sleepwalker--staring, mesmerized. Not only was she sunburned, her whole body was a mass of wounds. Industrious ants crawled across her, following orderly, seemingly well marked trails like hordes of tiny cars negotiating rush-hour freeway traffic. Flies swarmed and hovered in the heavy air above her, hoping to find some appropriately still-damp place in which to lay their eggs.

But what fascinated and at the same time appalled Ernesto Tashquinth, what held his eyes hostage, were the naked, sunburned, upturned breasts, especially the right one. Something was wrong with it. He moved closer until he saw that the entire right nipple was missing-not missing exactly, but hanging loose, attached to the body by a single shred of flesh and skin.

The gray shadow of a soaring bird glided overhead, an ominous cloud passing between Ernesto and the sun. A buzzard had done that to her, he assumed at once, looking up at the patiently circling bird. A buzzard had inflicted that gross indignity on the dead woman's body.

Ernesto was grateful that he had arrived in time to interrupt the grisly process. There was nothing to be done about the flies and ants, but he could keep the birds away.

Whoever she was, at least he could spare her that.

Bent on protecting the body, Ernesto tore the trash bag open until he had a flat strip of black plastic three feet wide and eight feet long.

He covered her feet first, using rocks to hold the corners of the plastic in place. It wasn't until he approached the woman's crimson face that he realized he knew her, that she was someone he had worked with at the mine.

Margie Danielson, one of the white ladies at Hecla, had worked in payroll. She had given him his pink slip only two weeks before issuing her own After he recognized her, Ernesto Tashquinth knelt there silently for a moment before covering her face. His mother was right after all, he decided. He really was lucky. Ernesto Tashquinth was still alive and kicking. Margie Danielson wasn't.

In Rita's leaden dream it was night, and the train station was hot and dusty. It should have been dark, but the wavering gas lights of downtown Chuk Shon gave everything an eerie glow. Thirty or so Indian children stood huddled together in a silent , apprehensive group at the far end of the platform Under one arm, Dancing Quail carried a blanket with her clothing and Understanding Woman's precious medicine basket rolled safely inside. In her other hand, clutched tightly in a sweaty fist, she carried her magic rock. The little girl stood with the others, her feet blistered and sore in the stiff secondhand or thirdhand leather shoe_ the Outing matron had given her.

The train pulled into the station, causing the very ground to tremble.

Dancing Quail looked to the sky. Falling Star always signaled the shaking of the earth, but above her the sky was hazy with Chuk Shon's dust and smoke. If Falling Star tried to warn them just then, no one could have seen him.

The youngest child in the group, Dancing Quail watched in amazement as people climbed down from the train using steps a man had placed in front of the doors. They emerged carrying small cases and boxes. They looked all right. Dancing Quail had worried that whoever stepped inside that huge, smoking iron monster would be instantly devoured, eaten alive, but these people hadn't been. Maybe she wouldn't be, either.

Other people came out on the platform ' and began loading. Soon it would be Dancing Quail's turn. She 'prayed for courage.

clutched her magic rock and asked At last the outing matron motioned the children to move out, but not toward the doors of the train through which the other people had disappeared. Instead, they were herded back along the platform almost to the end of the train where they were ordered up a straight metal ladder on the' outside of one of the cars.

Faced with the unfamiliar ladder, Dancing Quail drew back in dismay.

She knew how to climb rocks and cliffs, but she had never seen a ladder before. She watched while one of the older boys pulled himself up it.

How could she climb that way and still hold on to her rock and her blanket?

Dancing Quail edged her way to the back of the line, hoping to escape notice. With the other children all on top of the car, Dancing Quail found herself being pushed forward by the outing matron.

There was no alternative. Dancing Quail stuck the magic rock in her mouth and gripped it between her teeth while she started up the ladder.

She was terrified climbing up, and even more terrified once she reached the top and looked back down. The ground was far away. What would happen to her if she fell?

Following the example of the other children, she dropped to a sitting position just as the whistle shrieked and the train lurched forward.

Wrapping her legs around the rolled blanket, she held on to a metal rail with both hands. Wind whipped her hair across her face, blinding her.

At first she was afraid the wildly rushing air would pry her loose. It was a long time before she dared let go with one hand long enough to remove Understanding Woman's precious rock from her mouth.

Afraid to sleep for fear of falling off, Dancing Quail tried to stay awake, but eventually' the rhythmic racket of metal on metal lulled her eyes closed.

"Rita!"

Someone from far away was calling her by that other name, the same name the outing matron had used.

"Rita," the voice called again, more firmly this time.

Dancing Quail didn't want to answer. She didn't want to wake up because she knew when she did that it would be the same as it had been that long-ago morning when the train finally reached Phoenix. The sun would be bright overhead, and Understanding Woman's magic rock would be gone forever. Sometime during the night it had slipped from her grasp and fallen from the swaying boxcar.

More than half a century later, Dancing Quail still mourned its loss.

Juanita Ortiz rose stiffly from the uncomfortable chair where she had spent the night at her sister's bedside. She went to look out the window, while the nurse woke Rita to take her pulse and temperature.

Gabe hadn't come by the BIA compound to summon his mother until late, not until after Diana Ladd had picked up Davy. Fat Crack had given Juanita some lame excuse about promising Rita not to leave the child alone. His mother didn't approve. It wasn't right that Gabe should have waited with the little white boy all that time without coming to tell his own family about Rita's injuries. How could an Anglo's needs come before those of Gabe's own family?

Looking out the window, Juanita Ortiz shook her head in frustration.

There was much she didn't understand about her son, and she understood her sister even less.

Of all the people on the reservation, only a few-Juanita Ortiz among them-still remembered that, as a child, Rita Antone had once been called Dancing Quail. And only Rita remembered that their father's pet name for baby Juanita had been S-kehegaj, which means Pretty One. That was all a long time ago. Dancing Quail no longer danced, and no one had called Juanita pretty in more than forty years.

With chart in hand, the nurse left the room. Juanita went back over to the bed. Dr. Rosemead had told her that Rita's injuries weren't nearly as serious as he had at first s+posed, but that if she hadn't been in the ambulance when her heart stopped, she surely would have died.

" Juanita said softly. "Elder Sister, how are you?"

"Thirsty, ni-shehpij," Rita answered, opening her eyes and speaking formally to her younger sister. "I sure am thirsty."

The nurse had left a glass newly filled with crushed ice on the nightstand. Juanita ladled a spoonful of ice into Rita's parched mouth.

"I must see S-ab Neid Pi Has," Rita whispered as soon as she could speak again after swallowing the ice.

Instantly, Juanita Ortiz's eyes hardened. S-ab Neid Pi Has, Looks At Nothing, was an aged, blind medicine man who lived as a hermit in Many Dogs, an almost-abandoned village just across the Mexican border from the rest of the reservation. He was a man who lived accordin to the old ways, who long ago had divorced himself from white man's liquor, whose lungs smoked only Indian tobacco.

Juanita had converted from Catholic to Presbyterian as a young woman when she married Arturo Ortiz. She heartily disagreed when her son, Fat Crack, went off and joined the Christian Scientists, but at least, she conceded, he was Christian. Juanita staunchly drew the line at the idea of summoning a medicine man.

"Ni-sihs," Juanita scolded disapprovingly. "Sister, you are in a hospital. Let the doctors and nurses take care of YOU."

But Rita still remembered those three huge buzzards sitting with outstretched wings on the row of passing telephone poles. The Anglo doctors with their bandages and thermometers could fix her broken body perhaps, but those three ominous buzzards represented Forebodings, something that required the ministrations of a medicine man. They were symptomatic of a Staying Sickness-a disease that affects only Indians and one that is impervious to Anglo medical treatment with its hospitals, operating rooms, and bottles of pills.

"I must see Looks At Nothing," Rita insisted stubbornly.

"Please ask Fat Crack to go get him and bring him here."

When Andrew Carlisle told his mother that he was going to Tucson to check on his storage locker, Myrna Louise wondered if he might go away and not come back. She made him a huge jar of sun tea and iced it down in a Thermos. Andrew always liked to do that, she remembered, to travel with lunches and drinks packed from home rather than stopping off someplace to buy meals. It made sense to travel that way, with prices in all the restaurants higher than a cat's back.

She made him a good breakfast, too-toast and coffee and eggs over easy.

He said he'd seen nothing but scrambled for years. Powdered scrambled.

Those couldn't be any too good.

He didn't talk while he ate, and he didn't look at her.

Myrna Louise didn't know what to do or say, so she hovered anxiously in the background, pouring more coffee Into his cup long before it was empty, offering to make more buttered toast or fry a few more eggs.

"Look," he said crossly, pushing his cup away before she could fill it again. "Don't fuss over me, Mama. I can't stand it when you fuss."

Myrna Louise's eyes clouded with tears, and she hung her head. "I was only trying to help," she said, her voice quavering. "I mean, I don't know how you expect me to act."

He turned on the charm at once, a trick he'd been able to perform at will since childhood, forcing his mother to smile through her tears in spite of herself.

"Treat me like I just got back from Istanbul, Mama."

"But I don't know anything at all about Istanbul."

He laughed. "Believe me. They probably don't have over-easy eggs there, either."

Diana brought a mug of coffee into the room and slammed it onto the coffee table in front of Brandon Walker. Davy, always attuned to his mother's moods, looked at her guardedly.

"Are you mad, Mom?" he asked.

"I'm not mad at anybody, Davy," she said, her tone contradicting the words. "Go get dressed. We'll drive out to Sells and see how Rita is."

Davy hurried away with the dog padding behind him.

"I'm sorry about last night, Diana," Brandon began. "It's just that, under the circumstances . . ."

"Forget it," she snapped, cutting him off in mid-apology.

"It doesn't matter."

But it did matter, at least to him. It had been late at night, some time after they came back from getting Davy's stitches. Davy was asleep in his bedroom, but the grown-ups were wide awake. They were sitting on the couch drinking lemonade and talking when the calm after the storm was suddenly too much. Diana dissolved into an unexpected squall of tears. It was natural for her to fall against Brandon Walker's shoulder, natural- for him to put a comforting arm around her.

The electricity had been there for him from the first moment he laid eyes on the woman. Holding her that way brought it all back to him in a rush.

He wanted her. God, how he wanted her, just like he'd wanted her years earlier when he was still married and she was pregnant as hell. The sweet, clean smell of her hair filled his nostrils. The touch of his fingertips on bare, smooth skin stirred his whole body and aroused a part of Brandon Walker that he kept on a very short leash.

He wasn't sure when the comforting arm he'd draped around her shoulder evolved into a caress, or when exactly he began to kiss that soft, sweet-smelling hair, but he was painfully aware of her abruptly sitting up straight and pushing him away.

"No," she said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Go now, please. just go away."

He was almost glad she'd stopped it when she did, before things got out of hand. He wanted her, but not like this, not when she was at the end of her emotional rope. Brandon Walker wanted her, and he wanted Diana Ladd to want him back.

But in the aftermath of that one unexpected kiss, she was overtaken by a sudden fit of unaccountable fury. She accused him of taking un advantage and ordered him out of the house. Walker simply refused to leave.

Telling her he wasn't going to leave her alone with an injured child no matter what, he kicked off his shoes and stretched his long frame out full length on her living-room couch. Short of using a gun, that didn't leave Diana many options. Still angry, she stalked off to bed.

During the night, they reached a truce of sorts. He insisted on getting up with her every time she went to check on Davy anyway.

Finally, at five in the morning, she knuckled under and gave him an alarm clock. Now, though, awake and sipping coffee, she seemed angry again, and Brandon didn't know what to do about it.

He looked around the room with its freshly stuccoed walls and open-beam ceilings, searching for a reasonable topic of discussion that would keep the conversation out of harm's way.

Hanging on the wall behind the couch was a basket Brandon recognized as a Papago maze with I'itoi standing in the cleft at the top of the design. He had seen Papago baskets like that before, but this one was unusual in that the design work was done in red rather than the traditional black.

"Great basket," he said.

Diana nodded. "It was a housewarming present from Rita when we first moved in here."

"I've never seen a red one before."

"They're fairly rare," she told him. "The color isn't dyed, it comes from a yucca root. Killing live yuccas to make baskets doesn't go over too well these days."

"It suits the room," he said stupidly, groping for something to say.

"It goes with the rest of the house."

Brandon Walker knew he must sound like a complete jackass, but talking about the basket seemed to have blunted the worst of Diana's anger.

should have seen it when we first moved in," Diana "It was awful. Rita was a huge help. Between the two of us, we managed to make the place habitable."

Brandon changed the subject. "I heard Davy telling the doctor that you're writing books. Is that true?"

Diana flushed. "I'm trying," she said. "Nothing published yet, but I'm working at it" Brandon frowned as a trace of memory surfaced.

"Isn't that what your husband ...?" He broke off the question as soon as he saw the pained expression on her face, but it was too late. The damage was done. He berated himself for blundering and making things infinitely worse rather than better.

"Yes," she said. "That's what Gary was studying before he died.

Writing. As a matter of fact, he told me that on our very first date That he was going to write the great American novel someday."

Brandon Walker thought he already knew the answer, but he asked the question anyway, just to be polite. "Did he?"

Diana Ladd stood up abruptly and swept both coffee cups off the table.

"No. Gary never finished anything he started," she said bitterly, heading toward the kitchen. "He had a very short attention span."

They were still in the booth at the I-Hop, drinking their eighth or ninth cup of coffee. The waitress was growing surly.

"you're shitting me!" Gary Ladd exclaimed in delight.

"you're going to be a writer, too?"

After hearing about Gary Ladd's Pulitzer Prize ambitions, Diana Lee Cooper shyly mentioned her own interest in writing. "It's what I've always wanted to do," she added, surprised to find herself confiding in this semi-stranger.

Diana's desire to write wasn't something she confessed to others openly or often. People in Joseph, Oregon, laughed sly at the very idea.

Here at the university, she felt unworthy, underqualified. But Gary Ladd didn't seem to share that opinion.

"Hey, that's great," he said, giving Diana's shoulder an encouraging pat accompanied by one of his engaging grins.

--What say we do it together-matching typewriters on a single table, right?"

She laughed and nodded. "Right."

From near the cash register, the waitress glared at them pointedly.

Garrison Ladd grabbed Diana's hand. "Come on," he said. "Let's go before they throw us out."

On the way outside, Diana glanced down at her watch.

"Oh, my God," she said in dismay. "I'm late." She started for her bike with Garrison Ladd right behind her.

"Late for what? Where are you going?"

"Ushering. I have to get home, change, and get back down here in less than an hour."

"Ushering?" he asked. "What's this about ushering?"

"At Robinson Hall. It's my second part-time job," she explained. "I make three dollars a night."

November's early darkness was settling over Eugene, bringing with it a chill winter rainstorm as she knelt on the wet ground and struggled with the stubborn lock on her bicycle chain.

"Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You work in the English Department fifteen hours a week, and you usher in the auditorium as well. Do you have any other jobs I don't know about?"

"Only the newspaper," she told him.

"What newspaper?"

"The Register-Guard. I deliver ninety-six papers during the week and a hundred-ten on Sundays."

"When do you find time to eat and sleep?" he asked.

"When I can. I told you, I have to pay my own way.

This is what it takes to stay in school."

"That may be, but you sure as hell don't have to ride that thing home in this downpour. Don't be stubborn. Let me load it into my van."

She accepted gratefully. The radio was on as they drove toward the rambling house off Euclid where Diana lived in a tiny apartment over a garage. They were almost there when the local announcer began a public-service listing of all the functions for that evening that had been canceled or postponed in a show of respect for the slain president.

Among them was the performance of the Youth Symphony scheduled for Robinson Hall.

"Damn." Diana bit her lip in disappointment and fought back tears.

There went another three bucks she wouldn't have come next payday.

Along with the other two she had missed by not working all afternoon at the department, payday would be very short indeed in a budget that was already tight right down to the last nickel. At this rate, how would she ever accumulate enough money to buy next semester's books?

"That means you're off tonight?" Garrison Ladd was saying.

Not trusting herself to speak, Diana nodded.

"What will you do instead?"

"Study, I guess," Diana answered bleakly. "I've got some reading to do."

