by J. A. Jance
David Ladd sighed. For a farewell celebration, it was not an auspicious beginning.
Lani Walker left a note for her parents on the kitchen table. “Have fun at the banquet. Remember, Jess and I are going to that dueling bands concert at the Community Center tonight. Her parents are giving us a ride both to and from. I shouldn’t be too late, but don’t wake me for breakfast. Tomorrow’s my day off.”
The Tucson Mountains loomed in deep shadows against a rosy sky when Lani rode her bike up to Mr. Vega’s parking place. She had worried overnight that maybe he wouldn’t show up, but he was there with his easel already set up by the time she braked the mountain bike next to his station wagon.
“Nice hat,” he said. “And nice shirt, too, but you’re right. Those clothes make you look more like a cowgirl than an Indian.”
“Hardly anybody wears feathers anymore,” Lani told him. “And most of the people who go around in leather ride motorcycles.”
“Point taken,” he said, with a mock salute. “I think maybe I’ll have you sit over here on this rock with the saguaro in the background. By the way, do you want anything to drink before we get started? I brought along orange juice just in case you didn’t have time for breakfast.”
Lani took off her hat and smoothed her windblown hair. “Some orange juice would be great,” she said. She settled onto the rock and tried to get comfortable while he brought her a glass of juice.
“What do I need to do?” she asked.
“Relax and try to look natural,” he said.
“That’s a lot easier said than done,” Lani said, taking a long drink of the juice, hoping it would settle her nerves. “I don’t like having my picture taken, either. That might be part of what was wrong with the kids you tried to draw out on the reservation. When the white man first came west and tried taking pictures of Indians, people believed that the photographer would somehow end up capturing their spirits.”
“No kidding.” Mr. Vega was busily sketching with a stick of charcoal now, pausing every few moments and studying Lani’s face. “And you’re saying that some people out on the reservation still believe that’s true?”
“Probably some of them do,” she said.
Lani had no idea how much time passed. She was aware of a sudden buzzing in her head, like the angry hum of thousands of bees. Her first thought was that she was dreaming, that something had brought to mind the old story of Mualig Siakam.
“Mr. Vega,” she said, reaching out to steady herself as the mountains around her spun in a dizzying circle.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. Mr. Vega left his easel and walked toward her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel strange, like I can’t sit up, like I’m going to fall over. And hot, too.”
“Here,” he said, reaching out to her. “Let me help you.”
The last thing Lani felt was Mr. Vega’s arms closing tightly around her and lifting her off the ground. Weaker than she could ever remember feeling in her life, Lani let her head drop heavily against his chest.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she mumbled. “I’m so tired, so sleepy.”
“You’re okay,” Mr. Vega said soothingly as he carried her toward the back of the Subaru. “You close your eyes and relax now, Lani. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
He knows my name, Lani thought. How come he knows my name? Did I tell him?
She couldn’t remember telling him, but she must have. How else would he have known?
Thirsty as hell, Manny Chavez woke up under a mesquite tree. Fighting his way through an alcohol-induced fog, he sat up and tried to figure out where he was. He remembered stopping off at the trading post at Three Points sometime after dark. He had gone there with a terrible thirst and the remains of his paycheck. Now the sun was high overhead, but the thirst remained.
The rockbound walls of Baboquivari rose up out of the desert far to the south while Kitt Peak was directly at his back a few miles away across the desert. From the looks of the mountain looming over him, Manny figured he was probably somewhere off Coleman Road.
Frowning, he tried to remember how he had come to be there. He had ridden to Three Points with his son, Eddie, and some of Eddie’s friends. They had bought some beer—several cases—and some Big Red fortified wine—and then they had gone off somewhere in the desert, off the reservation rather than on it, to drink it in peace. Now that Delia, Manny’s daughter, had returned to the reservation, Manny could no longer afford to be picked up by Law and Order. Delia had come to the jail and bailed him out once, but Manny’s pride still writhed in shame at the name she had called him.
“Nawmk!” she had spat at him. “Drunkard!”
Delia had been away from the reservation for so long that he was surprised she still remembered any of the language. But that particular word was probably indelibly printed in Delia’s brain, imprinted there by Ellie, Delia’s mother.
Feeling a lump under him, Manny rolled over and was relieved to find that a pint bottle—still half-full—lingered in his hip pocket. He unscrewed the top and took a long swig, hoping that the wine would help clear his head. It didn’t, but at least it did help slake his thirst. Struggling to his feet, he walked out to a small clearing where mounds of empty cans and bottles as well as the deep impressions of tire tracks told him where Eddie’s truck had been parked.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t there anymore. For some reason, Eddie and his friends had taken off, leaving Manny alone. In the early morning cool, the desert was very still. Far to the north, he could hear the occasional whine of rubber tires on pavement. From the sounds of distant vehicles speeding by, it probably meant the highway wasn’t all that far, especially not as the crow flies. Striking out across the low-lying desert, Manny headed for Highway 86.
Once he hit that, someone was bound to pick him up and give him a ride back home to Sells. There he’d be able to find Eddie and ask him why he had taken off and left Manny there alone. It wasn’t a nice thing for a son to do to his father, even if the father did happen to be drunk.
