Walk a Black Wind

16

“His name was Ralph Blackwind,” Katje Crawford said, and smiled thinly. “I think the name fascinated me. It was so strong, ethnic. I was seventeen in 1950, in New York alone trying to be a dancer. I had no talent. Too tall, awkward. So many young people desperately want to be what they can never be. As if they purposely choose the dream that must defeat them because they are equipped for it least of all they could do. Perhaps it’s necessary to learn the pain of failure before you can turn back to what you really knew you had to be all along. The real tragedy is the few who go on pursuing a hopeless dream, just good enough for a few small triumphs, hope always just ahead.”

She stopped to find a cigarette. I waited. She would tell it all in her own way. Out on the porch, Carter Vance was mixing another drink. His own was still half-full, so it wasn’t for him. Crawford sat like a man watching an old movie he’d seen fifty times before and knew by heart.

“Ralph Blackwind,” Katje Crawford said, smoked. “I met him at a YMCA dance for soldiers. He was handsome, dark-eyed, small and stocky, intense and all male. I was seventeen, in a hurry to be a woman. We were both outdoor people, we used to ride in New Jersey. He wanted a ranch among his people, work with them. Dedicated, coiled like a whip. I’m not a fool, I was failing as a dancer, and I knew it. I needed a new dream, Ralph was it. After a month we were married. But Korea had broken out, and two months later Ralph was sent over there, and I came home. Of course, I was pregnant by then.”

She looked up at me. “I was pregnant, Ralph was in Korea, and I knew it was wrong, a mistake, an error. The moment I came home, I knew it. Ralph and I-here? With what I knew all at once I really wanted? My life here? It had been a childish dream worse than the dancing. I knew, but Ralph was fighting in Korea. Could I write and tell him? I couldn’t. So the girls were born, twins. Francesca and Felicia Blackwind.”

The names were exotic in the big, elegant room. They had a wild sound, open and windy in a dry land of desert hills.

“God,” Martin Crawford said, “how Francesca would have liked that name. We should have told her, Katje, the moment we saw what kind of tough girl she was.”

“Perhaps we should have,” Katje Crawford said, and said to me, “I met Martin again soon after the twins were born. He’d known me when I was a girl. We fell in love. We were right for each other-the same lives, the same backgrounds, the same plans for the future. What were we to do? I couldn’t divorce Ralph, by then he’d been reported missing in action! Martin was in politics, it would have been suicide to try a divorce. We waited and waited, but Ralph wasn’t found, and the girls were growing. So we had the marriage quietly annulled, and were married ourselves. A year later, Ralph came home.”

She stubbed out her cigarette. It was almost a vicious gesture. Carter Vance brought her the drink he had made. She took it and drank without looking at Vance.

“Ralph had been a prisoner of the North Koreans for almost two years. He’d escaped-alone across hundreds of miles of enemy territory. He’d killed many of the enemy, some with his hands. Something had changed in him. He was cold, bitter, a man who could kill easily. Perhaps that had always been part of him, in his history, in his anger at being an Indian.

“He learned of the birth of the girls, and of our annulment. I suppose something snapped when they told him. A combination of what he’d been through, of the shock of the news. Perhaps it was only a last straw. He talked about death, the horror of war, the horror of the whole world, the insanity of the white man’s world. He wanted his haven-me and his children.”

She recrossed her legs. “I don’t pretend to think that I acted well to Ralph. I never wrote to him about the girls, I had the marriage annulled without telling him. Yes, I thought he was dead over there, perhaps I even hoped he was, but that was no excuse. I did what I had to do for my own life. We had made a mistake, Ralph and I, and Ralph would have known that, too, if we had tried to go on. I had to correct it. Firm and final. There was no other way.”

She drank the drink Carter Vance had given to her, and seemed to realize she had it for the first time. She stared into the drink. “I was living with my parents while Martin was in Albany. That weekend, Martin was on his way home, but he hadn’t arrived yet. I’ve always given thanks for that. I think Ralph would have killed Martin.

“He walked into the house with a submachine gun and a pistol. All I did was move, and he started shooting. He shattered the living room, and hit my father! He almost killed my father. He made me get the children, and drove away with us. We drove all evening toward Canada. The girls had to eat and sleep, so he stopped in a motel in Utica. That was when I learned all about Korea, his escape, his anger at the world. He talked to me all night while the children slept as much as they could they were so afraid.

“He talked and talked that night, about all his horrors, and about his plans for a ranch in Canada. Nonstop, as if he really were insane.

“I’ve seen that night in my dreams a thousand times since, and I’m still sorry for Ralph, terribly sorry for what he had become in that war, for what I had had to do. But I have never regretted it. The girls had nightmares for years afterwards. He would have been hounded down eventually, and who knows what would have happened to the girls? I did what was right.”