"How about dinner?"

"Tonight? Isn't that . .

"Tacky?" he supplied with a wink. "You think just because somebody knocked off the president, the rest Of us shouldn't eat?"

"It does seem . . . well, disrespectful."

"From what I hear about JFK himself, he'd be the last one to want us missing out on a good time. Come on. I'll take you someplace special.

How about the Eugene Hotel?

They have terrific steaks there."

Diana found herself salivating at the very mention of the word steak.

She hadn't tasted one since the previous summer's rodeo-queen supper.

Her school budget seldom made allowances for hamburger, let alone steak.

She let herself be enticed.

All right," she said. "But I've never been to the Eugene Hotel. What should I wear?"

"We'll manage," he said.

Despite Iona's warnings about not inviting men up to her room, it didn't seem polite to leave Garrison Ladd waiting outside in the cold car while she went up to change. After all, he was an instructor at the university. Surely, someone like that was above reproach.

She started having doubts though when, after closing the apartment door behind him, he stopped just inside the threshold and didn't move.

Diana turned back and looked at him. "Have a seat," she said. "I'll go into the bathroom and change."

He studied her curiously. The undisguised appraisal in the look made her nervous. "What's the matter?"

"Come here," he said, crooking his finger at her.

"Just come here."

Against her better judgment, she did as she was told, walking toward him slowly, woodenly. What was going on? she wondered. Maybe her mother was right. Maybe she shouldn't be here in her room alone with this man.

Diana stopped when there was less than a foot between them. "What?" she asked.

"Has anyone ever told you how lovely you are?"

"Come on," she said, shaking her head. "Don't give me that old line."

She started to move away from him, but he caught her wrist, imprisoning her hand in his and drawing her closer.

With his other hand, he brushed the hair back from her face and then traced the slender, curving jaw with a gently caressing finger.

"It's not a line," he said. "You're beautiful."

"People in Joseph don't talk to the garbageman's daughter that way," she said stiffly. Tentatively, she tried to free her hand, but he didn't let it go.

No doubt about it. Her mother was right. She'd made a serious mistake in inviting him up here, and she didn't know how to get rid of him.

She tried again to loosen his grip on her wrist, but he held firm.

"They don't? How do they talk to her?"

Now Diana was genuinely scared. Her apartment was a long way from the main house. If she yelled for help, no one would hear her.

"Let me guess," Garrison Ladd continued, still holding her captive.

"They'd probably say something gross, like 'Fall down on your back, honey, and spread your legs."' At once hot, humiliating tears stung Diana's cheeks. This was the very thing she had hoped to escape by running away from Joseph, by running away from home. Those words, those exact same words, were ones her father had shouted at Iona in one of his drunken, raging tirades when neither one of them knew their daughter was in the house.

Too young to realize what was going on, Diana knew no words for what her father had done to her mother. She had hidden in the closet and waited until it was over, crying and praying that her father would die, that God would strike max Cooper dead on the spot, but, of course, He hadn't.

And now, here she was faced with those very words again, and with whatever else came with those words.

She squared her shoulders and prepared to fight. Running away hadn't done her any good if the words had found her anyway, searched her out here in Eugene in her own apartment. Maybe destiny wasn't something you could escape by running from one end of the state to the other.

but she sure as hell didn't have to go quietly.

"Let me go," she snapped. "You're hurting me."

"Not until you kiss me, Liza."

Liza! She felt as though he'd slapped her. Who the hell was Liza? An ex-girlfriend maybe? Had Gary Ladd mixed her up with someone else?

"My name's not Liza. Let me go!"

He smiled and effortlessly pulled her to him until her taut body was against his chest. "Haven't you ever heard' of Liza Doolittle, Liza?

She's a garbageman's daughter, too, you know. And my name is Henry Higgins, so what are You going to wear to the ball, my dear?"

He kissed her then, quickly, briefly--a brotherly kiss not even a garbageman's daughter could fault him for-and led her to the closet, where he began rummaging through her clothing, looking for an appropriate dress.

The rush of relief and gratitude that swept over Diana almost brought her to her knees. He hadn't meant her any harm. It had all been a game, genuine teasing. She wasn't used to that, and she didn't know how to handle it.

-Here we are." He held up the blue taffeta semiformal Diana's mother had made for her to wear to the prom.

"This should do nicely."

Gathering everything she needed into a bundle, Diana hurried into the bathroom to change, while Garrison Ladd lounged comfortably on her bigger-than-twin-but-less-than full-sized bed. The idea of him sitting there big as you please made her blush. Her mother had warned her about that, too, about letting men sit on your bed, but then what did her mother know?

As soon as Diana was dressed, they drove to Garrison's place, a two-bedroom apartment with a pool, emptied now for the winter. He invited her up, but she wasn't taking any more chances. She stayed in the car while he went inside to change. He came out wearing a tuxedo-his very own tuxedo. Except for Walter Brennan, maybe, no one in Joseph, Oregon, owned his own tuxedo.

They went to the hotel for a dinner of medium-rare steaks, lush salads, and huge baked potatoes complete with sour cream and chives. Feeling like Cinderella, Diana couldn't help noticing that Garrison Ladd paid more for that single steak dinner than she'd earn from a full week's worth of work, but that didn't keep her from enjoying herself They laughed at anyone and everyone, including one tearful waitress who acted as though it were inappropriate for anybody to be out on the town having such a gloriously good time with John F. Kennedy not yet in his grave.

Diana Lee Cooper didn't know when she'd ever had so much fun. She laughed until she cried, and then she laughed some more, and all the while the part of her that had never laughed before was falling more and more in love by the minute.

Finally, at midnight, she'd had enough. "I've got to go home and get some sleep," she announced. "I've got newspapers to deliver in the morning."

"No way," he told her. "I'm not letting you out of my sight. We'll stay up all night. When it's time to deliver your damn newspapers, I'll help you. How does that sound?"

At five O'clock in the morning, in a driving rain, the two of them delivered the black-banded newspapers that announced President John F. Kennedy's death. Garrison Ladd drove her around the route in his VW-Bus. Diana, barefoot but still wearing her blue dress, hopped in and out of the bus to Send the papers sailing through the air.

Gary Ladd was impressed that she never missed a single porch.

Afterward, back in her apartment, cold and wet and still laughing, she let him help her Out of her soaked clothes.

The wet taffeta was ruined, but Diana didn't care. She didn't look at it as he unzipped it and let it slip to the floor In a sodden heap.

Nothing mattered except this wonderful man she was with who had the ability to make her laugh and feel beautiful at the same time.

She barely noticed as he unfastened her bra and slipped her garter belt and panties down to the floor. She stepped delicately out of them and stood naked before him while he wrapped his arms around her, holding her close.

"You're shivering," he said. He kissed her once, a long, lingering kiss, and she responded eagerly. Playfully, he nibbled at her ear. It tickled, and she giggled, but then she caught herself. She realized what was happening and tried to pull away.

"Don't tease me," he whimpered urgently. "Please don't tease me."

She closed her eyes and let herself melt against him while the room whirled around her. She tried to block out the sickening memory Of her father's drunken voice, but it was all there again in her mind, not only the night she'd spent in the closet but also that other terrible long-ago night after the first pre-rodeo dance.

A few of the boys took her out behind the school and offered to show her exactly what she'd have to do to win.

They told her that any girl who came from the wrong side of the tracks wasn't going to make it to the top any other way. Somehow she escaped them. She ran all the way home, arriving in tears with her clothes half torn off.

And just when she got inside, closing the door behind her, just when she thought she was safe, Max Cooper materialized behind her and switched on the light. Drunk, he was enraged when he saw her clothes.

"Slut!" he shouted.

"You worthless, no-good slut! What the hell have you been up to?"

Desperate to get away, she darted past him up the stairs.

The booze slowed him down, and she got away clean, but Max plowed up the stairs after her. Upstairs, she locked herself in the bathroom and was sick, vomiting into the toilet. He banged on the door a couple of times. She heard him distantly, over the sound of her own retching.

At least he didn't break the door down. The wooden door kept his fists at bay, but his words found their mark all the same.

"You're a bitch, Diana Lee Cooper! A no-good bitch of a prick-tease!"

She was washing her face by then, staring at her ashen face in the bathroom mirror. She wouldn't be that, she vowed into the mirror. No matter what he called her, no matter what it was, she wouldn't ever be that.

"What did you say?" she asked vaguely.

She stood with her head thrown back, her wet hair dripping on the floor behind her. Without her being aware of it, Garrison Ladd had kissed his way down her yielding neck and across the gentle swell of her breast. He closed his lips around one delicate, upright nipple. She moaned with pleasure as wild sensation shot through her body.

Reluctantly, he let the nipple go. Straightening up, he crushed her against him while his breath came in short, harsh gasps. Through the confines of his trousers, she could feel his urgent hardness straining against her. She pulled back from him again for a moment, far enough away to look up at his face and see the blazing intensity in his eyes.

That was when the second realization hit her--Garrison Ladd wanted her.

Diana Lee Cooper was stunned by the unbridled passion in his wanting.

How had she allowed it to happen? How had she let him go this far?

Because it was too far-too late to tell him no, too late to make him stop. She remembered the promise she'd made, a sacred vow spoken to the frightened face of a girl reflected back in a pockmarked bathroom mirror while her father pounded on the door. There could be no turning back.

She reached up with both hands and pulled Garrison Ladd's face down until his lips once more grazed hers.

"I won't tease you," she whispered fiercely. "Not ever."

And she kept her word.

The nonpeople were very jealous of Little Bear and Little Lion. They wanted the boys' beautiful birds to use the feathers on their own arrows.

One night the boys' grandmother warned them, "Tomorrow the people will come here. They will kill me and try to steal your birds. You must take the birds far away from here and throw them off the mountains in the east."

The -next morning, it happened just as she said. The people came to the house and killed Wise Old Grandmother, but Little Bear and Little Lion escaped, taking their beautiful birds with them. Back then, the people had not yet lost the ability to follow tracks, so they followed the two boys across the desert.

As Little Bear and Little Lion started up the far mountain, they heard the angry people close behind them. Little Bear was too tired to go on.

"Here," he said to his brother. "You take my bird as well. I will wait here for the people. They may kill me, but at least the birds will be free." And that is what happened. Little Bear kept the people with him long enough for Little Lion to throw the beautiful birds with their multicolored feathers off the mountain. And that, nawaj, is the story of how Sunrise and Sunset got their colors.

They say a certain type of criminal always returns to the scene of his crime, and Andrew Carlisle fit that mold. He was curious. He wanted to know if anyone had discovered Margaret Danielson's body yet; not that he would actually have gone up the mountain to see for himself, but he couldn't resist pulling off into the rest area at Picacho Peak since it was on his way. He was rewarded by the collection of law-enforcement vehicles parked haphazardly around the picnic and playground area, which told him what he needed to know.

The highway patrol had cordoned off almost half the rest area, but a few tables were still available. He took his Thermos to one of those and settled down to watch the fun, which included several milling television cameramen, some reporters, and a few stray newspaper photographers.

"What's going on?" Andrew asked a man who came by lugging a huge television-equipment suitcase.

"An Indian killed a woman up there on the mountain," the guy said.

"They're just now bringing the body down."

An Indian? Carlisle thought. No kidding. They think an Indian did it?

He couldn't believe this stroke of luck. For the second time in as many chances, fate had handed over the perfect fall guy for something Carlisle himself had done, someone to take the blame. Sure, he'd gone to prison for Gina Antone, mostly because the cops thought he'd driven the truck that had inadvertently broken her neck. They had never suspected the real truth, not even that wise-ass of a detective, because if they had, it would have been a whole lot worse. Now, here he was again with somebody else all lined up to take the rap.

One thing did worry him a little. It hadn't taken long for the cops to find her. He hadn't expected them to work quite this fast, but he was prepared for it anyway. He was glad now that he'd taken the time to clean the bits of his flesh from under her fingernails. With something like that, you couldn't be too careful. His mentors in Florence had warned him not to underestimate cops. The crooked ones had a price-all you had to do was name it. Straight ones you had to look out for, the ones who were too dumb to take you up on it when you made them an offer they shouldn't refuse.

"Mom, if Rita dies, will we put a cross on the road where she wrecked the truck?"

They had just driven by the Kitt Peak turnoff on their way to Sells.

With all the emergency vehicles gone, there was no sign of the almost-fatal accident the previous afternoon.

"Probably," Diana answered, "but Rita isn't going to die. I talked to her sister this morning. She'll be fine."

"Does my daddy have a cross?"

The abrupt change of subject caused Diana to swing her eyes in her son's direction. The car almost veered off the road, but she caught it in time. "Why do you ask that?"

"Well, does he?"

"I suppose. At the cemetery. In Chicago."

"Have I ever been there?"

'No.

"Is that where he died?"

"No. Why are you asking all these questions?" Diana's answer was curt, her question exasperated.

"Did you know Rita puts a new wreath and a candle at the place where Gina died? She does that every year. Why don't we?"

"It's an Indian custom," Diana explained. "Papago custom. Your father wasn't a Papago."

"I thought you said I was going to turn into an Indian."

"I was kidding."

Davy fell silent for several miles, and his mother was relieved that the subject seemed closed., "Did you ever kill anything, Mom?" he asked at last. "Besides the snake, I mean."

Jesus! She had almost forgotten about the snake. It was two years now since the afternoon she was inside and heard Bone barking frantically out in the yard. Alarmed, she hurried out to check.

She found all three of them-boy, dog, and snake mutually trapped in the small area between the side of the house and the high patio wall. The rattlesnake, a fat four footer, had been caught out in the open sunning itself It's said that the first person can walk past a sleeping rattlesnake but a second one can't. Davy had walked past the drowsing snake unharmed and was now cornered on the rattler's far side. Bone, barking himself into a frenzy, was smart enough not to attempt darting past the now-coiled and angry snake.

Diana Ladd was usually scared witless of snakes. As a mother, this was her first experience in dealing with a life-or-death threat to her child. Instantly, she became a tigress defending her young.

"Don't move, Davy!" she ordered calmly, without raising her voice.

"Stand right there and don't you move!"

She raced back to the garage and returned with a hoe, the only weapon that fell readily to hand. She had a gun inside the house, a fully loaded Colt .45 Peacemaker, but she didn't trust herself with that, especially not with both Davy and the dog a few short feet away.

She had attacked the snake with savage fury and severed its head with two death-dealing blows. Only after it was over and Davy was safely cradled in her arms did she give way to the equally debilitating emotions of fear and relief.

"How come your face's all white, Mom?" Davy had asked. "You look funny. Your lips are white, and so's your skin."

"Well?" Davy prompted once more, jarring Diana out of her reverie.

"Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Ever kill anything besides the snake?"

"No," she said, "So help me God, I never did."

As the sun rose above her hospital room window, Rita's life passed by in drowsing review.

Traveling Sickness came to Ban Thak the year Dancing Quail was eight and again away at school. The sickness crept into the village with a returning soldier, and many people fell ill, including all of Dancing Quail's family, from her grandmother right down to little S-kehegaj.

Desperately ill herself, but somewhat less so than the others, Understanding Woman sent word to the outing matron asking that Dancing Quail be brought home from Phoenix to help. Understanding Woman also sent for a blind medicine man from Many Dogs village, a man whose name was S-ab Neid Pi Has, which means Looks At Nothing.

At fifteen, Looks At Nothing left home to work in AJo's copper mines.

Two years later, he was blinded by a severe blow to the head during a drunken brawl in Ajo's Indian encampment. The other Indian died.

Looks At Nothing, broken in body and spirit both, returned home to Many Dogs Village. The old medicine man there diagnosed his ailment as Whore-Sickness, which comes from succumbing to the enticing temptations of dreams, and which causes ailments of the eyes.

First Looks At Nothing was treated with ritual dolls.

When that didn't work, singers were called in who were good with Whore-Sickness. For four days, the singers smoked their sacred tobacco and sang their Whore-Sickness songs. When the singing was over, Looks At Nothing was still blind, but during the healing process he came to see that his life had a purpose. I'itoi had summoned him home, demanding that the young man turn his back on the white man's ways and return to the traditions of his father and grandfathers before him. In exchange, I'itoi promised, Looks At Nothing would become a powerful shaman.

