Hour of the Hunter

Chapter 3

At almost seven thousand feet, a brisk breeze struck their faces as Rita and Davy stepped down from the GMC. After the heat of the desert floor far below, the cool mountain air felt almost chilly.

In the sparsely occupied observatory parking lot, Rita left Davy to unload baskets while she limped toward the gift shop. A little blond-haired girl sitting on sun-soaked steps regarded the Indian woman curiously as she tapped lightly on the visitor center’s side entrance. At this hour, visitors inside would be watching a movie. Rita disliked walking past them on her way to the craft shop.

Edwina Galvan, manager of the shop, came to the door. Edwina, a Kiowa transplant to the Papago, had fallen in love with and married a young Papago fire fighter who now, as a middle-aged man, served as tribal-council representative from Ban Thak.

Even in her forties, Edwina’s classic Plains Indian features and good looks met and exceeded all the visiting tourists’ “real Indian” expectations. She augmented a stunning natural beauty with a varying wardrobe of antelope bone or squash-blossom necklaces that she wasn’t shy about removing and selling on the spot if a likely purchaser showed sufficient interest.

Since coming to the Papago and assuming management of the Kitt Peak gift shop, she had developed a reputation as a shrewd and knowledgeable basket trader, one with an unerring eye for superior craftsmanship. For years, the Kiowa woman had been Rita Antone’s sole customer.

Edwina smiled when she saw Rita’s broad weathered face waiting outside the door. “So,” she said. “If you’re here, it must be June. It’s sure a good thing. Your baskets are all gone.”

She didn’t say that because of their unrivaled superiority, Rita Antone’s baskets were always the first to sell. Such high praise would be considered excessive and rude. It was enough to say that Rita’s baskets were gone. The old woman nodded a brief acknowledgment of the understated compliment.

Davy appeared just then, lugging the first box of baskets. He waved at Edwina, then hurried back after the next load.

“The bald-headed baby isn’t bald anymore,” Edwina observed as the door closed behind him. “He’s sure big. Is he in school?”

“He just finished kindergarten. He’ll be in first grade next year,” Rita answered.

Davy returned with the second box of baskets, smiling shyly at Edwina as he put it down on the floor. Edwina had heard all the reservation grumblings about Rita Antone, often called Hejel Wi’ithag, or Left Alone, by other Papagos. Gossips said it wasn’t right for her to squander all her hard-earned knowledge on Davy Ladd, an Anglo at that-a boy whose father, convicted or not, was ultimately responsible for Rita’s own grandchild’s death. No one could understand why she would abandon her people to go live in Tucson with the killer’s Anglo widow and her white-skinned baby.

Edwina, still considered a reservation newcomer after a mere twenty years, accepted as a given the special bond that existed between Rita Antone and Diana Ladd. She remembered how the people had unaccountably closed ranks against the bereaved woman after Gina Antone’s death, saying that the old woman was bad luck. Diana and Rita, united by nothing more than mutual grief, had been each other’s strongest allies in that time of trouble. Edwina Galvan didn’t fault either woman for their continuing alliance, nor did she begrudge Left Alone her devotion to the blond-haired boy. In fact, Edwina rather liked him herself.

It took Davy several more trips before all the baskets were assembled in a pile on the floor in front of the counter. By then, Rita was seated on a chair behind the counter drinking a glass of water and fanning herself while Edwina went through the boxes one by one, examining each basket in turn, writing the price on a piece of masking tape that she affixed to the bottom of each basket after first making a note in the ragged notebook that served as her master record.

“You’ve sure been busy,” Edwina commented offhandedly as she worked. “What are you going to do with all your money?”

“Saving it for my old age,” Rita answered. At that, both women laughed. Rita was sixty-five years old. Among the Papago, in a population with the highest blood-sugar count of any known ethnic group in the world, one decimated by the ravages of both diabetes and alcoholism, Rita Antone was already well into a venerated old age.

“Does she give you any of that cash?” Edwina asked Davy with a smile. He shook his head seriously. Edwina reached into her pocket and extracted a quarter. “Here, I’ll give you some,” she said. “Go get yourself a Coke. The machine’s right outside.”

