Hour of the Hunter

Chapter 10

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 jarring 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 blowjob, 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.

Carlisle, 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-minded 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 slick 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 vanilla-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.

An orderly brought dinner. Rita ate a few spoonfuls of watery vegetable soup before drifting back into her 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 grasp of English. Sister Mary Jane also worried about the Indian girl’s lack of formal religious training. When apprised of the 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 Ioligam.

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 Vamori.

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 en route 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.”

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-gahn 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 I’itoi, which all the animals and people used to speak, “Offer it to him again,” Coyote said, “only this time say, ‘nawoj,’ 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 Ceremony of the Peace Smoke, or the Peace Pipe, as some tribes call it, for the Tohono O’odham, 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 Wi’ithag 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 Mil-gahn 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 R amp; R 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 a 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 blond. “Thanks,” she said, taking it. “Are 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.”

The blonde looked at him quizzically. “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.”