By the time Understanding Woman summoned him to Ban Thak, Looks At Nothing, although still very young, was already reputed to be a good singer for curing Traveling Sickness. He came to Coyote Sitting, sang his songs, and smoked his tobacco, but unfortunately, he arrived too late.

Dancing Quail's parents died, but he did manage to cure both Understanding Woman and Little Pretty One. Looks was still there singing when Big Eddie Lopez, by the outing matron, brought Dancing Quail e from Phoenix.

Riding to Chuk Shon inside the train rather than on it, Dancing Quail was sick with grief With both her parents dead, what would happen if she had to live without her grandmother and her baby sister, too?

Soon, however, it was clear that Understanding Woman and Pretty One would recover. Dancing Quail was dispatched to pay Looks At Nothing his customary fee, which consisted of a finely woven medicine basket-medicine baskets were Understanding Woman's specialty-and a narrow-necked olla with several dogs representing Many Dogs Village carefully etched into the side.

Dancing Quail approached the medicine man shyly as he gathered up his remaining tobacco and placed it in the leather pouch fastened around his waist. At the sound of her footsteps, he stopped what he was doing.

"Who is it?" he asked, while his strange, sightless eyes stared far beyond her.

"Hejel Wi'ikam," she answered. "Orphaned Child. I have brought you your gifts."

Looks At Nothing motioned for her to sit beside him First she gave him the basket, then the olla. His sensitive fingers explored each surface and crevice. "Your grandmother does fine work," he said at last.

They sat together in silence for some time. "You are glad to be home?" he asked.

"I'm sorry about my parents," she said, "but I'm glad to be in Ban Thak. I do not like school or the people there.

Looks At Nothing reached out and took Dancing Quail's small hand in his, holding it for a long moment before nodding and allowing it to fall back into her lap.

"You will live in both worlds, little one," he said. "You will be a bridge, a puinthi."

Dancing Quail looked up at him anxiously, afraid he meant Big Eddie would take her right back to Phoenix, but Looks At Nothing reassured her. "'You will stay here for now. Understanding Woman will need your help with the fields and the baby."

"How do you know all this?" she asked.

He smiled down at her. "I have lost my sight, Hejel Wi'ikam," he said kindly, "but I have not lost my vision."

Fat Crack drove his tow truck south past Topawa on his fool's errand.

Rita had told him that Looks At Nothing still lived at Many Dogs Village across the border in Old Mexico.

The international border had been established by treaty between Mexico and the United States without either country acknowledging that their arbitrary decision effectively divided in half and disenfranchised the much older-nine thousand years older-Papago nation.

Because Many Dogs Village was on the Mexican side, Fat Crack would have to cross the border at The Gate-an unofficial and unpatrolled crossing point in the middle of the reservation. Once in Mexico, he would have to make his way to the village on foot, or perhaps one of the traders from the other side would offer him a ride.

Supposing Fat Crack did manage to find the object of his search, how would he bring the old man back to Rita's bedside in the Indian Health Service Hospital? According to Fat Crack's estimates, if Looks At Nothing were still alive, he would be well into his eighties. Such an old man might not be eager to travel.

The Gate was really nothing but a break in the six-strand border fence surrounded by flat open desert and dotted, on both sides, with the parked pickups of traders and customers alike. Owners of these trucks did a brisk business in bootleg liquor, tortillas, tamales, and goat cheese, with an occasional batch of pot thrown in for good measure.

Fat Crack approached one of the bootleggers and inquired how to find Looks At Nothing's house. The man pointed to a withered old man sitting in the shade of a mesquite tree.

"Why go all the way to his house?" the man asked derisively. "Why not see him here?"

Looks At Nothing sat under the tree with a narrow rolled bundle and a gnarled ironwood cane on the ground in front of him. As Fat Crack approached, the sightless old man scrambled agilely to his feet. "Have you come to take me to Hejel Wi'ikam?" he asked.

Fat Crack was taken aback. How did the old man know?

"Hejel Wi'ithag," he connected respectfully. "An old widow, not an orphaned child."

Looks At Nothing shook his head. "She was an orphan when I first knew her. She is an orphan still. Oi g hihm," he added. "Let's go."

Fat Crack helped the wiry old man climb up into the tow truck. How did Looks At Nothing know someone would come for him that day? Surely no one in Many Dogs owned a telephone, but the old man had appeared at The Gate fully prepared to travel.

Devout Christian Scientist that he was, Fat Crack was far too much of a pragmatist to deny, on religious grounds, that which is demonstrably obvious. Looks At Nothing, that cagey old shaman, would bear close watching.

Brandon Walker dreaded going home. He figured that after he'd spent the whole night AWOL, Louella would be ready to have his ears. He stopped in the kitchen long enough to hang his car keys on the pegboard and to pour himself a cup of coffee, steeling himself for the inevitable onslaught. Instead of being angry, however, when his frantic mother came looking for him, she was so relieved to see him that all she could do was blither.

"It's a piano, Brandon. Dear God in heaven, a Steinway!"

"Calm down. What are you talking about?"

"Toby. I worry about buying food sometimes, and here he goes and orders a piano. For his sister, the concert pianist, he told them.

His sister's been dead for thirty-five years, Brandon. What is Toby thinking or. What are we going to do?"

"Did the check clear?"

"No. Of course not. Do you know how much Steinways cost? The store called me and said there must be some mistake. I told them it was a mistake, all right."

"Where's Dad now?"

"Inside. Taking a nap. He said he was tired."

"Let's go, Mother," Brandon ordered. "Get your car."

This time he wasn't going to allow any argument.

"The car? Where are we going?"

"Downtown to the bank. We'll have to hurry. It's Saturday, and they're only open until noon. We're closing that checking account once and for all."

Louella promptly burst into tears. "How can we do that to your father, Brandon, after he's worked so hard all these years? It seems so ... so underhanded."

"How many Steinways do you want, Mom?" His position was unassailable.

"I'll go get my purse. Do you think he'll be all right here by himself if he wakes up?"

"He'll have to be. There's no one els- we can leave him with. We'll hurry, but we've both got to go to the bank."

It wasn't until he was left alone with the young deputy that Ernesto Tashquinth realized exactly how much trouble he was in. Come to think of it, the Pinal County homicide detective had been asking him some pretty funny questions: Why did he go up the mountain to check the spring in the first place? What was the woman's name again? How long had he known her? How well did he know her?

Ernesto tried to be helpful. He patiently answered the questions as best he could. The buzzards, he told them.

He had seen the circling buzzards, and he was afraid if something was dead up there, the smell might come down to the picnic-table area and get him in trouble with his boss.

But now the detective had gone up the mountain to oversee the removal of the body, and Ernesto was left with a young hotshot deputy who couldn't resist swaggering.

"How come you bit that poor lady's boob off, Big Man?

Do you know what happens to guys like you once you're inside?"

Ernesto didn't need the deputy to draw him any pictures.

He remembered all too well a former schoolmate from Sacaton who, accused of raping a white woman, had turned up dead in a charco, suffocated on his own balls.

"I want a lawyer," Ernesto said quietly. "I don't have to say anything more until I have a lawyer."

"The judge will be only too happy to appoint you one, if you live that long," the deputy told him with a leering grin. "He'll do it by Monday or Tuesday at the latest, but it's a long time between now and then, chief If I were you, I'd be good-very, very good."

They brought squares of Jell-O for lunch, and Juanita tried to feed them to her, but Rita shook her head and closed her eyes once more.

The next years passed happily for Dancing Quail, although no one called her that anymore. She became Understanding Woman's ehkthag, her shadow, Dancing Quail kept busy caring for her little sister, looking after the fields, and helping her grandmother make baskets and pottery.

At age six S-kehegaj herself went off to school, taking her turn at riding to Chuk Shon in Big Eddie's wagon. Pretty One thrived in the new environment. She returned home the following summer wishing to be called only by her new Anglo name, Juanita, and refusing to part with her stiff leather shoes.

When Dancing Quail's young charge went off to school, no one thought to send her. People forgot that Dancing Quail was little more than a child herself. By then, her grandmother was so frail that she needed someone with her most of the time. Dancing Quail was happy to be that someone.

She spent all her waking hours with Understanding Woman, caring for her and reaming whatever lessons her grandmother cared to teach.

Dancing Quail was fourteen and had passed her first menstruation with all due ceremony the summer Father John rode into her life. He had hair the color of autumn grass and funny red skin that sometimes peeled and flaked off in the hot sun.

Father John came to Ban Thak because the sisters at Topawa had sent him.

They worried that Alice Antone's orphaned daughter was growin up too much under her grandmother's pagan influence. The girl never came to church anymore, not even at Christmas and Easter. The sisters sent Father John in hopes that by offering the girl a cleaning job at the mission in Topawa, they might also coax her back into the fold.

Father John, fresh out of seminary, was an earnest young man on his first assignment. When he saw Rita with her long black hair flowing loose and glossy around her shoulders, when he saw her dancing brown eyes and bright white teeth against tawny skin, he thought her the loveliest, most exotic creature he had ever encountered. He was intrigued by the fact that, despite the heat, she didn't wear shoes.

When he rode into the village in his dusty, coughing touring car, she ran beside it barefoot, along with the other village children, laughing and making fun of him because they could run faster than he could drive.

He spoke to Understanding Woman that afternoon as best he could.

Unable to communicate in a common language, they were forced to call upon Dancing Quail to translate in her own inadequate English. She giggled as she did so.

Father John trotted out all his best arguments, including the one he thought would make the most difference. "If you work at the mission," he said, "the sisters will pay you money so you can buy nice things for yourself and for your grandmother."

"Where?" she asked. "Where will I buy these things?

The trading post is far from here. I have no horse and no car."

I could give you a ride sometimes," he offered.

,No," Dancing Quad said decisively. "I will stay here."

"What did he say?" Understanding Woman asked anxiously. There had been several exchanges during which Dancing Quail had translated nothing.

"He wants me to work- at the mission. I told him no. MY place is here with you."

"Good," Understanding Woman said, patting her young granddaughter's hand. "It is better that you stay in Ban Thak."

A Mormon missionary, dressed in a stiffly pressed white shirt and wearing a carefully knotted tie, brought word to Rebecca Tashquinth that her son, S-abamk, the Lucky One, was being held in the Pinal County jail in Florence and that he would most likely be charged with the brutal murder of Margaret Danielson. It was thought, the missionary reported dutifully, that the woman had been raped as well, but no one knew that for sure. Not yet.

Rebecca was well aware of the kinds of lawyers local judges appointed for Indian defendants, particularly those accused of serious crimes against Anglos. She didn't waste time on a useless trip to Florence.

The guards at the jail wouldn't have let her see her son anyway.

Instead, she got in the car and drove to Ahngam, Desert Broom Village, to speak to her father.

Eduardo Jose was a man of some standing in the community, a man with both livestock and a thriving bootleg-liquor business. Eduardo knew how to deal with Anglos. He had even hired himself an Anglo lawyer once to help him when the cops had caught him transporting illegal tequila across nonreservation land to the annual O'odam Tash celebration in Casa Grande.

If anyone could help her son in all this, Rebecca's father was the man who could do it.

Diana was still angry with Rita when she got to the hospital. She resented Davy's questions about his father, questions he had never asked before. She blamed Rita for bringing all that ancient history back to the foreground, but when she saw the old woman, seemingly shriveled in the bed and swathed in bandages, she forgot her anger.

Rita's sister, Juanita, was sitting by the bed when Diana entered the room, but she rose at once and went out into the hallway. Diana knew Juanita didn't like her, and she had long since ceased worrying about it. If Gary's parents didn't understand why she and Rita were inseparable, why should Rita's relatives do any better?

Rita opened her eyes when Diana stepped to the head of the bed and touched her good hand.

"How's Davy?" Rita asked.

"He's fine. He has a few stitches in his head, that's-" "Is he here?

Can I see him?"

"The doctor won't let him come into the room. He's too young. You have to be sixteen."

Rita reached for her water glass and took a tentative sip through the straw. "Yesterday was the anniversary," she said quietly. "Davy went with me. He may ask questions."

Diana laughed uneasily. "He already has, Rita. - It's all right. I'm getting a lot closer to being able to answer them."

"He'll want you to put up a cross. For his father, I mean.

A cross with a wreath and some candles."

"I can't do that."

In Diana Ladd's mixed bag of fallen-away Catholic religion, suicides were never accorded full death benefits. She had told Gary's parents to bury him wherever they liked, but as far as she was concerned, Garrison Ladd still didn't qualify for a memorial wooden cross and never would.

"Why didn't you tell me you were a virgin?"

-You didn't ask."

Diana Lee Cooper and Garrison Ladd cuddled together on Diana's narrow three-quarter bed nestled like a pair of stacked teaspoons. With his back pressed against the wall and his head propped up on one elbow, Gary's other hand glided up and down Diana's slender back. He liked the feel of smooth skin stretched taut over backbone and rib and the gentle curve of waist that melted into the small Of her back. He liked fingering the matching indentations of dimples that marked the top of her buttocks. Most of all, he liked the fact that she didn't warn his hand away from places most other girls wouldn't let him touch.

Diana Lee Cooper lay on her side, head on a pillow, with One arm dangling loosely Off the edge of the bed. Unsure of herself, Diana worried that perhaps it hadn't been all Gary had expected. "Was I all right?" she asked.

Garrison Ladd laughed out loud. "It was more than all right." He kissed the back of her neck. "The boys in Joseph must not have been paying attention. "The boys in Joseph called me names," Diana replied grimly.

"You're kidding.- She shook her head. The boys had called her names, but they were pikers compared to her father. Max Cooper was the champion name-caller of all time.

She turned so she could look Gary Ladd full in the face.

Maybe this man who, like her, also hated his father, could help her decode her own, help her understand that looming darker presence who even now reached out across the state and attacked her with bruising words far worse than his punishing fists.

"My father was the worst," she said, carefully controlling her voice.

"'Cunt' happened to be his personal favorite."

Gary Ladd shook his head in disbelief "Your father called you that to your face?"

"Yes."

I don't know."

She suspected it was because calling her that robbed her of her books and dignity and cut her down to size. While she still mulled the question, Gary Ladd lost interest in the conversation. He rolled Diana over on her back so he could caress her full breasts and run his hands up and down the ladder of ribs above her smoothly flat abdomen.

He twisted the curly auburn pubic hairs around the tips of his fingers and touched what lay concealed beyond those Curiously inviting hairs.

He waited to see if she would object and move his probing fingers away.

Some girls did, even after screwing their brains out, but Diana didn't.

She lay with her eyes closed, her body quiet and complacent beneath his touch.

Diana Ladd was the girl of his dreams. How could he have been so lucky?

"What brought you to Eugene?" he asked, wanting to delay a little before taking her again. "How'd you get here?"

"By horse," she answered.

He checked her expression to see if she was joking, but her face was unsmiling, impassive.

"Come on. You're kidding. You rode all the way across Oregon from Joseph to here on a horse?"

"My mother got me the horse, a beautiful sorrel quarter horse," she said. "His name was Waldo. Waldo was my ticket out of town."

Diana came home from school carrying an armload of books, half of them textbooks and the others from the library. She found old Mr. Deeson's pickup, with horse trailer attached, parked in front of their house.

The presence of a neighbor's pickup wasn't particularly unusual.

Chances were, Mr. Deeson had stopped off to unload some garbage, and her mother had invited him in for a cup of coffee or freshly baked cookies.

She often encouraged customers to stop by for half an hour or so in order to stave off her ever-present loneliness.

Diana hurried past the trailer with its stamping load of horseflesh.

In the kitchen, she found George Deeson and her mother chatting over coffee, just as she'd expected. What she hadn't expected was the sudden silence occasioned by her arrival.

"There you are," Iona said eagerly. "We've been waiting for you to come home. I've got a surprise for you."

"What kind of surprise?"

"Out front. I thought you'd want to unload him yourself "

For a moment, Diana wasn't sure she'd heard correctly.

"Unload him?" she repeated. "You mean the horse? That's the surprise?"