Davy dashed eagerly out of the gift shop. Rita and his mother didn’t let him have sodas often, so this was a special treat. He found the machine with no trouble and felt terribly grown up as he inserted the coin all by himself and pressed the selection button. A can rolled into the slot with a satisfying thunk. Grabbing it and turning at the same time, he ran headlong into the little Anglo girl who had watched him make trip after trip carrying loads of baskets. The impact of the unexpected collision knocked the soda can out of his hands. It fell to the ground and rolled away.

“Watch where you’re going, dummy,” he muttered. He retrieved the can, but when he opened it, half its contents blew into the air. Disappointed, he flopped down onto the steps to drink what was left. Moments later, the little girl joined him, bringing her own soda with her.

“Is that woman you’re with a Indian?” she asked.

It was bad manners to ask such questions, but Davy answered anyway. “Yes.”

“Are you a Indian, too?” she persisted.

“Maybe I am,” Davy answered, growing surly. “And maybe I’m not, either. What’s it to you?”

With that, he stomped away, not sure what about the question had made him so angry. He hurried across the parking lot to where two quarrelsome ground squirrels argued over an abandoned crust of bread. Suddenly, the automatic door of an outbuilding opened, and an ambulance eased into the sunlight.

At first Davy thought he was going to get to see it drive off with lights flashing and siren blaring. Instead, the driver parked directly outside the door, shut off the engine, then went back into the garage. He returned moments later carrying a bucket of soapy water, a brush, and a fistful of rags.

Disappointed, Davy finished what was left of his soda and went looking for Rita.

Andrew Carlisle took his time. He was in no hurry to leave the scene of his triumph and return to the car. After drinking his fill from the rocky pool, he washed the blood from his back, shins, and knees, letting the hot sun dry the moisture from his chafed skin. He took real pleasure in knowing that his victim had fought him and lost. He was a slight man, but the years of working out in prison, especially his total concentration on strengthening his hands, had paid off.

Only after he was fully dressed did he once more turn his attention to the dead woman. Andrew Carlisle was not a man accustomed to cleaning up his own messes, but in this case he made an exception. Dragging her by one arm, he hauled her into the shallow stream and washed her thoroughly, carefully rinsing off whatever traces of himself he might have left behind. Touching her now no longer aroused him, but he enjoyed looking at the ruined breast and knowing he had caused the damage. That was a trophy of sorts, something to be proud of.

When he finished cleaning her up, he dragged her back out of the water and arranged her to his liking, leaving her lying faceup in the searing sun, then he surveyed the area, gathering her clothing and sandals into a small, tidy stack. He shook an almost full package of Winstons out of the woman’s shirt pocket, and was happy to see that a book of matches had been shoved inside the cellophane wrapper.

He squatted there and smoked his cigarette. Little time had passed, but already a few alert flies and ants were beginning to do what flies and ants do with dead flesh. He observed their purposeful movements with detached amusement, wondering idly how the insects knew about the unexpected bounty good fortune had laid at their doorstep. Was there some kind of secret signal, some code? Did an alert scout sound a special buzzing alarm that said, “Hey guys, follow me. Come see what I found”?

By the time Carlisle finished the cigarette, there were far more ants and flies than there had been when he first lit up. He ground out the cigarette and placed the butt along with the accumulated stack of clothing. He returned to the corpse and removed the jewelry-three rings, a Timex watch, and a single gold-chain necklace-wresting them roughly from the body not because they might be valuable or worth selling but because any delay in identifying the body would work to his advantage.

Systematically, he went through the pockets of her shorts and shirt, finding nothing but the car keys and his own sixty-five dollars. “You should have asked for more, honey,” he said aloud to the dead woman as he returned the bills to his wallet. “Believe me, your pussy was worth it.”

He returned to the pitiful stack of belongings and wrapped them as well as his discarded cigarette butt into a secure bundle, which he stuffed inside his shirt. The cigarettes, matches, and car keys went into a pocket. He made one last careful search of the area to make sure he had missed nothing.

Most of the terrain was rocky except for the hooker’s makeshift earthen bed. With a mesquite branch, he swept the area clean of footprints, adding the branch to his bundle as well. When he was certain he had removed all visible incriminating evidence, Andrew Carlisle turned and walked away.

Welcome to the world, he thought. Payback time has started.