She stopped, and sat back in her chair. She lighted another cigarette. She smoked as if that was all, the story over as far as she was concerned-she had done right.

“How did you get away from him?” I asked.

“The police came in the morning,” she said, her voice normal now. “Martin had arrived home soon after Ralph took us. He saved my father, and alerted the police. When they found us, Ralph tried to resist, and Francesca was shot in the melee. That was her scar, Mr. Fortune. Under it all, Ralph wasn’t a bad man. When Francesca was hit, he gave up, carried her out to an ambulance himself.”

I said, “Then?”

Martin Crawford said, “I defended Blackwind. I had Katje say she had gone with him voluntarily, to talk to him, and I had the kidnapping charge dropped. I got it all dropped-except the assault-with-intent-to-murder on Katje’s father. Mr. Van Hoek had been badly shot, and we couldn’t evade that charge even though he pulled through. Blackwind got ten-to-twenty in Auburn. Three years later he escaped with four other men. One was killed in the escape-so was a prison guard. Ralph and the other two evaded for three days. Two of them were cornered in Hancock, one was killed. The survivor said that Ralph had drowned in a Catskill lake where they’d hidden.”

“They found his body?”

“Not at first. They found his weapons at the lake, the food he’d been carrying, but nothing else. So they continued the manhunt for five months. They ran down every lead, every report, everyone who had known Ralph. No trace of him was found, not a whisper that he was alive anywhere. Then divers found a body in the lake, wedged under rocks. It was bloated and eaten beyond any recognition, but it was Ralph’s size, had the remnants of his clothes, and his identification. It had been in the water the exact time. He’s dead, Mr. Fortune.”

For a time we were all silent. I knew what we were all thinking-was Ralph Blackwind alive somewhere? Perhaps somewhere not very far?

Carter Vance broke the spell. “I never knew the whole story. He was already dead when I came to town. Awful.”

Katje Crawford said, “You think that Ralph is alive, Mr. Fortune?”

“Any time a body isn’t positively identified, you have to consider that, yes,” I said. “What about dental records, scars, wounds, old injuries?”

Crawford said, “Blackwind had no dental work beyond his childhood, and his reservation had no records. The body was too decomposed to show scars. His brother said he had broken his left arm once, and there was a break in the left arm of the body. Only it was a recent break, and the M.E. couldn’t say if it was a new break or the old one rebroken. The reservation had no X-ray records.”

“But the left arm did have the break?”

Katje Crawford said, “He’s dead, Mr. Fortune. How could he have eluded such a manhunt so completely, and how could there have been a body his size in that lake just at the right time? If he was alive, he would have tried to see the girls sometime during the last fifteen years. He had a tremendous love of children, I hadn’t known that about him. In fact, I knew so little about him.”

“Would Francesca search for a dead man?” I said.

“Perhaps, yes. For her identity, for the truth about her history. She’d want to know about Ralph.”

Crawford said, “And she wouldn’t ask us, no.”

“Was Abram Zaremba connected to Blackwind at all?”

“Not at all, as far as I know,” Crawford said.

“How about a Carl Gans? John Andera? Harmon Dunstan? Or maybe Joel Pender, or Frank Keefer, or Anthony Sasser?”

“No, none of them,” Katje Crawford said. “Tony Sasser wasn’t even in Dresden before Ralph was dead.”

Crawford said, “Wait. There was a Captain Dunstan at Ralph’s trial, Katje. His commanding officer in Korea, captured with Ralph, remember? He testified for Ralph.”

“I don’t remember, Martin,” Katje Crawford said. “It’s been fifteen years now.”

“Are you sure, Crawford?” I said.

“Pretty sure, yes. Captain Dunstan.”

“All right, maybe Francesca went searching out her past and a dead father. Maybe it has something to do with why she was killed, and maybe not. It could be a coincidence, or she could have stumbled over something dangerous, or someone could even have made a mistake about what she was after,” I said to them. “But maybe we better remember one thing-if Ralph Blackwind does happen to be still alive, he’s got the murder of a prison guard hanging over him still. He might do a lot to not be found.”

None, of them had an answer for that. Katje Crawford sat looking at the floor when I left. Maybe she was wondering if none of this would have happened if she had told the girls about their father a long time ago.

In my car, I drove back to my motel and checked out. As I drove south and east through the rain, it all came into focus. Francesca had been looking for her father. Now Felicia was. Dead or alive, I didn’t know. Maybe that was what the grandfather, Emil Van Hoek, had had to tell Francesca-one way or the other.