"Your Granddaddy Dale did me a favor once way back when," George Deeson drawled. "I never did quite get around to paying him back once I got on my feet. My brother gave me this here horse out yonder, and Waldo-that's his name by the way-was just standing around in my Pasture, taking up room and eating my hay.

"The girl who had him before, my niece, I'm Sorry to say, didn't do justice by him a'tall. All she ever did was race barrels. Take him out, run him around those barrels hell-bent-for-election, and then lock him right back up in his Stall- A good horse needs more than that, needs some companionship, needs some time off. Know what I mean?"

Diana nodded, but she didn't understand, not really.

George Deeson continued on as though she did.

"It occurred to me that maybe you folks could make good use of him.

What do you think, girl? Would you like a horse?"

Diana staggered to the table and put down her load of books. She had long ago shed the childish dream of ever having a horse of her own.

The Coopers simply didn't have the money. Not only was there the initial purchase price, there was also the ongoing expense of feed and upkeep and tack. In addition, Max Cooper had told his daughter over and over again that he didn't like horses and wouldn't ever have one on his place.

"We can't afford it, can we, Mother?"

"I already told you, girl, that there horse is free," George Put in.

"You don't have to pay a dime for him. I've got the papers right here in my pocket, all ready to sign over to YOU."

"We'll manage," Iona told her daughter firmly. "You just sign the papers and don't worry about it."

"But what'll Daddy do? He always said - . ."

"Never mind what your father said," Iona countered.

"I'll handle him. You go ahead and sign the papers."

Within minutes, the bill of sale was signed, and Waldo, a registered quarter-horse gelding, belonged to Diana Lee Cooper.

"I reckon we'd otta go unload him now," George Deeson said. "He'll ride in a trailer all right as long as it's movin', but he don't much like standin' around being cooped up in 'em for very long afterward.

Me neither, if you know what I mean, missus."

George Deeson picked up his battered straw hat from the floor next to his chair and led the way out to the pickup and trailer. Waldo came complete with a whole set of tack-horse blankets, two saddles, and several bridles, all of which George Deeson unloaded in a heap on the Coopers' front porch.

"Are you sure all this comes with the horse?" Diana asked.

"Sure, I'm sure," he told her. "Now your mama said we should take Waldo and all his stuff out to the old barn. She says she's fixed him up a stall."

George eased the horse out of the trailer and handed the reins over to Diana. "You'd better try leadin' him. He'll need to be gettin' used to you, and you'd better plan on spendin' plenty of time with him, too."

Diana led the way around to the old barn where a newly cleaned stall was waiting. When had her mother had time to do so much extra work along with all the other things that demanded her attention?

"Know anything about takin' care of horses?" George Deeson asked.

"Not very much. I've never owned one before. Some of my friends have horses, but I don't get to ride very often."

"Reckon I'll be over of a Saturday mornin' to give you a lesson or two as long as your mama throws in some of her coffee and homemade biscuits."

"How come, Mr. Deeson? I don't understand."

"How come? Why, girl, hasn't your mama told you yet?

Me and her's gonna turn you into a rodeo queen."

"Me?" Diana asked in stunned disbelief "Yup, you. You're how old now?

Thirteen?"

Diana nodded.

"It'll take around four years, I reckon, give or take." He leaned over and studied Diana's face.

"Yup," he said, "this girl's got good bones. She'll do just fine, but take it from me, missus, them braids gotta go. Braids don't win no prizes these days, although they used to. They sure enough did, and not so very far back, neither."

That evening, after supper, Iona cut off Diana's braid.

The following day, when school got out, Iona drove Diana to the drugstore in La Grande and bought her rollers, hair spray, combs and brushes, and makeup. When Diana came downstairs the next morning wearing her first tentative attempt at makeup, she waited for her father to say something, but he was strangely silent on the subject, almost as though he didn't notice.

The next Saturday morning and for almost every Saturday morning that followed during the next four years, George Deeson appeared at the Coopers' house bright and early to spend hours working with Diana and Waldo. When it was too cold to be outside, they worked in the barn.

He taught her saddling and bridling and grooming. Together, Waldo and George Deeson taught Diana barrel racing. George taught her how to sit astride the horse so girl and horse were a single, symbiotic unit. He taught her how to read Waldo's moods, how to calm him down during rumbling thunderstorms and barrages of exploding firecrackers, how to coax him in and out of unfamiliar horse trailers.

George Deeson taught Diana self-reliance, encouraged her to take Waldo off on long, solitary trail rides to one of the fifty-two alpine lakes in the Blue Mountains surrounding Joseph, Oregon. There, with only her horse and her books,

alone sometimes for days at a time, Diana could read and fish and care for her horse far away from Iona and Max Cooper's day-to-day conflicts.

And those trips weren't good only for Diana, either.

Starved for human companionship by his previous owner, Waldo thrived on the generous doses of attention Diana lavished on him.

But more than all that, George Deeson educated Diana Lee Cooper in something she never could have learned from her own mother. George Deeson taught Diana presence, schooled her in how to carry herself He tutored her in the art of smiling and helped her master the rodeo-queen wave. Most of all, he infected her with his unshakable belief that one day she really would be queen of the Chief Joseph Days Rodeo.

George Deeson taught Diana all that and more. It didn't dawn on her until years later that he never told her why.

And she didn't ask.

Chapter Eight

LOOKS AT NOTHING rode in the truck without saying a word, offering no explanation and asking for none. Fat Crack did the same.

Halfway back to Sells, a call came in from Law and Order on the truck's two-way radio. The tribal-police dispatcher told Fat Crack that he was needed near the QuiJotoa Trading Post, where an Anglo lady's Winnebago had broken down on her way to Rocky Point. She wanted a tow back home to Casa Grande.

Fat Crack was disappointed. He had wanted to go along to the hospital and watch the old medicine man strut his stuff. Now, that would be impossible.

In the early afternoon, Fat Crack came through the low pass outside Wedged Turtle Village, which Anglos can Sells. As the truck slowed for the cattle guard marking the village boundary, Looks At Nothing held out his hand.

"Stop here," he said.

"My aunt is in the hospital," Fat Crack objected. "Let me take you there."

"No," Looks At Nothing responded. "I will go to her later. Not now.

Let me out."

Fat Crack stopped, and Looks At Nothing climbed down.

"But there's nothing here," Fat Crack said through the open window.

"At least let me take you to the trading post."

Looks At Nothing shook his head. "I have what I need," he said. "I will wait under a tree until it is time."

As Fat Crack drove away, he glanced back in the rearview mirror. Looks At Nothing, shimmering like a ghost in the rising midday heat, poked around with his cane in the nearby dirt and loose gravel. Then, after locating the soft shoulder of the road, the old man carefully made his sightless way down the steep embankment, heading unerringly toward the shade of a small grove of trees.

Fat Crack shook his head. Some things defied explanation. This was certainly one of them.

Long ago, a medicine man raised his daughter alone.

She was good and beautiful and hardworking. The wise man taught his daughter that she must not laugh at silly things, or men would think she was too easy.

When the girl grew up and was ready to marry, her father said she would marry whoever could make her laugh. First Coyote tried, and then Whippoorwill, and even Horned Toad, but none of them could make her laugh.

One day Coyote was sitting on a hill when he saw the girl he still wanted to marry. She was walking around gathering wood, and her burden basket was walking behind her. Burden baskets never walk on their own sticks, but, as I told you, the girl's father was a very powerful medicine man.

Coyote kept watching. The girl gathered a large stack of wood and loaded it into the basket, and still the burden basket followed her.

As she started back to the village, Coyote came down to where she and her basket were walking.

"So," Coyote said. "Your basket walks around."

As soon as he said that, the basket stopped walking and turned into a mountain-Giwho Tho'ag or Quijotoa, as the whites call it.

And that, nawoj, is the story of Burden Basket Mountain.

Early afternoon passed with no word from Fat Crack and Looks At Nothing.

Worrying that perhaps the medicine man would not come, Rita closed her eyes once more.

By age sixteen, most Papago girls were married. With the outing matron's help, educated girls could now find domestic jobs in Tucson, Phoenix, and even California.

Girls like that were especially prized wife material on the cash-poor reservation, but Dancing Quail was no prize. No one wanted to marry her.

Earnings from domestic service were far more than Dancing Quail made selling baskets and ollas. Not only that, anyone marrying Hejel Wi'ikam, as people now called her, would assume the added burden of her ready-made family-a blind, useless old grandmother and an arrogant younger sister named Juanita.

Once more the determined Franciscan sister saw a chance to redeem Alice Antone's elder daughter. Once more they sent Father John to carry their message.

"Come to Topawa and work in the mission," he said.

"The sisters will teach you how to clean houses so that one day you, too, will be able to work in Phoenix or Tucson."

For the first time, even Dancing Quail saw her lack of education as a liability. "But what of my grandmother?"

she asked. "I can't leave her here alone in Ban Thak."

For this, Father John had a prerehearsed answer. "Bring her along.

There's a little house near the mission where you can both live. She won't be far away. You'll be able to care for her and still work and earn money."

Dancing Quail considered the offer for several long moments. Without men to look after their fields and livestock, she and Understanding Woman had struggled desperately just to survive. White man's money was the key, and the girl knew it.

"How would I get her there?" she asked. "My grandmother is old. It's a long way from Coyote Sitting to Burnt Dog Village."

"Don't worry," Father John told her. "Pack your things.

In two days, I'll come back and take both of you in my car."

Dancing Quail was dubious. "What if she won't go?"

But the old woman surprised everyone and voiced no objection. It was time her granddaughter married. Burnt Dog Village offered far more potential suitors than Coyote Sitting.

With Dancing Quail's help, Understanding Woman began to pack. One by one, she gathered her possessions and placed them in two old-fashioned crossed-stick burden baskets. The most treasured item was Understanding Woman's only remaining medicine basket, the last one she had made before her eyesight failed.

"Ni-ka'amad," Understanding Woman said. "Granddaughter, do you still have the medicine basket I gave you that time?"

Dancing Quail hung her head in shame, grateful for once for her grandmother's blindness. She had never admitted to' anyone how she had lost Understanding Woman's beautifully colored spirit rock or how the school attendants had taken the medicine basket away from her as soon as they found it rolled up in her blanket. They had confiscated it, and she never saw it again.

"No, ni-kahk," Dancing Quail said softly. "No, Grandmother. I lost it long ago."

She was afraid her grandmother would think she hadn't appreciated the gifts, hadn't treated them with proper respect.

"The rock, too?" Understanding Woman asked.

"The rock, too."

For a time, the old woman sat fingering that final medicine basket It wasn't nearly as well made as earlier ones had been. The seams were crooked. Some of the weaves were as rough-edged as if the work had been done by a rank beginner. Rough or not, though, this had been her own special basket, the one she had kept entirely to herself.

Instead of packing it along with her other household goods, she placed it on the ground beside her.

"It does not matter, ni-ka'amad," Understanding Woman said. "I will teach you to make another."

The next day, when Father John drove up in his spindlewheeled touring car, the two women waited outside their adobe house with two fully loaded burden baskets standing between them.

"Ready?" he said.

In the two years since first coming to the reservation, Father John had learned to speak some Papago. He sensed that the old woman had never ridden in an automobile before and that she was anxious about it.

Dancing Quail went to load the burden baskets while Father John eased Understanding Woman to her feet and helped her to the car. "Are you afraid, Grandmother?" he asked.

The old woman shook her head. "No," she answered, although her voice quivered. "I am not afraid."

Just then something slipped from her hand. She gasped and bent to retrieve it, but the small basket rolled out of the car onto the ground, spilling as it fell.

Father John quickly gathered the fallen basket and its scattered contents, scooping things back into it almost without looking-a tiny straw doll with a strange clay face, a small fragment of broken geode, and something that looked like a Thank of human hair, a chipped arrowhead.

The old woman's hands were still desperately searching the floorboard of the car when Father John placed the restored basket safely under them.

"Is this what you're looking for?" he asked.

Understanding Woman nodded gratefully and clutched the basket to her shriveled breast as though it were a precious newborn baby.

"Yes," she murmured, settling back. "Thank you."

Rita had no idea Juanita had gone home. When she opened her eyes, she saw a brown-robed figure sitting there in her sister's place, head bowed in the afternoon sun. She knew at once who it was, although she hadn't seen him for twenty years. In the mid-fifties, she had gone to San Xavier for a Saint Francis feast and run into him by accident not realizing that after years in California, he had transferred back to the Papago.

Unaware she was awake, Father John's beads cocked quietly in liver-spotted hands as he intoned a whispered rosary in her behalf Silently, she examined every minute detail of him-parchment-like skin stretched across bony knuckles, sparse hair white now rather than the color of dried grass. Like his hands, the bald place on his head was dotted with large brown spots. Underneath the brown cassock, he was precariously thin.

He's old now, too, Rita thought. Were both old. She said, "Are you still trying to save my soul?"

Father John's head jerked up at the sound of her voice.

"And mine," he answered quietly. "Yours and mine."

She turned her face to the wall, surprised that after all this time unbidden tears still sprang to her eyes at the mere sound of his voice.

What was he doing here in the hospital room with her? How had he found her? She had never asked for his help. Who had called him?

"Your sister called me," he said, answering the unspoken question.

"After what happened to Gina years ago, I asked Juanita to let me know if anything..."

"Go away," Rita said, refusing to turn and face him again.

"But ...

"Go away," she insisted.

She heard the heavy swish of his robe as he rose to his feet. Beads rattled when he dropped them into a pocket.

"If there's ever anything I can do ...

Still she didn't look at him.

"Ni-gm hu wabsh oan," he began. "Forgive me. Dancing Quail, please forgive me."

Rita didn't answer. Father John left, closing the door gently behind him. Afterward, Rita tried to blot him from her mind, but he wouldn't leave. He was there, walking around in her soul, not as he was now, old and liverspotted, but young again, tall and straight, with a headful of palomino-colored hair.

Before he visited the storage locker, Andrew Carlisle stopped at Woolworth's and bought himself a long blond wig, a selection of makeup, and some suitable women's clothing, including a frilly blouse, an obscenely padded bra, and a pair of thongs. He had concluded it would probably be best if a woman showed up at the locker, and the clothing would come in handy for his private fund-raising program later on in the day.

The wig served a dual purpose. It concealed his newly achieved baldness, and it also protected the tender, underexposed skin from the glaring June sun. The few minutes he'd spent outside at Picacho Peak had given him a good start on a painful sunburn.

He used a discreet stop at a gas station to change clothes.

He went into the men's room as a man and came out as a woman.

Fortunately, no one was watching, but when he arrived at U-Stor-It-Here off Fort Lowell and Alvernon, Andrew Carlisle almost laughed aloud at his having taken such elaborate precautions. The woman in the RV-turned office waved him through the open gate without a second glance, no questions asked.

Carlisle enjoyed the anonymity of being a nameless, faceless woman as he sorted through the locker and inventoried his own equipment. It was almost as if he were someone else checking through a stranger's possessions.

The survival gear was all there. He opened the hasp held lid on the metal fifty-five-gallon drum and looked through the freeze-dried food he kept there as well as the water-purification equipment and tablets.

He had no intention of allowing the adventure of a lifetime to be short-circuited by a raging case of diarrhea brought on by drinking giardia-contaminated water.

Other than noticing his survival equipment and commenting on it, his mother hadn't messed with any of it. Carlisle was grateful for that.

Good for My ma Louise. Maybe she was actually getting a little smarter with age, although he 'doubted it.

Andrew had always been a bright boy-he took after his father, Howard, in the brains department. He aced his way through every private school in which his ambitious grandmother had enrolled him. He knew he was smart, and he knew equally well that his mother wasn't. Her overwhelming stupidity was always both a shameful burden and a mystery to him.

While still a child, he wondered how his father had ever become involved with fifteen-year-old Myrna Louise in the first place. Only in adulthood did he finally conclude that basic good looks and raw sex appeal were his mother's main assets. Were in the past and remained so in certain geriatric quarters. After all, she had reeled Jake Spaulding in without the least difficulty. Myrna Louise's big problem was always keeping a man once she got him.