Diana Ladd leaned away from her typewriter and rolled her shoulders, trying to relieve the tension caused by several uninterrupted hours before her trusty Smith-Corona. The writing wasn’t going particularly well, but she refused to quit.

It was probably weariness that made her drop her guard for a moment, allowing the unwelcome, errant thought into her consciousness-if only Gary were here to give her a back rub.

Disgusted with herself, she choked the thought off smothering it as quickly as she could. Seven years after Gary’s suicide, her mind and body both still played those kinds of tricks on her. She felt betrayed by the treachery of her own flesh, by the aching longings that sometimes awakened her in the middle of the night. Gary was dead, dammit, and she wouldn’t have wanted him around any longer even if he weren’t.

When the boy was gone, Mister Bone, as Diana often called the dog, lay at her feet. As soon as the typing stopped, he raised his head, hoping Diana might throw the ball for him. When she got up and padded to the kitchen, he followed, stopping by the kitchen sink to take a long, sloppy drink from his water dish while she retrieved a pitcher of warm sun tea from the patio.

Diana Ladd knew that her friends were losing patience. One by one, they had all taken the trouble to tell her that it was high time she got over Gary’s death, time that she dated someone else and found a father figure for poor little Davy. That was what they always called him-“poor little Davy.” Well, she hadn’t chosen very damn well the first time, and she didn’t have any faith she’d do better the next time around. Besides, she had tried it-once.

She had gone out for one miserable evening with a traveling encyclopedia salesman who had made a presentation to the school faculty at Sells. He had taken her to dinner at the Iron Mask in Tucson and then to the Maverick, a country-western place on Twenty-second Street. She had done all right until the band had played “The Snakes Crawl at Night.” When they did that number, she had asked him to take her home, and she’d refused to go out with him again. Months later, he still called her periodically.

Taking the glass of iced tea back to her room, Diana settled down at the desk and read through the five pages she had written since Rita and Davy had left at noon. It was tripe, she knew it, but she resisted the temptation to wad it all up into a ball and throw it in the garbage. Later, after she’d given it a rest, some of it might still be salvageable. If she was going to finish the book this summer-that was her stated goal-she couldn’t afford to throw everything away.

Although she thought of the book as a novel, it was autobiographical, of course. Someone had said that all first novels are autobiographical. It was the story of a woman’s attempt to go on living in the aftermath of her husband’s betrayal and subsequent suicide. The problem was the main character. There was no joy in her heroine, no life.

Diana rolled another clean sheet of paper into the machine, then sat there staring at it. In the stillness of the darkened room, her parents’ voices returned to haunt her. Once they started up, she had no choice but to let them play on to the end of whatever tape had surfaced in her head. All of the arguments and battles were there, preserved indelibly in her memory. The details varied occasionally, but the basic theme was always the same.

It had usually started around dinnertime when her father would come in from working in the woods near Joseph, Oregon.

“Where’s that lazy daughter of yours, Iona? Why the hell isn’t she down here helping you?”

Her mother’s voice would come drifting up the stairs to her then-calming and soothing, as always. “She’s studying, Max. Leave her alone. I don’t need any help. Dinner’s almost ready.”

But Max Cooper was never one to be easily dissuaded. He would come to the bottom of the stairs, and his voice would boom through the house like a clap of thunder announcing a sudden storm over Oregon’s Willowa Mountains.

“Diana Lee, you get your ass down here. Now!”

Knowing better than to argue or fight back, Diana would hurry downstairs. Inevitably, he would be waiting for her at the landing, swaying dangerously, hiking up his pants, tugging at his suspenders. She’d try to slip past him, but he would catch her by the braids, snapping her head back, pulling her hair until her eyes watered. She must have been twelve then, because her mother had cut off the braids right after her thirteenth birthday.

“What were you doing up there?” he demanded.

“Reading a book. For my book report.”

At twelve Diana Lee Cooper hadn’t known that her father was illiterate. Diana didn’t find that out until much later, when her mother was dying. Max Cooper’s inability to read was part and parcel of the helplessness that bound Iona Cooper to him. Aside from the fact that Diana wasn’t a son, her love of reading was another reason for Max to despise their only child. Diana’s love of books and schooling both mystified and infuriated him.

Diana tried to slip away, but he yanked her braids again, shaking her, lifting her off her feet. The skin all over her head smarted, but she didn’t cry out. Wouldn’t cry out.