Quentin Walker woke up fairly early that Saturday morning, hung over as hell and in a state of blind panic. What if someone had broken into his rented room overnight and stolen the money? Or worse, what if the money didn’t exist at all? What if it was a figment of his imagination—a drunken delusion of some kind? Thinking about it, though, Quentin didn’t believe he had been that drunk when Mitch Johnson showed up in the bar looking for him.
And it turned out the money was there after all, still hidden in the toe of his mud-spattered work boots, exactly where Quentin had left it before going to bed. He took the bills out and examined them again. One by one he held them up to the light from the grimy bedroom window. There was nothing about the bills that smacked of counterfeit. The vertical, copy-proof strip was there—the one feds had announced they were putting in bills to counter the counterfeiters.
Quentin’s inspection proved that the bills were real enough, but they also posed a real dilemma. Existing from paycheck to paycheck as he did, Quentin Walker had no bank account. Somebody who dressed and looked the way he did couldn’t very well walk into the nearest Wells Fargo bank branch and make a five-thousand-dollar deposit with five bills. If somebody like him turned up in a bank with that kind of money, the teller was bound to notice and remember. While he was there or after he left, people would wonder and ask questions. Pretty soon, his parole officer would be asking questions, too.
On a week-to-week basis, Quenton cashed his paychecks in the bars he frequented—usually ones in his immediate neighborhood—places he could walk to. Quentin had lost both his pickup truck and his driver’s license in the aftermath of that damned DWI accident that had landed him in the state prison.
Cashing a paycheck was one thing, but nobody in a bar was going to fork over change for a thousand-dollar bill. Besides, even if they had that kind of cash in a safe, changing the money in a bar in that marginal neighborhood was far too risky. Somebody mig
ht see what was going on and decide to relieve him of the cash the moment he stepped back outside. Quentin Walker knew too well that not all bartenders were honest.
Unable to decide how to proceed, Quentin stood for some time holding the bills in his hand. Finally he stuffed them into his pocket and then moved from the tiny bedroom of his furnished apartment to the equally tiny kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and took out the remainder of the loaf of bread that he kept there to protect it from marauding cockroaches. There were only two slices of bread left in the loaf. His first instinct was to throw them out. He had the two dried crusts in his hand and was ready to drop them in the garbage when he realized what a mistake that would be. The slices of bread themselves were the makings of the perfect hiding place.
Quentin took the bills out of his pocket and placed them between the two slices of bread, folding them small enough so no pieces of paper showed on the outside of the bread. Then he put his freshly assembled money sandwich back inside the plastic bread bag. Convinced that his hiding place was absolutely brilliant, he shoved the plastic bag into the small frost-filled freezer compartment of his refrigerator and shut the door.
Enormously pleased with himself, Quentin left the apartment, locked the door, and then walked as far as the McDonald’s on the other side of the freeway. There, he splurged on breakfast. He treated himself to coffee, orange juice, and two Egg McMuffins.
Over breakfast, Quentin’s worries about taking Mitch Johnson to the cave surfaced once again with a vengeance. If he had still owned his truck, it wouldn’t have been a problem. He could simply have driven out to the cave well in advance and checked things out for himself. If there was a problem, he could take care of it…
The answer came to him like a bolt out of the blue. He could buy a car. One of the major roadblocks to buying a car had always been a chronic lack of money. In order to buy a car on time—in order to get a loan—it was necessary to show proof of insurance. Without it, no bank in the universe would even let him drive an uninsured car off the lot. With his driving record, car insurance was something else Quentin Walker didn’t have and wasn’t likely to get.
But now he had the money—as much or even more than he would need—to buy a car. And if he was paying cash for something like that, the people at the dealership probably wouldn’t even blink at the thousand-dollar bills, as long as the total amount was less than the ten-thousand-dollar limit that would cause all kinds of scrutiny.
With growing excitement Quentin paged through the automotive section of an abandoned Arizona Sun he grabbed off a neighboring table. He wanted to find something that would be rugged enough to suit his needs and cheap enough to fit his budget. He circled three that seemed like possibilities—an ’87 Suzuki Samurai soft-top, a rebuilt 1980 Ford Bronco, and a ’77 GMC Suburban—all of them in the thirty-five-hundred range. That would just about do it—use up his little windfall, leave him some change, and get him some wheels all at the same time.
By the time he headed back to his apartment to shower, the day had taken on a whole new promise. He was finally going to have something to show for all his years of struggle. And if he ever ran into either of his so-called brothers again—Davy Ladd or Brian Fellows—he would tell them both to go piss up a rope.
Diana was lying awake in bed when she heard the side gate open and close as Lani mounted her bike and left for work. Glancing at the bedside clock, Diana was surprised by how early it was—just barely five-thirty. Why was Lani leaving for work so early when her volunteer shift didn’t start until seven?
Next to her, Brandon seemed to be sleeping peacefully for a change, so Diana was careful not to wake him as she crept out of bed herself. Wrapping a robe around her, she padded silently down the tiled hallway, through the living room, and into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. She found Lani’s note on the kitchen table.