In addition to stupidity, that was Myrna Louise's major flaw--she had never learned the meaning of power or how to use it. Her son had, certainly not in his undergraduate days at Southern Cal and not in the rarefied and surprisingly easy Ph.D. program at Harvard, either, a school where he once again took top honors. No, Andrew Carlisle learned the basics of power, about the granting and withholding of favors, about exploiting both the weak and the powerful, during his years in prison at Florence, during his post-Ph.D. program, as he called it.

Nobody really expected that he'd be sent to prison. That didn't usually happen to educated white men no matter what their crime, but go to prison he did. He left the courthouse with the searing image of an awkwardly pregnant but triumphant Diana Ladd burned into his memory.

If she had dropped it, if she hadn't kept pressing the cops and the prosecutors, no one would have given a damn about Gina Antone. Diana Ladd was the one person who had cost him those precious years out of his life. He would see that she paid dearly for it.

At first he merely wanted her dead, her and the child she carried as well. He employed vivid fantasies of what he'd do to her in order to dull the pain of what was happening to him during his own brutal initiation to prison life.

Over the years, he'd refined his thinking about exactly what he wanted from Diana Ladd. The Margaret Danielsons of the world were useful in the short term, good for immediate gratification, but they afforded little genuine satisfaction. Real vengeance, authentic eye-for-an-eye-type vengeance, demanded more than that. Whatever price he exacted from Diana Ladd would have to be equal to that required of him by those thugs in the prison-absolute submission and unquestioning obedience, no more, no less. The key to that would be her child....

With some difficulty, Carlisle roused himself from contemplation. He wondered uneasily how long he'd been standing, lost in thought, in that overheated storeroom.

Slipping in and out of his imagination like that was dangerous. He would have to pay more attention, keep a better grip on what he was doing. The ability to deliberately disassociate himself from reality was a necessary survival skill in prison, but letting it sneak up on him unawares on the outside could cause trouble.

Even so, thinking about Diana Ladd was sensuously seductive, irresistible. Knowingly now, he let himself slip back into the dream.

Where would he take her? he wondered idly. Where would he have the time-it would take some time, of course-4o do all he wanted, to bring the bitch to her knees?

The answer came in such a brilliant flash of inspiration that it seemed he must have known it all along. Thinking about it made him giddy. It was so right, so perfectly appropriate to go back to the place Garrison Ladd had shown him, to use the man's own pitiful excuse at research to destroy his entire family, both widow and child. How wonderfully appropriate.

Carlisle took one last careful look around the storeroom.

He had moved all the necessary equipment into one corner so it would be easily accessible and could be gathered at a moment's notice, but except for a hunting knife, he didn't take any of it along with him in Jake Spaulding's Valiant.

Not right then. It wasn't time yet.

He went out and closed the door behind him, locking it with a real sense of purpose and anticipation. All he had to do now was find Diana Ladd and that lump of a baby of hers. The child must be six years old by now. Once he did that, the rest would take care of itself All things come to them who wait.

Dr. Rosemead said you had to be sixteen years old to visit with the patients in their rooms. While his mother was down the hall in Rita's room, Davy waited in the busy lobby. He watched with interest as a very sunburned white man came in through the doors and hurried to the desk. A thick curtain of silence fell over the room.

"I'm looking for a patient named Rita Antone," the man said loudly, glancing down at a small notebook he carried.

"Who?" the Indian clerk asked.

"Rita Antone," he repeated. "An old lady who was hurt in a car wreck yesterday."

"I don't know her," the clerk said.

Davy couldn't believe his ears. This was the very same clerk who had, only minutes before, given his mother the number to Rita's room.

"They told me she came here by ambulance. Did she die?"

"I don't know," the clerk repeated blankly.

With an impatient sigh, the man gave up, stuffed the notebook back in his pocket, and retreated the way he had come. Almost without realizing what he was doing, Davy followed the man outside and caught up with him as he climbed into his car.

"I know Rita," Davy said.

Surprised, the man swung around and looked down at him. "You do?

Really?"

Davy nodded. "That woman in there told a lie. Rita is too in there.

My mom's with her."

The hot sun shone on Davy's stitches, making them itch.

Unconsciously, he scratched them.

"Wait a minute," the man said suspiciously, kneeling and staring at the sutured wound. "Wait just one minute.

What happened to your head?"

"I cut it. Yesterday."

"How?"

"When the truck turned over, I guess."

"Rita Antone's truck?" the man asked.

Davy nodded, wondering how the man knew about that.

"So you must be the boy who told my friend about the ambulance on the mountain?"

"You know the man in the red car?" Davy returned.

"As a matter of fact, I do," the man said with a smile.

"You're actually the person I wanted to see. Let's go over there in the shade and talk." They left the man's car and headed toward a mesquite-shaded concrete bench just outside the hospital door. "What's your name?"

Davy.

"Davy what?"

"Davy Ladd."

"And where do you live, Davy?"

"In Tucson."

"What's your mother's name?"

"Diana."

The man had taken the notebook back out of his pocket and was scribbling furiously in it. Now, he paused and frowned, cocking his head to one side. "What's your daddy's name?"

"I don't have a daddy," Davy told him. "My daddy's dead."

"I'll be damned!" the man exclaimed. "You're Garrison Ladd's son, aren't you!"

Davy could hardly believe his ears. He knew from his grandmother's Christmas letters that Garrison was his father's name, but he had never heard it spoken by anyone other than his mother when she was reading those letters aloud. His blue eyes grew large.

"You mean you knew my daddy?"

"I sure did," the man answered. "We had a class together at the U back when I still thought I was going to be a novelist when I grew up. I guess Gary did, too. We were both wrong."

"You mean my daddy wanted to write books?"

The man looked startled. "Sure. Didn't you know that?"

"I don't know anything about my daddy. He died before I was born."

For a moment, the man's eyes grew serious, and then he nodded. "I'll tell you what, Davy, you tell me what you know about Rita Antone, and I'll tell you what I know about your father. Deal?"

He held out his hand, and the boy placed his own small one in it.

"Deal," Davy said gravely, and they shook on it.

Louella Walker sat up straight and chatted almost hopefully as they returned from their brief trip to the bank. The lady there had been most helpful.

"The same thing happened to my grandmother," Anna Bush had said sympathetically, when they explained the situation. She graciously made arrangements to drop service charges on the bounced Steinway check.

"The only sensible thing to do is to start a new account with just your signature and your son's on it, if that's all right."

In the end, that's what they did.

"She was very nice," Louella was saying to her son as they drove home, "although I still feel a little underhanded.

It's like I'm robbing your father of his dignity."

She said that as they turned off Swan onto Fifth and came within sight of their own driveway three blocks away.

Brandon saw the problem long before Louella did.

"Oh, my God!" he muttered grimly.

"What's the matter?"

"My car," he said. "The department's car. It's gone."

As a homicide detective, he took his county-owned vehicle home in case he was called to a crime scene over the weekend when the department was seriously understaffed For years, everyone in the family had hung car keys on a kitchen pegboard upon entering the house. Pure reflex, it was a habit no one thought to change in he face of Toby Walker's failing mental capacity.

"Your car?" Louella asked, puzzled, not yet grasping the seriousness of the situation. "Wherever would it be?"

When Diana came down the hall from Rita's room, Davy wasn't waiting in the lobby. She found him outside, drinking a forbidden Coke. He seemed distant, uncommunicative.

:'What's the matter?" she asked.

'Nothing," he said.

:'Are you worried about Rita?"

'I guess," he told her.

"Well, don't be. Dr. Rosemead says she's going to be fine."

Diana was tired when she and Davy got back home.

She put the boy down for a nap and decided to take one herself.

Locking the door to her room, she stripped off her clothes and lay naked under the vent from the cooler, letting the refreshing, slightly PineSol-scented air blow across her body.

She was tired, but she couldn't sleep. Instead, she lay there and castigated herself for her unreasonable outburst at Brandon Walker.

After all, she was the one who had started bawling on his shoulder.

What red-blooded American male wouldn't have got the wrong idea? It was just that she didn't want this particular male anywhere in her vicinity.

His presence brought up too many unpleasant memories, reminded her of a time in her life that she wanted to keep buried far beneath the surface of conscious thought.

So, of all possible people in the world, why had she chosen Brandon Walker's shoulder to cry on? She realized now that she was lonely for male companionship, but was she so desperate that she would throw herself at the first available man who chanced across her path?

But then, what was so new and different about that? she said to herself grimly. Nothing at all. The loneliness had always been there, for as long as she could remember, and it had always made her do stupid things--Garrison Ladd being a prime case in point.

They'd been inseparable that first weekend, and he had insisted on helping her with her Sunday papers. Then, after the paper route, they'd eaten bacon-and-egg breakfasts at the Holiday Inn before going back to his apartment, where, he told her with a guilty grin, he happened to have a real, full-sized double bed.

"I'll only be a minute," he said, leaving her in the doorway of his book-lined living room. "Wait right here."

She was sure he wanted to straighten the room and make the bed before he invited her into it, which she was equally certain he was going to do.

Diana Lee Cooper didn't object. Going to bed with him was a foregone conclusion, the reason she'd agreed to come to his apartment in the first place.

She knew he wanted her again, that he couldn't get enough of her, and Diana Lee Cooper was willing. In fact, she was more than willing.

As she meandered around the room, looking through the collection of books-volumes of poetry and philosophy, a Middle English version of The Canterbury Tales complete with margins full of carefully handwritten notes-she realized that she'd do whatever it took to capture and keep this Garrison Ladd.

Here was someone she wanted-a man of intellect, a man of some refinement and grace, a man she could respect, who was, as far as she could tell, as different from her own backwoods father as he could possibly be. That difference was exactly what she'd been searching for-someone not the least bit like Max Cooper.

And if "spreading her legs," as her father would have said, was all it took to win him, then bring on the double bed and spread away. She knew what those words meant now, and she was beginning to have some sense of her own power. She'd show her father, all right. If sex was the bait and Gary Ladd was the prize, she'd screw until Garrison Ladd couldn't walk or talk or see straight, if that's what he wanted. She'd do whatever he asked and more besides.

As she stood there in the apartment's small living room waiting for him, Diana Cooper couldn't see that the furnishings were relatively cheap.

Compared to what she knew from Joseph, it was palatial. What she saw convinced her that she'd found the man of her dreams, one worthy of her undying loyalty, someone she could afford to lavish her love on, someone who would give her love and laughter in return.

She was so smitten, so convinced by her own initial, naive assumptions, that it was years before she began to question them. By then, it was too late.

"You can come in now," he called.

As she'd suspected, the bed had been hastily made, with lumpy covers pulled up over pillows but not properly tucked in. He was closing the closet door when she walked into the bedroom.

For the first time, Garrison Ladd seemed slightly unsure of himself.

"The couch isn't very comfortable," he said hesitantly. "I thought we could lie here and watch television or something."

The fact that he seemed nervous filled her again with that headspinning, newfound sense of power. Without a word, she kicked off her shoes, slipped out of her jeans, and peeled the University of Oregon sweatshirt off over her head. When she looked up from unfastening her bra, Garrison Ladd was still standing with his hand frozen to the knob on the closet door. He stood unmoving, his eyes feasting hungrily on her nakedness.

"Well?" she said airily, moving toward the bed and turning down the covers. "Are you coming or not?"

jumped away from the closet.

didn't want us to watch television with our clothes on, you?"

"No," he said with a startled laugh. "No, I guess not."

He hurried out of his own clothes then, dropping them on the floor as he went, and flipping on the switch of the tiny television set as he came to the bed. Gradually, the picture appeared, but the sound stayed off.

Laughing, Garrison Ladd fell across the bed and landed on top of Diana, knocking the breath out of both of them, making them both laugh some more. He kissed her once and then settled his head on the pillow beside her.

"You know," he said thoughtfully, "the 'Playboy Advisor' always said there were girls like you in the world, but I never believed it. Not for a minute."

-Girls like what?" Diana asked, feigning innocence, as though she had no idea what he meant. She wanted to hear him say the words.

"Girls who like doing it," he returned.

She bit him gently on the exposed side of his neck, and was gratified to feel under her fingertips the fine layer of gooseflesh that rose at once on the bared skin of his chest.

She remembered how, during one of their Rodeo Royalty weekends in Pendleton or Omak or one of those places, her attendants had explained to her in gory detail exactly how biting affected men, how it turned them on' It was one of those all-night gabfests with the chaperon fast asleep in the motel room next door when Diana finally confessed to the others that the current year's queen of the Chief Joseph Days Rodeo was still a virgin. Shocked runners-up Charlene Davis and Suzanne Lake took it upon themselves to give Diana Lee Cooper the benefit of their own somewhat wider experience.

"If you really want to drive a man crazy," Charlene said, "you bite him all over. Most men can hardly stand it if you do that."

"Or lick 'em," Suzanne added mysteriously. "Like an all-day sucker."

The other two girls rolled on the bed with laughter although Diana didn't quite understand what was so funny.

"And then. . Suzanne said, still laughin and gasping for breath, and then ... when they're all excited, you leave 'em high and dry. I did that to stupid Joe Moore, remember him? I'll never forget. His little prick was standing straight up in the air, waving like a rabbit's ear.

When I got out of the car, he started to cry, I swear to God. I mean, he was literally bawling like a baby. He came after me and begged me to get back in the car and finish it, and I said to him, 'I don't know what kind of a girl you think I am.

And Suzanne and Charlene laughed some more. Diana joined in, but only halfheartedly. It wasn't so funny to her, because she knew then for the first time what her father had meant when he called her that-a prick-tease.

Once more she swore to herself that she wouldn't be that.

If she teased a man, it would be because she intended to do something about it.

She bit Gary Ladd again, harder this time, just at the base of the neck, her sharp teeth leaving a line of small indentations in the smoothly tanned skin. He groaned above her, and she could feel the hardness of him pressing at her through the covers.

He pawed at the sheet and blanket and pulled them away from her, then he fell on her, burying himself deep inside her body. Bruised and sore, she nonetheless raised welcoming hips to meet him, while behind them, on the silenced television set, Jack Ruby mutely gunned down a handcuffed Lee Harvey Oswald.

It was a weekend where no one got quite what they bargained for-not Ruby, not Oswald, and certainly not Diana Lee Cooper.

Because Toby Walker had essentially stolen a county car, Brandon was reluctant to report it through regular channels. He called Hank Maddem at home and asked for advice.

Maddern,s suggestion was succinct. "Report it," he said at once.

"That'll get word out to the cars so everybody's looking. In the meantime, I'll come over and we'll see what we can do."

Leaving Louella with strict instructions to remain by the phone, Brandon escaped from the house and his mother to the relative sanity of Hank Maddern's Ford F-100.

Maddem drove through the neighborhood in ever-widening circles while the younger man brimmed over with self- reproach. "All of it. I never should "It's all my fault," he fumed.

have left the damned keys there in the first place, but I just didn't think about it. In Our house, car keys have been kept on that pegboard for as long as I can remember."

"He's never done anything like this before?" Hank asked.

"Never."

"There's always a first time," Maddem said with a shrug.

One-handed, he shook two cigarettes out of a pack, passed one to Brandon, and then punched the lighter. "And out whose fault it is.

Fault doesn't for Chrissake, forget ab matter. By the way, what was your old man wearing when he took off?"

"Pajamas," Brandon answered. "Red-and-white-striped cotton pajamas."

"Somebody dressed like that shouldn't be too tough to find. How were you fixed for gas?"

"Gas? Almost empty, actually. I should have filled before I left the office yesterday, but I didn't want to take the time. I drove all the way out to Sells and back last night."

"And didn't come home until late, either," Hank added with a mischievous wink. "Did you get lucky?"

"Look, Hank, it wasn't anything like that," Brandon said quickly.

"Diana Ladd needed help with the boy, that's all."

until five o'clock in the morning? According to Tom Edwards, five was the last time your mother called looking for YOU."

"Great," Brandon muttered, shaking his head. "That's just great. A little privacy might be nice."

Maddern heard the edginess in Brandon's voice and dropped the subject.

"Does your dad have money?"

"With him? A little, maybe, but not much."

"What kind of credit cards? Any bank cards?" "No. Mom took those away. The department-store cards as well. He probably has a Chevron and a Shell. Maybe a couple of others."