“How come you’ve always got that snooty nose of yours stuck in a book, young lady? You get your butt out into the kitchen, girl, and learn something useful for a change.”

Twenty years later, Diana Ladd could still smell his stale, beer-saturated breath and see the spikes of stiff nose hairs in his flaring nostrils.

“Once you learn how to cook and clean and please a man, then’s time enough for you to sit on your ass and read books.”

He had shoved her away from him then, propelling her toward the kitchen. Somehow she managed to keep her legs under her. In the kitchen, Iona Cooper, lips clenched, bent over the stove, concentrating on stirring the gravy or mashing the potatoes, refusing to meet Diana’s gaze. She never said anything aloud, never said anything her husband might overhear and use against them both, but a conspiracy of silence existed between the woman and her daughter.

Afterward, Diana Lee Ladd remembered that battle in particular and counted it as a watershed. A spark of rebellion caught fire that evening, one that Max Cooper was never able to stifle or beat out of his daughter no matter how hard he tried.

And twenty years later, Diana Lee Cooper Ladd pushed aside her typewriter, put her head down in her arms, and cried because it wasn’t worth it.

What good had it done to escape her ignorant father, to flee the brutal prison that had been her home in Joseph, Oregon? There was still no joy in her life. No joy at all.

Rita carefully maneuvered the truck down the winding road. It was a thirty-minute, twelve-mile drive, most of it with the road perched precariously on the steep flank of the mountain. She kept the truck in low gear to save the brakes. While Rita drove, Davy, more quiet than usual, hunkered down in his corner of the seat.

“What is it, Olhoni?” Rita asked.

“Will I be an Indian when I grow up?”

His question mirrored her own concern, but she tried to laugh it off. “You already are,” she told him.

“Really?” He brightened at once. “What kind? Papago, like you?”

Rita shook her head. “Big Toe,” she said, smiling to herself because she knew the old joke would be new to Davy.

“I never heard of Big Toe Indians,” he countered. “Where are they from?”

“All over,” she answered.

“Are you sure?”

“They’re people with so little Indian blood that the only thing Indian about them is their big toe.”

“You’re teasing me,” he said, pouting.

She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons I’itoi chose us for his people. We tease and laugh and make jokes. So does he.”

“But I still want to be an Indian,” Davy insisted.

At the bottom of the mountain, the road straightened abruptly, dropping through the foothills on a stretch of reservation-owned open range.

Rita had driven on open range all her life, and she wasn’t driving fast. They were nearing the junction with Highway 86 when a startled steer came crashing up onto the roadway out of a dry wash. With no warning, there was barely enough time to react. Rita jammed on the brakes. The pickup swerved to one side, avoiding the animal by inches, but the right rear tire caught in the soft sand of the shoulder.

The GMC rolled over onto its side and then rolled again, end over end, coming to rest lying on its roof in the other lane, its hood facing in the wrong direction. Without knowing precisely what had happened or how he got there, Davy found himself standing upright in the middle of the road.

He couldn’t see anything. There was a terrible shrieking noise ringing in his ears, and another noise as well-a car’s horn, honking one long, terrible wail.

Davy gasped for breath and realized that the first sound came from him-his own voice screaming. He put his hands to his face and brought them away bloody, but he could see again, could see the dust still flying, the tires still spinning uselessly in the air. The engine was still running, and the horn wouldn’t quit. The blaring noise seemed to be all around him, coming up out of the desert floor, raining down on him from the very sky itself.

“Nana Dahd,” he shouted. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

There was no answer, only the horn-the terrible horn. He scrambled over to the pickup and peered inside. Nana Dahd lay with her body crushed against the steering wheel, which jutted far into the cab. Blood gushed from a gaping wound on her left hand.

“Nana Dahd!” Davy shouted again, but she didn’t hear him, didn’t stir.

Just then a pair of strong hands gripped his shoulders and dragged him away from the truck. Davy looked up to see that an Anglo man, a stranger, was holding him. He fought the hands with all his might, kicking and screaming, “Let me go! Let me go!” But the man held him fast.

A second man was there now, crawling on his hands and knees, peering into the truck. He reached inside across Nana Dahd’s still body and switched off the engine, then he tugged at some wires under the dash. The wailing horn was instantly stilled, and the sudden silence was deafening.