Diana read it and tossed it back on the table. She didn’t remember any discussion about Lani’s going to a concert. That meant Lani had asked her father for permission rather than her mother. But then why wouldn’t she? Despite Brandon’s tough-guy act and protestations to the contrary, the girl had had him buffaloed from the very beginning.
“Being foster parents is one thing,” he had told his wife the night before Clemencia Escalante was due to arrive at their house after being released from Tucson Medical Center. “Obviously the poor little kid needs help, and I don’t mind pitching in. But just because Rita managed to bend the rules enough to have Clemencia placed with us on a foster child basis doesn’t mean it’s going to lead to a permanent adoption. It won’t, you know. It’ll never fly.”
“But Rita wants her,” Diana said.
“Regardless of what Rita wants, she’s seventy years old right this minute,” Brandon pointed out, taking refuge in what seemed to, him to be obvious logic. “And considering it was neglect from an elderly grandparent that sent the poor little tyke to the hospital in the first place, nobody in the child welfare system is going to approve of Rita as an adoptive parent.”
“I wasn’t talking about Rita adopting her,” Diana said quietly. “I was talking about us.”
Brandon dropped his newspaper. “Us?” he echoed.
Diana nodded. “It’s the only way Rita will ever be able to have her.”
“But Diana,” Brandon argued. “How long do you think Rita will be around? She already has health problems. In the long run, that little girl will end up being our sole responsibility.”
“So?” Diana answered with a shrug. “Is that such an awful prospect?”
Brandon frowned. “That depends. With your work and my work, and with the three kids we already have, it seems to me that our lives are complicated enough. Why add another child into the mix?”
“We have yours, and we have mine,” Diana returned quietly. “We don’t have any that are ours—yours and mine together.”
“A toddler?” Brandon said. He shook his head, but Diana could see he was weakening. “Are you sure you could stand having one of those underfoot again?”
Diana smiled. “I think I could stand it. I can tell you that I much prefer toddlers to teenagers.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, most toddlers turn into teenagers eventually.”
“But there are a few good years before that happens.”
“A few,” Brandon conceded.
“And Rita says she’ll handle most of the child-care duties. She really wants this little girl, Brandon. It’s all she’s talked about for days—about how much she could teach her. It’s as though she wants to pour everything into Clemencia that she was never able to share with her own granddaughter.”
“Diana, replacing one child with another doesn’t work. It isn’t healthy.”
For the space of several minutes, Diana was silent. “Living your life with a hole in it isn’t healthy, either,” she said finally. “Garrison Ladd and Andrew Carlisle put that hole in Rita’s life, Brandon. Maybe you don’t feel any responsibility for Gina Antone’s death, but I do. And now I have an opportunity to do something about it.”
“And it’s something you really want to do? Something you want us to do?”
“Yes.”
Again there was a long period of silence. “I guess we’ll have to see,” he said finally. “I’ll bet it doesn’t matter one way or the other what we decide because I still don’t think the tribal court will go for it.”
“But we can try?”
“Diana,” he said, “you do whatever you want. I’ll back you either way.”
Brandon made a point to come home from work early the next afternoon when Wanda Ortiz arrived with Clemencia. Diana went to answer the door, leaving Brandon and Rita in the living room. Brandon was sitting on the couch and Rita was in her wheelchair when Wanda carried the screaming child into the room.
“She’s been crying ever since we left the hospital,” Wanda said apologetically, setting the weeping child down in the middle of the room. “Too many strangers, I guess.”
; Clemencia Escalante looked awful. Most of her woefully thin body was covered with scabs from hundreds of ant bites. A few of those had become infected and were still bandaged. She stood in the middle of the room, sobbing, with fat tears dripping off her chin and falling onto the floor. She turned in a circle, looking from one unfamiliar face to another. When her eyes finally settled on Rita, she stopped.
“Ihab—here,” Rita crooned softly, crooking her finger. “Come here, little one.”
Still crying but with her attention now riveted on Rita’s kind but wrinkled face, Clemencia took a tentative step forward.
“Come here,” Rita said again.
Suddenly the room was deathly quiet. For a moment Diana thought that the child was simply pausing long enough to catch her breath and that another ear-splitting shriek would soon follow. Instead, Clemencia suddenly darted across the room, throwing herself toward Rita with so much force that the wheelchair rocked back and forth on its braked wheels. Without another sound, Clemencia clambered into Rita’s lap, burying her face in the swell of the old woman’s ample breasts. There the child settled in, clinging desperately to the folds of Rita’s dress with two tiny knotted fists.
Shaking his head in wonder, Brandon Walker looked from the now silent child to his wife. “Well,” he said with a shrug, squinting so the tears in his eyes didn’t show too much. “It looks as though I don’t stand a chance, do I?”
And he didn’t. From that moment on, the child named Clemencia Escalante who would one day be known as Dolores Lanita Walker owned Brandon Walker’s heart and soul.
6
After traveling a long way, Coyote reached a village where there was a little water. While Ban was hunting for a drink, an old Indian saw him. Old Limping Man—this Gohhim O’othham—still talked the speech all I’itoi’s people understood. So Coyote told him what Buzzard had seen in that part of the desert which was so badly burned.