"That's where we'll start then, with gas stations."

They headed north on Swan, stopping at every gas station along the way where Brandon knew his father had a working credit card. They went west on Broadway and south again on Alvernon. At a Chevron station on Alvernon south of Twenty-second Street, they finally hit pay dirt. The young Mexican kid tending the pumps remembered To by Walker well.

Hey, man, I thought it was crazy. This guy comes in wearing pajamas and no shoes, driving a county car, and wanting to know how to get to Duluth. Where the hell is Duluth?"

"Minnesota," Brandon said quietly.

"Duluth," Maddern repeated. "Why Duluth?"

"It's where he grew up. On a farm outside Duluth."

The attendant thumbed through the credit-card receipts.

"Here it is. Tobias Walker. He took 15.9 gallons of premium and said something about a farm, about going there for dinner. He asked me how to get back over to 1-10, and I told him."

I They drove to where Alvemon intersected with the freeway. "Which way?" Walker asked. "He's got plenty of gas. He could drive two hundred and fifty miles in either direction without having to stop for more.

"At least we know what to do now," Maddern said.

"What's that?"

"Call the Highway Patrol. If your dad's out on the freeway, it's not just our problem anymore."

Public transportation as known in the Anglo world was nonexistent on the reservation. Hitchhiking was the alternative.

As Fat Crack left Casa Grande for Sells late in the afternoon, he stopped for a hitchhiker just inside the reservation boundary. Fat Crack could tell from the way the man shambled after the truck that he was drunk, but he offered a ride anyway. "Where to?"

"The Gate," the man said. "I just got outta jail, and I want to get drunk. It sure was bad in there."

For an Indian, this was a talkative drunk. Fat Crack found himself hoping his rider would pass out and sleep until they reached Sells.

They drove past the turnoff to Ahngam. "Do you know Eduardo Jose?" the rider asked.

Fat Crack nodded. Eduardo Jose's bootlegging exploits were legend.

"His grandson's sure in big trouble," the man continued.

"They brought him in to the jail tins morrung. For raping and killing a white lady."

"That's too bad," Fat Crack told him.

They drove for several more miles in stony silence. Both of them knew full well that Indians who went to jail for raping white women didn't generally live long enough to see the inside of a courtroom, let alone a penitentiary.

"He bit her," the man said much later. "What kind of a sickness would make him do that?"

But a stunned Fat Crack didn't answer right away. "You say he bit her?"

The man nodded. "Her wipih," he said. "Her nipple.

Almost off. One of the deputies told a cook, who told some of the others."

The hairs on the back of Fat Crack's neck stood erect under his gray Stetson. He had heard once before about someone who did that to women, a killer who bit off his victims' nipples. It had happened to Gina, his cousin.

Supposedly, Gina's killer was dead.

The cab of the tow truck was suddenly far too small, and the hot air blowing through the opened windows took Fat Crack's breath away.

Just as Looks At Nothing, despite his blindness, had known unerringly where to find the shady grove of uses, Fat Crack knew at once, despite the fact that Gary Ladd was dead, that there was some connection between this dead woman at Cloud Stopper Mountain and his cousin, found murdered in the charco of deserted Rattlesnake Skull Village seven years earlier.

Unable to do anything else about it, Fat Crack tightened his grip on the steering wheel, and he began to pray.

Diana must have slept. When she woke up, it was early evening. She dressed hurriedly and guiltily, worrying about what Davy was up to.

She found him on the living-room couch. She could see his head over the back of the couch and see Bone's long, curving tail sticking out from in front of it.

"Are you hungry?" she asked, pausing in the doorway.

Davy didn't look up. He was working on something in his lap, staring down intently, lips pursed, shoulders hunched, brow furrowed.

"What are you doing?" Diana asked when he didn't answer.

She walked up to him and peered down over his shoulder.

His lap was full of whitened yucca leaves. In his hand was the small awl Rita had given him for his birthday.

"What in the world are you doing with Rita's yucca?"

Diana demanded. "You know you're not supposed to touch those."

Davy looked up at her, his eyes filling with tears. "I'm trying to make her a basket," he said. "But I don't know how to do the center."

Chapter Nine

WHEN HE LEFT the storage unit, Andrew Carlisle took with him only the hunting knife. The blade had been honed to a razor sharp edge, which years of careful storage hadn't dulled- The knife was big enough to be deadly, but small enough to conceal in the brightly colored summer bag among his other purchases.

Back in the Valiant, he drove to the Reardon Hotel off Fourth Avenue.

He had checked his bank balance and found that he didn't have as much cushion as he wanted. Once finished with Diana Ladd, he would disappear. He needed cold hard cash, running money. He wanted it quickly and from a quarter where no questions would be asked.

When it came to not asking questions, the seedy Reardon suited his purposes admirably. Carlisle had heard about the hotel and bar and its singular clientele from some of the other residents of the joint.

Joint. Thinking about Florence in that jading bit of jargon always brought a mental smile to Carlisle's Ph-D.-trained ear. Phraseology wasn't all he'd picked up in prison, not by a long shot. There were always lessons to be learned in that all-male, survival-of-the-fittest environment where sex was a valuable commodity, a bargaining chip. It was a milieu that regarded small men as prized possessions, and Andrew Carlisle was a small man.

Once he understood that exploitation was inevitable, he surrendered willingly and made himself available to the highest bidder, to partners who could make the physical pain and mental degradation most worth his while. He closed his mind to the reality of it even while it was happening, and learned to stand outside himself during the blowjobs and the rest, to calmly total up the privileges each encounter would give him, all the while keeping score of what the outside world would owe him once it was over the world in general, and Diana Ladd in particular.

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."

Little Bear did as Coyote said, and once more offered the tobacco to the man sitting next to him. This time the man accepted it, He took a smoke and then, passed it along to the man next to him, saying "nawoj" as he did so.

And so the tobacco went all the way around the circle.

When it was finished, the people decided that Little Lion and Little Bear had brought them a good gift, this tobacco, and that they should be left to live in peace to raise it.

And that, nawoj, is the story of the Cerenwny of the Peace Smoke, or the Peace Pipe, as some tribes call it, for the Tohono O'othham, the Desert People, do not use pipes.

Effie Joaquin waited until after nine when both Dr. Rosemead and Dr. Winters went home to their Saturday night poker game in the hospital housing compound. Only then did she go get the medicine man. With younger Indians, it usually didn't matter, but with older ones, people who still clung to the old ways, if the medicine man wasn't summoned, the patients might simply give up and not recover.

Effie didn't much believe in all this singing of songs and shaking of feathers, but her elderly patients did. If they wanted a medicine man, she saw to it that one came to the hospital. Usually, he arrived late enough at night that the doctors didn't notice. Effie was always careful to air out the acrid smell of wild tobacco before the doctors came back on duty the next morning.

Effie drove her pickup as far as the grove of trees where she knew Looks At Nothing would be waiting.

"Oi g hihm," she said to the old man, opening the door.

"Get in and let's go."

She drove back to the hospital and steered him down the hall. Letting him into Rita Antone's room, she left him there, closing the door behind him.

Looks At Nothing had been in hospital rooms before, but this one was worse than most. As always, he was shaken by the sharp, unpleasant odors assailing his nostrils. Mil-gahn medicine was not pleasing to the nose, but in this room there was something more besides-a sensation so fraught with danger that it filled the old man's heart with dread.

"Nawoj," he said softly, testing to see if Hejel WFithag was awake.

"Friend."

"Nawoj," she returned.

Guided by the sound of her voice and tapping the ironwood cane, he made his way to the bed. When he was close enough, she reached out and grasped his hand.

"Thank you for coming."

"It is nothing," he said. "I am always happy to help little Dancing Quail. I know you are troubled."

"Yes," she responded. "Would you like a chair?"

Looks At Nothing pulled his hand free from hers and felt behind him until he located the wall. "There are no other patients in this room."

It was a statement, not a question.

"Two other beds," Rita told him, "but no one is in them.

"We're alone."

"Good." Looks At Nothing eased his wiry frame down the wall. "I will sit here on the floor and listen. You must tell me everything."

And so she did, a little at a time, from the car wreck to the buzzards.

Looks At Nothing opened the leather pouch he wore around his scrawny waist and smoked some of the hand-rolled wild tobacco cigarettes he carried there.

Gradually, the pleasant Indian smoke overcame the Milgahn odors in the room. He listened, nodding thoughtfully from time to time. When Rita finished, he sat there in silence and continued to smoke.

"Tell me about this Anglo boy," he said at last, "the one you call Olhoni."

Rita told him about Davy then and about Diana Ladd, a mother who, like the Woman Who Loved Field Hockey, was so busy that she neglected her own child. As the hours went by, she told the medicine man everything she could remember, weaving together the threads of the story in a complicated pattern that had its beginnings with Gina's murder.

At last there was nothing more to tell. Exhausted by the effort, Rita closed her eyes, while Looks At Nothing staggered unsteadily to his feet.

"Where does your nephew live?" the old man asked.

Rita frowned. "Fat Crack? He lives behind the gas station in one of those new government houses. Why do you ask?"

"I must go see him," Looks At Nothing said. "Together we will decide what to do."

Johnny Rivkin, the well-known Hollywood costume designer, was slumming.

Fresh off the set in Sonoita, he had come to Tucson to have some fun & over the weekend. Hal Wilson, the director, had warned him that Johnny's particular brand of entertainment wouldn't be tolerated by the locals in the several small southern Arizona towns where they were filming Hal's latest Americanized spaghetti western. A search for other outlets brought Johnny straight to the Reardon Hotel.

Larry Hudson, Johnny's lover of some fifteen years' standing, had recently thrown him over in favor of a much younger man. Johnny's ego damage was still a raw, seeping wound. In public, he tried to shrug it off, to act as though it didn't matter, but it did-terribly.

For years, Johnny Rivkin had successfully negotiated the treacherous costuming end of the movie biz, but despite .having a name for himself, he was still basically shy. He didn't like the meat-market pickup scene. He didn't like shopping around, making choices, and maybe being turned down. He still looked good. He had the plastic-surgeon receipts to prove it, but truth be known, the hunks were all out looking for younger stuff these days.

This is Tucson, he reminded himself, trying to ward off discouragement.

He hoped that since the place was a real backwater, maybe he'd be able to find someone not quite so jaded as those back home in L.A. Maybe one or two-two would be much nicer than one-would be dazzled enough by Johnny Rivkin's name and connections that they would follow him anywhere, opening up the possibilities for a long-term menage d trois.

That was what he wanted--the illusion of permanence with a little excitement thrown in for good measure.

Outside the Reardon, Johnny paused at the bar's dismal entrance with its broken neon sign. No one would ever mistake the place for a Hollywood glamour spot. From inside, he heard the sound of intermittent laughter, smelled the odor of stale smoke and the sour stench of spilled beer.

For the hundredth time, or maybe the thousandth, Johnny Rivkin cursed Larry Hudson for throwing him out for forcing him back into the open market. Johnny was too old to be out making this scene again, to be playing the game, searching for warm bodies. He wanted his old life back-his comfortable, boring, settled life. This was too much effort.

Steeling himself for the ordeal, Johnny pushed open the door. The bar was long and smoky and dimly lit. A series of shabby booths lined one side of the room. All occupied, they were filled with small groupings of men in twos, threes, or fours talking in low voices. A televised baseball game flitted across the color screen above the bar, but the sound was off. No one except the bartender was paying any attention to it.

When the door opened, an uneasy silence filled the room as the regulars noted and evaluated the newcomer. Was he one of them or not? Had a straight arrow mistakenly wandered into their midst? That happened occasionally, often with disastrous results.

The roomful of men gauged everything about Johnny Rivkin, from the quality of his expensive but casual clothing and his seasoned California tan to the several gold chains peeking coyly out from under an artfully unbuttoned collar.

Johnny had dressed carefully for the occasion, calculating exactly the kind of impression he wanted to make, but he loathed the unabashed scrutiny of strangers. Unfortunately, in places like the Reardon, that was always the real price of admission.

Eventually, with a collective shrug, the regulars looked away. The inspection was over, and Johnny Rivkin had passed. He belonged.

Relieved, Johnny made his way down the crowded bar.

The only unoccupied stool was halfway down the room next to the only woman in the place. That was too bad. It might give people the wrong idea, drive away some of the most likely prospects. The pickup process was painful enough without people jumping to erroneous conclusions.

He settled onto the bar stool and ordered a Chivas on the rocks, which he paid for out of a good-sized roll of bills.

He didn't like showing that kind of money. Some people said it was dangerous, but at his age, money-lots of it was often the only insurance against ending up alone.

Next to him, the blonde bestirred herself and ordered a whiskey sour.

As soon as she spoke, Johnny realized she was a he in drag, a man almost as old as Johnny himself.

Doing a quick professional evaluation of the blonde's clothing, the costumer almost choked on his drink. The outfit was appalling. The shoes and purse were worse. Rivkin didn't know where or when he'd seen such cheap, ugly stuff. If you're going to go to the trouble of dressing up, he thought, why not put on something decent?

The bartender brought the whiskey sour, and the blonde paid for it, pocketing every penny of change. Johnny Rivkin felt a faint tweak of sympathy. He still hadn't forgotten his own impoverished early days.

The blonde was someone for whom money, or the lack of it, was a major issue. You had to feel Pretty damned poor to stiff the bartender out of his tip.

Maybe abject poverty explained the awful clothing as well.

Sipping his drink, the blonde stared straight ahead toward the ranked bottles standing at attention behind the bar. There was an almost palpable sadness about the drag queen, a loneliness and despair that matched Rivkin's own and touched a chord of sympathy in him.

Johnny had never been a particularly good conversationalist where strangers were concerned. He didn't mind being in groups of people he knew, -but with strangers, instead of talking, he froze up and contented himself with making Up imaginary scenarios about the people around him.

Now, he found himself wondering if the blonde, like him, hadn't been recently thrown out of a long-term relationship with nothing more than the clothes on his/her back. Johnny knew how that felt. It wasn't any picnic.

"Mind if I smoke?" Rivkin asked.

The blonde looked up, seemingly noticing Johnny for the first time.

"No. Go right ahead."

Johnny opened his gold cigarette case, took out a cigarette, and offered one to the blonde. "Thanks," she said, taking it. "Am you new to town?"

"Just passing through, really," Johnny answered. "I'm working on that new Hal Wilson film. We've been on location in Sonoita all week. That place is a hellhole."

Dropping Hal Wilson's name didn't seem to have any visible effect.

Maybe the blonde wasn't into films.

Johnny polished off his drink, probably sooner than he should have, but being in a dump like the Reardon made him nervous. He wanted to make a connection and get the hell out of there.

"May I buy you a drink?" he asked, when the bartender responded to his signal.

"Sure," the blonde said without enthusiasm. "That would be nice."

Johnny believed in his intuition, in his ability to read other people.

He decided in this instance to put it to the test.

"If you don't mind my saying so, you look like you just lost your best friend."

The blonde met Johnny's gaze with a rueful shake of blonde mane. "It shows that much, does it?"

Johnny raised his glass. "It takes one to know one."

"Really. You, too?"

Rivkin nodded. "After a mere fifteen years."

"I guess I got off lucky," the blonde said. "For me, it was only six."

"Cleaned you out?"

For the first time, the blonde smiled and then laughed aloud. "You could say that. I got away clean but broke."

. Mentally, Johnny patted himself on the back. He had been right all along. He returned the smile over his glass.

"So misery loves company," he said in his best imitation New York accent. "Maybe we could cheer each other up later, in my room, make a little revenge."

"Here?"

"Are you kidding? In this flea trap? Not on your life."

Johnny picked up the blonde's cigarettes, deftly placed his room key under it, and slipped the package and key down the bar.

"The Santa Rita. Room 831. in about half an hour."

"Sounds good to me," the blonde said.

Relieved to have scored with so little wasted effort, Johnny got up to leave. "By the way, do you like champagne?"

The blonde nodded.

"Good. I'll have a bottle on ice by the time you get there.

Don't be late."

"I won't," the blonde told him with another brave smile.

"I have a feeling my luck just took a turn for the better."