“Can we get her out, Joe?”

The man by the truck shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’s pinned. We’ve got to get a tourniquet on this hand, then find some help. How far back to that little trading post?”

“Three Points? A long way. What about the other direction, toward Sells?”

“Up there!” Davy told them, pointing back up the mountain, but the men didn’t hear him. After all, he was only a little kid. What did he know?

“You stay with her,” one man was saying to the other, letting Davy go and heading back toward his car, a shiny red Grand Prix. The two men had been traveling past the turnoff on the highway just in time to see the GMC perform its spectacular series of acrobatics.

One of the two men started toward the car, but Davy ran after him, attaching himself to the man’s knee like a stubborn cocklebur. The force of his tackle almost brought both of them down.

“Up there!” Davy insisted desperately. “We’ve got to go up there!”

“Let go, kid. Don’t waste time.”

“But there’s an ambulance up there. I know. I saw it!”

Finally, the boy’s words penetrated. “An ambulance? On the mountain?”

“Yes. Please.”

“No shit! I’m going, but you stay here. You’re hurt, too.”

Beating him off with a club was all that would have kept Davy Ladd from clambering into the Grand Prix. He sat in the front seat, not crying but shaking silently, his bloody face pressed to the inside of the windshield as the car raced up the steep mountain road, straightening the curves, clinging to the pavement on the outside edges.

At one point, the man tossed him a white handkerchief. “Christ, kid, use this, will you? You’re getting blood all over my car.”

When they reached the top of the mountain, the car screeched to a stop in the parking lot.

“Which way?”

Wordlessly, Davy pointed toward the garage. The door was closed, the now-clean ambulance inside and invisible. The man raced toward it while Davy scrambled out of the car and ran toward the gift shop. It was after four and the place was closed, but Davy pounded on the side door, the one Nana Dahd had used earlier. When Edwina Galvan finally opened it, he flung himself at her.

“It’s Nana Dahd! You’ve got to help her. She’s hurt bad.”

“What happened?”

The dam broke. Suddenly, Davy Ladd was sobbing so badly he could barely talk. “A cow,” he mumbled. “A cow in the road.”

“Where?” Edwina demanded, but he didn’t answer. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Where did it happen?”

“Down on the flat. Almost to the highway.”

Just then a piercing alarm sounded all over the complex at the top of the mountain. The man from the Grand Prix dashed out of the garage followed by the ambulance. Two other men appeared from nowhere and ran for the ambulance.

“It’s at the bottom of the mountain,” one of them shouted back at Edwina. “Radio Sells for another ambulance.”

Edwina nodded and turned to go back inside. Holding Davy’s hand, she intended to take him with her, but he pulled free and darted away, climbing back into the front seat of the Grand Prix just as it started out of the parking lot behind the speeding ambulance.

No matter what, Davy Ladd’s place was with Nana Dahd.

The pain was bigger than she was and hotter than the sun. It burned through her, seared through her, until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.

Where’s Olhoni? she wondered. She had called for him, but he didn’t answer. Where was he? Was he dead? No. That was impossible. That couldn’t be, but where was he?

She asked the man, a man who was there trying to talk to her through the mangled window of the truck, but she could no longer translate the funny Mil-gahn words. The only words that made sense to her now were those of her childhood, the Papago ones. The man shook his head helplessly. He didn’t understand, either.

“Where is Olhoni?” she murmured again and again. “Where is my bald-headed baby?”

There were other cars now, other people. Rita could hear them, could see feet where faces ought to be. Were they upside down or was she? What had happened? And where was Olhoni?

And then the pain. The pain that was bigger than she was grew even larger. It was a pain bigger than the stars and the sky and the universe. The pain was everything.

She heard a noise and realized that someone had cut a hole in the door of the truck. Her body was flowing out through that hole-her body and her blood.

They were moving her now, moving her out onto the ground and strapping her down to a board or a stretcher of some kind. That was when she started to fight them. The heavy white strap locked her to the board just as another strap long ago had once locked her to a bed.

She fought them like a smart cow fights when she knows she’s being led to the slaughter. The pain was blinding, but she fought through it, fought beyond it. She might have won, too, but suddenly Olhoni was there, kneeling at her side, pleading with her to be still.

