Hour of the Hunter

Chapter 7

Brandon Walker, stretched out full length on Diana Ladd’s long but sagging couch, wasn’t sure which of the two woke him-the boy or the dog. When the detective opened his eyes, a pajama-clad Davy Ladd sat cross-legged on the floor next to the coffee table, 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 you.”

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

“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. For a time, Hunter and his sister lived together in peace, but then the people 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 waited 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 for four 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 Lucky 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 I-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 free 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 shoes 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 now and began boarding the train, taking the places of those who got off earlier. Soon it would be Dancing Quail’s turn. She clutched her magic rock and asked I’itoi for courage.

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 supposed, but that if she hadn’t been in the ambulance when her heart stopped, she surely would have died.

“Ni-sihs,” 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 according 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 unfair 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.

“You should have seen it when we first moved in,” Diana said. “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 uproariously at the very idea. Here at the university, she always 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.

“Why?”

“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.