When Looks At Nothing left Rita's room, Effie Joaquin expected to take him back to his camp near the outskirts of town. He thanked her for the offer and said he'd find his way alone.

"But it's dark out there," Effie objected.

The old man smiled. "Darkness is my friend," he told her.

Effie considered herself personally responsible for bringing the old man to the hospital. She didn't want anything to happen to him on his way home.

"It's just that other people might not be able to see you," she snapped impatiently.

"Don't worry," he said. "It isn't far."

Keeping to the shoulder of the road, Looks At Nothing made his way to the gas station. At once a dog began to bark. The old man followed the sound, making the dog bark even louder.

"Who is it?" a woman's voice demanded from inside the house.

"Looks At Nothing," the medicine man answered. "I'm looking for Fat Crack."

"Just a minute," she said. "I'll get him."

Moments later, a door opened. "What do you want?" Fat Crack asked.

"To speak to you," Looks At Nothing answered. "About your aunt. She needs your help."

"My help? I thought she wanted your help. After all, you're the medicine man."

Looks At Nothing settled cross-legged on the ground, took a cigarette out of his pouch, lit it, and offered it to Fat Crack. "Nawoj," he said.

"Nawoj," Fat Crack returned, accepting the cigarette gracefully because it would have been rude to do otherwise.

"What's this all about?"

"Sit," Looks At Nothing ordered. "We must not rush."

Reluctantly, Fat Crack did as he was told. Although his heavy body was much younger than the gaunt old medicine man's, it wasn't nearly as agile. Fat Crack was used to chairs. Sitting on the hard ground was uncomfortable.

"You are a man of great faith, are you not?" Looks At Nothing continued.

Fat Crack was taken aback by the directness of the medicine man's question. "Yes," he said. "I suppose so. Why?"

"Your aunt is in grave danger," Looks At Nothing said.

Fat Crack nodded. "I know," he said.

Somehow he had known that from the moment she asked him to go get the medicine man. From the way she acted, he knew there was something more serious at stake than just the physical damage from an automobile accident.

"You are very still," Looks At Nothing observed.

"I'm thinking," Fat Crack said. "I'm wondering what this danger to my aunt could be and why you need my help."

"Sit here with me for a while," Looks At Nothing said.

"Smoke with me. The two of us will hold a council and let the sacred tobacco smoke fall upon our words. In this way, we will decide what to do."

Part of Fat Crack, the Christian Scientist part of him, began to buck and balk. Talk of sacred tobacco smoke didn't sit well with the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy.

Still, the gentle power wielded by the medicine man didn't seem inherently evil.

"Gabe," the woman called impatiently from the doorway of the house.

"Are you coming back inside?"

"After," Fat Crack replied. "I will come in after, but first this old man and I are going to talk."

Chapter Ten

HOW DID MY daddy die?" Davy asked.

Diana Ladd was tucking her son into his bed when he asked the direct, awful question she had dreaded for years. Always before, during oblique conversations, she had skirted the issue, promising herself that if he ever asked straight out, she would be forced to respond in kind. Wanting to protect him, she had rehearsed countless carefully nonjudgmental answers, in hopes that one day Davy would grow up and form his own opinions about his father.

Diana sat down on the edge of the bed and placed one hand on Davy's chest. In the soft glow of the night-light, his eyes were luminous dark pools gazing up at her. She swallowed hard.

"He committed suicide," she said.

Davy frowned. "Suicide. What does that mean?"

"Your father killed himself," Diana answered. "With a gun."

"Why? Didn't he love us?"

Davy's ingenuousness wrung at Diana's heart. She fought back tears, and bitter answers as well. "He didn't know you," she said gently.

"You weren't even born yet."

"Well, why did he do it then?"

"He was scared, I guess."

"About what?"

"About what was going to happen to him. You see, there had been a. .

." She paused, losing heart, unable to say the word murder aloud.

"There had been an accident," she finished lamely. "Your father was afraid of getting into trouble."

"Did he kill someone?"

Stunned, Diana wondered if Davy had somehow learned the truth. How else could his questions cut so close to the bones of truth? None of this was going the way she'd planned. "Is that what someone told you?" she asked.

Davy shrugged. "Not really. I just wanted to know why they called me that."

. "Called you what?"

"Me'akam Mad," he replied.

Diana Ladd knew some Papago, but not nearly as much as Davy. This she didn't recognize at all. "What does that mean?"

"Killer's Child," Davy whispered.

Instantly, Diana was outraged. "Who called you that?"

"Some of the Indian ladies. At the hospital. They thought I didn't understand."

Not trusting her ability to speak, Diana got up and paced to the window.

She stared out at a star-studded sky over the jagged black shadow of mountain. Even with the cooler running, the house was warm, but she felt suddenly chilled.

"Is it true?" Davy insisted. "Did my father kill somebody?"

"Yes," Diana answered at last, abandoning all pretense.

Davy had to be told.

"Who?"

"Her name was Gina, Gina Antone."

"Rita's granddaughter?"

Diana nodded. "Yes."

"But Rita loves us. Why would she if..

Diana turned decisively from the window. "Davy, listen to me. Your father was there when Gina died, but he didn't do it, and he didn't remember anything that happened. He fell asleep, and when he woke up, she was dead. Another man was there with them-a friend of your father's, a man named Andrew Carlisle. He tried to put all the blame on your father."

"What happened to him?"

"The other man? To Carlisle?" Davy nodded. "He went to jail, finally. The state prison. Rita and I saw to it."

"But he didn't die?"

"No."

"People still think my father did it."

"Probably. He wasn't alive to defend himself."

"And the other man was?"

"Yes, and he hired expensive lawyers. He was an Anglo, a well-known one, a teacher from the university, and the dead girl was only an Indian. Everybody acted as though it didn't matter if an Indian got killed, as though she weren't important. With your father dead, it was a terrible time for me, but it was worse for Rita. She didn't have anyone to help her, so I did-with the police, with Detective Walker and the prosecutor. If I hadn't been there, Carlisle never would have gone, to jail."

Most of Diana Ladd's impassioned explanation fell on deaf ears. Davy plucked out only one solid fact from the raging torrent of words.

"Detective Walker? The man who was here this morning? The one who took me for my stitches?"

"Yes."

"He knew about my father, too?"

"Yes.

Abruptly, Davy flopped over on his side, turning away from her and facing the wall. "I don't want to talk anymore."

"But, Davy. .

"I'm going to sleep."

Drained and rejected, Diana started to leave the room, but Davy called to her before the door closed. "Mom?"

"What?"

"How come everybody knew about my father but me?"

The hurt and betrayal in Davy's voice squeezed her heart.

"It was a terrible thing," she told him. "You weren't old enough to understand."

"I'm old enough now," he muttered fiercely into his pillow when the door clicked shut. "I am too."

But he wasn't. Not really. He lay awake for a long time after his mother left him, trying to understand why his father would have wanted to be dead so soon, why he hadn't wanted to wait around long enough to meet his own son.

Davy wished he could have asked him. He really wanted to know.

Looks At Nothing was gone, leaving Rita alone with her memories of that long ago, fateful summer. Homesick, Understanding Woman had wanted to return to Ban Thak.

It was too hot in Burnt Dog Village. She longed to be in Coyote Sitting where it was cool and where she would be among old friends for the coming rain dance. Hearing this, Father John generously offered a ride.

They would leave one day and return the next. Surely, the nuns could spare Rita for that long.

When the big day came, Dancing Quail was excited to be going home for the first time since she had moved to Topawa earlier that spring. She wore new clothes, which she had purchased from the trading post with her own money.

She looked forward to seeing other girls her age, to being included as one of them.

By now Dancing Quail had ridden in Father John's touring car more than once. She was totally at ease. While Understanding Woman drowsed peacefully in the backseat, Rita chattered away in her much-improved English, pointing out the various sights along the way, telling Father John the Papago words for mountains and rocks, plants and animals, and reciting some of the traditional stories that went along with them.

Father John had offered a ride, but he wasn't pleased to be going to the rain dance, and he didn't much like the stories, either. On a professional basis, he disapproved of the annual midsummer rain dances, thinking them little more than orgies where people got so drunk on ceremonial cactus wine that they vomited into the dirt. Ancestral Papago wisdom dictated this was necessary to summon back Cloud Man and Wind Man who brought with them summer rains, the lifeblood of the desert. Father John thought otherwise.

When he first arrived on the reservation, the priest's initial impulse had been to preach fiery sermons and forbid his parishioners' attendance at the dances altogether, but Father Mark, his superior, had counseled otherwise. He said the church would be better served if Father John attended the various dances in person, putting in goodwill appearances at each. He advised the younger man to do what he could to keep his flock in line, but not to turn the dances into forbidden fruit. After all, Father Mark explained, forbidden or not, the Papagos; would go anyway.

Dutifully, Father John attended, but he didn't think it did any good.

He was beginning to realize that the Papagos were an exceedingly stubborn lot and almost totally impervious to the influence of outsiders. They listened politely enough.

As succeeding waves of Anglo missionaries washed across their austere corner of the world, the Tohono O'othham accepted and incorporated some new ideas while blithely casting off the rest.

Father John suspected that Papago acceptance of any external religion, his included, was only skin deep. The Bible with its Old and New Testaments got layered in among all the other traditional stories, ones about I'itoi and Elder Brother. In this regard, his young charge Rita was no different from the others. She listened attentively during weekly catechism sessions, answering questions dutifully and well, but he worried that just beneath the surface of Dancing Quail's shiny Catholic veneer lurked an undisturbed bedrock of pagan beliefs.

"What are you going to do at the dance?" he asked. At sixteen, Rita seemed much too young to sit in the circle and drink the cactus wine.

He worried about that as well.

She laughed and tossed her head. "I think I'll find myself a husband.

Did you know that during a rain dance the woman may choose? The rest of the time, the men do the choosing."

"I hope you choose well," Father John said seriously.

He had seen several instances of unwise choices. Young women with their newfound jobs and independence were finding partners for themselves rather than following the old ways and letting their families do the negotiating. As a result, there was a growing problem with out-of-wedlock pregnancies. In addition, there were more and more cases where young fathers simply walked away from familial responsibilities.

"Maybe I'll choose you," Rita said with a mischievous smile.

Father John flushed. Dancing Quail always laughed at him when his ears turned red like that.

"I've already explained that to you," he said seriously.

"Priests don't marry."

"But what about that new priest, the Pre ... pre. .

She stumbled over the long, unfamiliar word.

"Presbyterian?" Father John supplied.

"Yes. What about that new Reverend Hobson? He's a priest with a wife and three children."

"He's not a priest," Father John explained. "He's a pastor-a Protestant, not a Catholic. Pastors marry. Priests don't."

"I don't understand," Rita said with a frown. "You're all from the same tribe, aren't you?"

Father John had never before considered the issue in quite those terms.

"Yes," he answered. "Yes and no."

The first giant cactus, Hahshani, was a very strange thing. Growing up over the spot where Coyote had buried the little boy's bones, he was tall and thick and soft, shooting straight up out of the ground until he finally sprouted arnu.

The people and animals were curious, and they all came to look at him.

The children played around Hahshani and stuck sticks into him. This hurt Giant Cactus, so he put out long, sharp needles to keep them away.

Then the children shot arrows into him. This made Hahshani very angry, so he sank into the ground and went away to a place where no one could find him.

After Giant Cactus disappeared, the people were sorry and began looking for him. Finally Crow, who was flying over Giwho Tho'ag or Burden Basket Mountain, came back and told the people he had found the cactus hiding in a place where no animals ever went and where no people hunted.

The people called a council. Afterward, the chief told the people to prepare four large baskets, then he told Crow to take the baskets and fly back to Hahshani. When Crow reached Giant Cactus, Hahshani was covered with red, juicy fruit. As the chief had directed, Crow loaded the fruit into the baskets and took it back to the People.

Crow placed the fruit in ollas that were filled with water, and then the ollas were set on the fire, where they were kept boiling from sunrise to sunset.

For four days, they cooked the fruit, and when it was finished, the chief told the people to prepare for a great wine feast. The people were puzzled because they had never tasted wine before. So all the people-Indians, animals, and bird&-gathered around to drink the wine.

At the feast, everyone drank so much that they began to do silly things.

Grasshopper pulled off one of his legs and wore it as a headdress.

Nighthawk saw this and laughed so hard that his mouth split wide open.

Since then, Nighthawk is so embarrassed by his big mouth that he only flies at night. Some of the other birds were so drunk that they began fighting and pulling out each other's feathers. That is why some of them still have bloody heads to this day.

When the chief saw all this fighting, he decided that there would be no more wine feasts, so he carefully gathered up all the Giant Cactus seeds and gave them to a messenger to take far away. The people didn't like this, so they sent Coyote after Messenger.

Coyote asked Messenger to show him what was in his hand. Messenger said no, but Coyote begged for one little peck, and finally, after much coaxing, Messenger gave in.

He opened his hand, just the slightest bit. As soon as he did, Coyote struck his hand, and the seeds of Hahshani flew far into the air.

The wind was coming from the north. Wind caught Hahshani's seeds and carried them up over the mountaintops, scattering them on the south sides of the mountains.

And that is why, to this day, Giant Cactus grows only on the south sides of the mountains. And since then, every year, the people have held the feast of the cactus wine.

The night was cooling fast. In the desert outside Sells, a coyote howled and was answered by a chorus of village dogs. It was a pleasant, peaceful sound that made both Papago men feel relaxed and at home.

For some time, Looks At Nothing sat smoking the wiw, the wild tobacco, and saying nothing. Fat Crack admired the old man's concentration and stubbornness He had beard stories about how the injured Looks At Nothing, returning to the reservation from Ajo, had shunned the white man's ways, including alcohol and store-bought tobacco and cigarettes.

The only alcohol the medicine man consumed was the cactus wine made once a year from fruit of the giant cactus. He smoked only the native tobacco, gathered from plants growing wild in the sandy washes.

The single exception, his post-World War H Zippo lighter, was more a concession to old age than it was to the Mil-gahn.

As the burning sticks of rolled tobacco moved back and forth between them, and as the smoke eddied away from them into the dark sky, Fat Crack could see why this particular tobacco smoke might still retain some of its ancient power.

"What do you believe caused the accident?" Looks At Nothing asked at last.

"A steer ran across the road in front of the truck," Fat Crack answered.

"When she tried to miss it, the tire caught on the shoulder and the truck rolled. That's what Law and Order told me."

"That may be how the accident happened," Looks At Nothing said, "but it's not what caused it. Do you know this Anglo child Hejel Wi'ithag lives with, the one she calls Olhoni?"

Fat Crack nodded. "Davy Ladd. His mother is a widow. Rita lives with them and looks after the boy. What about him?"

"The boy is the real cause of your aunt's accident."

"Davy Ladd? How? He's only six. He was at the hospital.

He sure wouldn't hurt her. They say he saved her life."

Looks At Nothing's cigarette glowed softly in the night.

He passed it back to Fat Crack. "The boy is unbaptized.

His mother was born a Catholic, but he himself has never been inside a church. Do you know the old priest from San Xavier?"

It took a moment for Fat Crack to follow what seemed like an abrupt change of subject, but finally he nodded and smiled. Looks At Nothing and Father John were contemporaries, but the medicine man thought the Anglo was old.

"Yes. My mother told me about him. He's retired now, but he still helps out sometimes."

"He was once a special friend of your aunt's. We must go to him tomorrow, in Tucson. We will tell him about this problem and ask his advice. I will call for singers to treat the boy in the traditional way, but Father John must do the other."

This is crazy, Fat Crack thought. He was familiar with the old superstition that claimed being around unbaptized babies was dangerous and caused accidents, but supposedly only Indian babies were hazardous in this fashion. That's what he'd been told.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked. "Why bother with two kinds of baptism when the boy isn't even Indian?

Besides, the accident already happened."

"The boy is a child of your aunt's heart," Looks At Nothing said softly.

"It doesn't matter if he's O'othham or not, and the accident isn't the only danger."

"It isn't?"

"While she was in the ambulance, Hejel Wi'ithag saw buzzards, three of them, sitting sunning themselves in the middle of the afternoon, not in the morning like they usually do. It is bad luck to see animals doing strange things. It means something bad is coming, something evil. Not only is it dangerous for your aunt, but for two other people as well."