“Let them help you, Nana Dahd,” he begged. “Please let them help you.”

She looked up then and saw that beyond Olhoni some of the other faces swarming above her were Indian faces. She wondered where they’d come from, or if they had been there all the time.

A few of the men were trying to pick up the stretcher with her on it. She could tell from the looks on their faces that they thought she was too heavy. For some reason, this seemed funny to her, but when she tried to laugh, another searing pain shot through her.

One of the men tried to pry Davy away from her hand, but he clung to her and refused to budge.

“Let him come,” one of the attendants said. “He’s hurt, too.”

Could that be? Olhoni hurt? Rita tried to look at him, to see what was wrong, but she blacked out then. The next thing she knew, she was riding in the ambulance, or rather on top of it. Over it somehow. She could see the two attendants huddled over a strangely familiar figure lying flat on a stretcher.

Olhoni was sitting off to one side. Rita called to him, but he didn’t look up, didn’t hear her. His eyes never left the face of the old woman on the stretcher. There was a bottle with some kind of liquid in it hanging above her. A plastic tube led from the bottle to a needle pressed into the flesh of the woman’s arm.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. “We’re losing her! We’re losing her!” one of the attendants shouted.

Ruthlessly, the other man shoved Olhoni aside, pushing him roughly up into the front seat. The boy didn’t protest. He went where he was told and sat there, with his hands clutching the dashboard, staring out the window in front of him.

And that was when Rita saw the buzzards, three of them, sitting in a row on three separate telephone poles, their huge wings outstretched to collect the last warming rays of sunshine. Those buzzards, their heads still naked and bloody after I’itoi scalped them in punishment for betraying him, sat there soaking up the sun on their coal-black living wing tips.

The buzzards were alive and wanted to be alive. Suddenly, so did Rita. Olhoni still needed her. I’itoi did not.

Clawing her way, hand over hand, Rita scrambled down from the roof of the moving vehicle, fought her way back inside the ambulance until she stood peering curiously down at the shrunken form still strapped to the stretcher. For some time, she gazed dispassionately at the body, amazed by how terribly ancient that old woman seemed, by how worn and wrinkled and used-up she was, but not yet ready to be dead.

With a terrifying jolt, the electrical current passed through her body, hammering her heart awake once more, and she was home.

Andrew Carlisle took his time coming down the trail. He searched back and forth, combing the mountainside until he found the two empty beer cans they had dropped on the way up. No sense in leaving a set of identifiable fingerprints. He knew from what he’d learned in Florence that the chances of homicide cops finding a “stranger” assailant were slim as long as the stranger was reasonably smart and played it cool.

The waning afternoon sun scorched the ground around him. No one had yet ventured into the deserted rest-area parking lot by the time he returned to his victim’s car. He helped himself to another beer-still cold, thank God-and started the Toyota. He turned off the air-conditioning and drove down the freeway with the windows open, letting the hot desert air flow freely over his body. It was outside air. He was free.

Fortunately, there was plenty of gas in the car, so he didn’t have to stop before he got to Phoenix. He drove straight to the Park Central Mall in Phoenix proper and parked in an empty corner of the lot. There, as afternoon turned to evening, he went through the woman’s purse and removed all the cash, over two hundred dollars’ worth. Beneath the seat he discovered a gun, a Llama.380 automatic. He had planned to take nothing that belonged to his victim, nothing that could tie him back to her, but the weapon was more temptation than he could resist. Trying to purchase a weapon if he wanted one later might cause people to ask questions. So he pocketed the gun.

Carefully, systematically, he went over every surface in the vehicle, wiping it clean of prints. Then he did the same to the beer cans and jewelry before he took them to a nearby trash can. The clothing he ditched in another can, this one at Thomas Mall on his way to the airport.

Sky Harbor was his last stop. Once there, he pulled into the long-term lot and took a ticket. One last time he wiped down everything he remembered touching since Park Mall-the door handle, steering wheel, gearshift, window knob, and keys. Then, placing the newly wiped keys back in the ignition, he got out of the car and walked away.

It was dark by then and much cooler. In the hubbub and hurry of the airport, no one noticed him walk away. It would be a five-mile hike to his mother’s new house in Tempe, but he wasn’t afraid of walking. In fact, walking that far would be a real treat.