The old man paused to smoke, and Fat Crack waited.

"There is something very puzzling in all this," Looks At Nothing continued finally. "The evil seems to be Ohb, and not Ohb, Apache and not Apache."

Fat Crack was struck by the medicine man's use of the old-fashioned word that means, interchangeably, both Apache and enemy.

"Yes," Fat Crack murmured under his breath, agreeing without knowing exactly why. "You're right. It is Ohb or at least Ohbsgam, Apachelike."

"You believe this to be true?" Looks At Nothing demanded.

Fat Crack stared up at the sky. Here was an undeniable answer to his earlier prayer for help. He hadn't expected it to come this soon, and certainly not in the guise of an old, blind medicine man, but surely the connection he had felt that afternoon was here again and stronger than ever.

"Do you remember my cousin, Gina, Rita's granddaughter?"

Looks At Nothing nodded. "The one who was murdered?"

"Yes, near the charco of old Rattlesnake Skull Village.

"I remember."

"There were two men involved, two Mil-gahn. One of them was the little boy's father, Olhoni's father. He committed suicide afterward. The other man went to jail." Fat Crack paused briefly.

"Go on," Looks At Nothing urged.

"One of the men bit off Gina's wipih, her nipple. At the time it was said the dead man did it, that he was the one who bit her, but now I don't believe it. The same thing has happened again, just yesterday, to another woman at the base of Cloud-Stopper Mountain."

Both men were silent for some time, listening while the coyotes and dogs passed another series of greetings back and forth, sharing the night in a way not unlike the two men sharing their wild tobacco.

"Is it possible that the spirits of the dead Apaches invaded this Mil-gahn's spirit, making him Ohbsgam, so he is Apachelike without being Apache?"

"Yes," Looks At Nothing agreed, impressed by Fat Crack's intuition.

"Is it possible that this other man is out of jail?"

"After six years," Fat Crack replied, "it's possible."

"We must find out."

"I know the detective," Fat Crack said. "I met him. He was with the boy's mother when she came to the hospital last night. Perhaps he will help us."' "You will speak to him at once," Looks At Nothing ordered.

"All right," Fat Crack nodded. "Tomorrow. When we go to see the priest, I will also speak to the detective."

"Good," the medicine man said. "That's good."

Evidently, the council was finished, because Looks At Nothing snuffed out his cigarette and stood up. "It is late.

We should get some rest. Come for me at my camp beside the trees in the morning. We will go together to Chuk Shon."

Fat Crack stood up as well. One of his feet had fallen asleep. He almost fell.

"Wait, old man. I'll go get the truck and give you a ride.

"No," Looks At Nothing said. "Show me where the road is. I can find my way from there."

They flew Toby Walker to Tucson Medical Center in a helicopter.

Meanwhile, Hank Maddern and Brandon Walker tried to deal with the problem of the Pima County sheriff's car. Initially, the Cochise County detectives were determined to impound it. Eventually, though, after a late night sheriff-to-sheriff call, it was decided to let Brandon take it back to Tucson. Even when committed by an elderly father, joy-riding was, after all, nothing but a misdemeanor.

"This isn't the last we're going to hear about this," Maddem warned as he helped siphon gas into the bone-dry Galaxy. "DuShane's going to be pissed as hell about this, and he'll make your life miserable. You'll wind up directing traffic at the Pima County Fairgrounds before he's through."

Brandon thought about his unconscious father, helpless and strapped to the stretcher, being loaded into the waiting helicopter. The medics said it looked like a massive stroke.

"Let him do his worst," Brandon said. "Who gives a shit?"

"Good boy," Maddern told him. "Don't let the turkeys get you down."

Using siphoned gas, they got as far as Benson, where they filled up both vehicles. "You turn on your lights and get your ass to the hospital," Maddern ordered. "I'll pick up your mother on the way and meet you there as soon as we can."

"Thanks," Brandon said.

He appreciated having a little extra time before facing his mother. No doubt Louella Walker would take the position that her son had failed again, as usual. Regardless of what happened, Louella could always twist it into being his fault.

Brandon found Toby Walker in the intensive-care unit hooked up to a bank of machines. The doctor he spoke to was grave.

"Don't get your hopes up," he said.- "The next twenty-four hours are critical. We're dealing with not only a severe stroke, but also a severe sunburn. He's badly dehydrated. What was your father doing out in the desert alone like that?"

"He was going to Duluth," Brandon said.

"Duluth? That's in Minnesota."

"I know," Brandon replied, "but that's where he told the gas-station attendant he was going in nothing but a pair of pajamas."

"Your father was senile then?" the doctor asked.

"How could he be? He's not that old."

"You'd be surprised," the doctor said. "We're seeing more and more cases like this all the time. They seem to be getting younger instead of older. Even without the stroke, you'd soon find he wouldn't be able to care for himself."

"And with it?"

"It's not good," the doctor said, shaking his head. "Not good at all."

He walked away just as Louella surged into the room on Hank Maddem's arm and rushed up to Brandon. "How is he?" she demanded. "Can I see him?"

Brandon nodded. "You can see him once every hour for five minutes at a time."

"Tell me. Is he going to be all right?"

"Of course, Mom," Brandon told her. "He's going to be fine."

But with any kind of luck, Brandon thought, by morning Toby Walker wouldn't be alive.

Diana couldn't sleep. The rooms of her house were too small, too confining. With Bone at her side, she left the house and paced the yard, remembering how it had been that morning when Gary came home. He had been out all night, and she had spent the night consumed with alternating bouts of rage and worry, sure at times that he was dead in his truck somewhere, and convinced at others that he was out with another woman, just like before.

Why had she believed him when he said all that was behind him? She had trusted him enough, had enough faith in the future of their marriage, to stop taking the pill at last, to start trying to get pregnant. How could she have been so stupid? All that long night Diana had sat in the living room, an unread book open on her lap, listening for Gary's truck, watching for his headlights. By morning she found herself hoping that there had been an accident, that he'd wrapped himself around a telephone pole somewhere, so she wouldn't have to face what her woman's intuition warned her had happened, so she wouldn't have to do anything about it, so she wouldn't have to make a decision.

It was long after sunrise before he came home. Her heart pounded in her throat when she heard his inept fumbling at the lock. She didn't wait long enough for him to come inside and close the door. She didn't care if she woke up the neighbors, if all the other teachers in the compound heard every word.

"Where were you?"

"Out."

"Damn you. Where?"

"The dance. At San Pedro. I told you I was going there."

A cloud of alcohol-laden breath surrounded him, filling her nostrils and wrenching her gut, reminding her of her father.

"I thought they drank wine at the dances, cactus wine.

I didn't know they served beer."

Not looking at her, he started toward the bedroom.

"Please, Diana. Drop it. I've got to get some sleep."

,sleep!" she screeched, heaving the book across the room at him. Her aim was bad. The book hit the wall three feet behind his head and fell to the floor with an angry thud.

,You need sleep?" she raged, getting up and coming across the room after him. "What about me? I've been up all night, too, up and worried sick!"

He turned to face her, and the ravaged, stricken look on his face brought her up short. Something was terribly wrong, and she couldn't imagine what it was.

"I said drop it!"

The quiet menace in his words took her breath away. She had heard those very same words countless times before, spoken in just that tone of voice and with just that shade of meaning, but always before they had come from her father, always from Max Cooper. Never from her husband, never from Gary.

Without another word, he disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. For minutes afterward, she stood in the middle of the room staring at the door, too frightened to move, too sick to cry.

Room 831 in the Santa Rita Hotel was a reasonably plush two-room suite.

The bottle of champagne was on ice, and Johnny Rivkin had donned a blue silk smoking jacket by the time his expected guest turned the key in the lock. The blonde came in looking even more bedraggled than Johnny remembered. The dim light in the bar of the Reardon had been very kind.

"Welcome," Johnny said with a smile. "I'm glad you decided to come."

"I almost didn't," the blonde returned. "I don't remember how to do this anymore."

"Come on." Johnny did his best to sound cheerful and encouraging.

"It'll all come back to you. The two of us will have some fun. If you like dressing up, you might check out the closet in the other room. I work in the movies, you see.

I always keep a few nice things on hand just in case."

The blonde disappeared into the other room while Johnny busied himself with opening and pouring champagne. His hands shook some. He didn't know if it was nervousness or anticipation, maybe both. An unknown assignation was a lot like diving into an ice-cold swimming pool.

Once you were in, everything was fine, but getting in required nerve.

The blonde came back out wearing a long silk robe with nothing on underneath, walking with shoulders slouched, hands jammed deep in the pockets. His obvious nervousness made Johnny feel that much better.

"Here," he said, passing a glass. "Try this. It'll be good for what ails you."

The blonde settled in the other chair, primly crossing his ankles, pulling the robe shut over his knees.

"Take off the wig," Johnny ordered. "It's dreadful, you know. I'd like to see you as you really are."

"Are you sure?" the blonde asked.

"I'm sure."

When the wig came off, Johnny found himself faced with a totally bald fifty-year-old man still wearing the garishly made-up features of an aging woman. The effect was disconcerting, like looking at your own distorted face in a fun-house mirror.

"What's your name?" Johnny asked.

"Art what?"

"Does it matter?"

"Only if I want to call you again."

"Art Rains."

"And what do you do, Art Rains? For a living, I mean."

Johnny was beginning to enjoy himself. Here was someone who hated small talk almost as much as he did, someone else who wasn't any good at it.

Knowing that made Johnny feel in control for a change, something that didn't happen to him very often.

"Believe it or not, for the past six years, I've been a housewife."

Art ducked his head as he made this admission, as though it were something he was ashamed of.

"I believe it all right." Johnny got up and poured two more glasses of champagne. "Here. Have another. It'll take your mind off your troubles, Art. You need to relax, lighten up, have some fun."

"What did you have in mind?"

Johnny shrugged. He was enjoying the tifte-d-tOte. It was a shame to rush into it. "I don't know. Not something terribly energetic. We're both a bit old for that sort of thing. Maybe start out with a nice massage. I have some lovely oils in the other room. Larry always said that I'm very good with my hands."

AA smiled sadly. "That's something else we have in common.

"Well, come on, then. Shall we flip a coin to see who goes first?

Although my mother always said company got to choose."

"I'll do you first," Art said, "unless you'd rather. .

"Oh, no, by all means. Suit yourself " Trembling with anticipation, Johnny took his glass and the almost-empty bottle of champagne and led the way into the bedroom. He set the bottle and his glass on the bedside table and stripped off his jacket and trousers. If Art had been much younger, Johnny might have worried more about how his body looked, but Art Rains wasn't any spring chicken, either.

Before Art had arrived at the hotel, Johnny had turned down the covers on the bed. Now, he lay facedown on the cool, smooth sheets and waited.

He sighed and closed his eyes. This was going to be delightful.

"Mind if I turn on the radio?" Art asked.

"Not at all."

Soon KHOS blared in his ear. Johnny didn't much like country-western, but it was a good idea to have some background music. After all, if this was very good, there might be a few inadvertent noises, A Holy Roller family might be next door.

A moment later, Johnny was surprised when, instead of a pair of well-oiled caressing hands touching his back or shoulders, he felt the weight of a naked male body settle heavily astride his buttocks. He didn't worry too much about that, though. There was certainly more than one way to do a massage. Johnny had heard the Japanese actually walked on people's backs.

Suddenly, a rough hand grabbed a fistful of hair and jerked his face off the pillow.

"Hey," Johnny said. "What's this ... ?"

The sentence died in the air. Johnny Rivkin never saw the hunting knife that cut him. In fact, he hardly felt it at first. He tried to cry out for help, but he couldn't, nor could he keep his flailing arms from the powerful hands that held him fast.

Rivkin's body leaped in the air, jerking like a headless chicken while Glen Campbell's plaintive "Wichita Lineman" lingered in the air and the almost-empty champagne bottle and glass fell to the carpeted floor but didn't break.

Johnny Rivkin's death was much bloodier than Margie Danielson's had been. Andrew Carlisle was glad he'd taken off all his clothes, glad he'd be able to shower and clean himself up before he left the room.

He had planned to let things go a little further, indulge in a little more foreplay, but buggering an aging queer didn't have much appeal.

Besides, Carlisle was inpatient He wanted to get on with it.

He waited out the ride, which wasn't that different from the other, although it seemed to take quite a while longer before Johnny Rivkin's gurgling struggles ceased. Fortunately, the hotel mattress was easy on Andrew Carlisle's sore knees. They still hurt from the scorching rocks at Picacho Peak.

I fell asleep, and even later day morning. With Rita gone, . and prospects for breakfast weren't good.

On her salary, eating out wasn't something Diana could afford often, but that Sunday morning seemed like a time to splurge. Both she and Davy had been through enough of a wringer that a special treat was in order.

They drove to Uncle John's Pancake House on Miracle Mile and waited through the Sunday morning crush.

Over brightly colored menus, Diana explained that Davy could choose from any number of Mil-gahn foods--eggs and bacon, buttermilk pancakes, Swedish pancakes, German pancakes-but popovers with honey or tortillas with peanut butter weren't an option.

The waitress, a crusty old dame from the eat-it-or-wear-it school of food service, arrived at their table pad in hand.

She fixed her eyes on Davy. "What'll you have, young man?"

Shyly, he ducked his head. "Swedish," he said in a strangled whisper.

"With the red berries."

"And what to drink?"

"How about you, ma'am?

"German pancakes and coffee."

The waitress nodded and disappeared, returning a few moments later with coffee and milk. She put the milk in front of Davy. "How'd you get all those stitches?" she asked.

Davy blushed and didn't answer. "He was in a car accident," Diana explained, speaking for him. "Out on the reservation."

The waitress frowned at that, but she left the table without saying anything more. A few minutes later, she was back, carrying a section of the Sunday paper. "This you?" she asked, holding the paper up so Davy could see it.

Davy looked at the picture and nodded. "What's that?"

Diana asked.

The waitress looked at Diana in surprise. "You mean you don't know about it?"

Handed the paper, a stunned Diana Ladd found herself staring into the eyes of a clearly recognizable picture of her son, complete with stitches.

"Your breakfast's on me this morning, sweetie," the, waitress was saying to Davy. "You sound like a regular little hero to me, saving that old woman's life. Wouldn't you like something else along with your pancakes, a milk shake maybe?"

"No," Davy said. "Thank you. Just milk."

The waitress left, and Diana turned on Davy. "How did your picture get into the newspaper?"

Her son glanced nervously at the paper. Next to his own picture was a smaller one, a head shot of the man who had spoken to him the previous afternoon. "The man had a camera. He took my picture yesterday while you were inside the hospital with Rita."

"You talked to a reporter?" Diana demanded, her voice rising in pitch.

"You let him take your picture?"

Davy squirmed lower in his chair until his eyes barely showed above the top of the-booth. "Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"He was a friend of my father's," Davy told her. "I was afraid you'd.get mad."

And, of course, he was right.

From George's Beat, a biweekly column by George O'Connell in the Arizona Daily Sun, June 14, 1975:

Seven years ago Friday a young Papago woman died brutally in the desert west of Tucson. Two men were eventually implicated in the death of twenty-two-year-old Gina Antone. One of them was a student of creative writing at the University of Arizona. The other was the English professor in charge of that same program.

The professor, Andrew Carlisle, was eventually convicted of voluntary manslaughter and second degree rape. He was sentenced to serve time in the Arizona State Prison at Florence, while his student, Garrison Ladd, committed suicide rather than face arrest and conviction.

Now, seven years later to the day, two of the families involved in that earlier tragedy are once more linked together in the news, only this time with a far different result.

On Friday, Rita Antone, the slain girl's sixty-five-year-old grandmother, was severely injured in an automobile accident on Highway 386, forty miles west of Tucson. Mrs. Antone now makes her home in Tucson with Diana Ladd, Garrison Ladd's widow, and her son, David.

Medics from the scene report that Mrs. Antone would probably have died without reaching the Indian Health Service Hospital in Sells had it not been for the quick-witted thinking of six-year-old David, who was himself injured in the accident.