The Story Teller

by Margaret Coel

  “How are the plans for turning the old school into a museum?” the director had wanted to know.

  “Coming along,” Father John had told him, a forced tone of optimism. He refused to take Father Stanton’s word as final.

  An hour with the provincial, Father John was certain, and he could convince him. Start-up funds were all he needed. Enough to renovate the school building, purchase display cases and other equipment, and pay the director’s salary the first few months. After the museum was established and had proved itself, there would be foundation money. And benefactors were generous. He’d spent almost eight years running St. Francis Mission on the generosity of strangers. If he could run the mission that way, well . . .

  It was the weak link in his argument, he realized. It was going to be tough to convince the provincial of his financial plan, but he and Father Rutherford went back a long time, and he was counting on discussing the matter face-to-face with an old friend, without interference from bureaucrats like Father Stanton. Part of an hour was all he needed, and then he’d be back in the Toyota driving home to the reservation.

  Before he left Denver, he intended to call Todd Harris and make sure the young man was still interested in taking on the job of director. He’d tried to call him yesterday, but there was no answer. Father Geoff had said Todd had stopped by St. Francis last Saturday. He seemed agitated, unlike himself. Seemed disappointed Father John hadn’t gotten back from Boston.

  Father John hadn’t thought much about it at first, but he’d begun wondering what was so important that Todd had driven all the way to the reservation when he could have called. Maybe Todd had accepted another job, now that he was close to finishing his master’s. It wouldn’t surprise him. The young man had talent and insight, qualities that would make him a welcome addition to any museum. If he had a better opportunity, Father John intended to advise him to take it, even though, he hoped, Todd would think the best opportunity would be a museum on the history and culture of his own people.

  Ahead, Rawlins glimmered on the plains like a white, sun-splashed pool. A few miles, and Father John was driving down the main street, past the sand-colored, flat-roofed shops and boxlike stores that looked as if they had erupted out of the flat, dry land. The wind whipped across the concrete apron of the gas station. He filled up the Toyota, paid the bill, and bought a cup of coffee. He’d sipped the coffee in front of the station, then walked up and down a few moments, grateful to stretch his legs. He’d been driving several hours. It was still a long way to Denver.

  6

  Vicky’s hands trembled against the hot steering wheel as she pulled into the rush-hour traffic. What had she accomplished at the Denver Museum of the West? Nothing, except to alienate the curator who had made no promises when she’d left her in the lobby. There was every possibility the curator would have the same excuses on Friday. Overworked staff, too little time. And then what? Perhaps she could file a federal lawsuit under NAGPRA, claiming the museum hadn’t been forthcoming, or file a lawsuit under Colorado’s open-records law, asking permission to search the records herself.

  She drummed her fingers on the rim of the wheel as she waited for a green light. Neither option was good. She had no proof the ledger book was still in the museum. She had only an old man’s story. And even if she could convince a judge to grant a hearing, Charlie Redman might not live long enough to tell his story in court. In the meantime the tribe’s claim to other objects in the museum would be stalled. Anything could happen while a lawsuit dragged on. Other artifacts might also disappear, and in the end, Arapahos would recover even fewer of the sacred and cultural items that belonged to them.

  She had a sinking feeling that she’d made a mess of things. Certainly the museum’s collection seemed well organized, everything labeled and in place. Why did she insist upon locating a ledger book that might no longer exist? What if it had been sold? What if it had fallen into the hands of a dealer? The pages could be cut out and framed in the homes of collectors around the world, the story lost forever. Why couldn’t she just return to the reservation and advise Dennis Eagle Cloud to sign off on the inventory, claim as many items as the law allowed, and forget about the ledger book?

  The light switched to green, and she pressed down on the gas pedal, heading south with three lanes of cars racing for home, her mind trying to sort out what it was that pulled her on, like an iron fist clamped to her shoulder. Her own stubbornness? Her determination to prove to her people she was a good lawyer—she could handle the tough, important cases? Or was it Rachel Foster’s arrogance, her cool insistence the museum had never owned an Arapaho ledger book? And yet . . . and yet, the curator had said the book was worth $1.3 million. How did she know the exact value of a book she claimed she knew nothing about?

  The sun splashed against the windshield as Vicky wove through the traffic. The ledger book was somewhere. It was real, and it belonged to the Hinono eino; it was their story. She had to find it, no matter how many lawsuits, no matter what it took.

  She shot through an intersection just as the light turned red. The digital clock on the dashboard blinked 4:30. Marcy Aker, the old friend she’d arranged to stay with, had said she’d be home by four-thirty from the downtown law firm where she and Vicky had once occupied adjoining cubicles. But Marcy could be delayed. Vicky remembered the late nights she had pulled when something unexpected had come up at the firm. She decided to see if Todd Harris was home.

  Abruptly she switched into the turn lane and wheeled east onto Speer Boulevard, heading in the opposite direction from Marcy’s house. Another left turn, and she was curving past the Neoclassical buildings surrounded by the wide swaths of lawn and beds of flowers in the Civic Center. Ahead, the golden dome of the State Capitol glistened in the sun. Another few blocks, and she was driving down apartment-lined streets where cars stood bumper-to-bumper at the curbs, reminding her of how impossible it usually was to find a parking place in Capitol Hill. So different from the open spaces on the reservation. At home she could park in the middle of the road if she wished.

  Just ahead a woman left a parking spot, and Vicky rolled slowly forward, past the brick apartment building with the address above the entrance that Todd’s fiancée had given her. She maneuvered into the vacant space, slid her bag off the seat, and hurried through the mottled shade of elm trees lining the sidewalk, the accumulation of the day’s heat pressing around her like a heavy buffalo robe. Above the roofs of the apartment buildings, the ridge of mountains rose into a cloudless blue sky. Strips of snow clung to the high peaks, sparkling in the sun like rivers of gold. It was the gold, Vicky knew, that had lured white people to the land of the Arapaho. Gold that had brought the soldiers who had driven her people from Colorado.

  A small entry, no more than a brick-enclosed stoop, jutted from Todd’s building. She let herself through the outer door and tried the main door. Locked, as she expected. A panel of mailboxes filled the right wall, and Vicky began scanning the names below each box. Third row down was T. HARRIS.

  She pressed the button below the box and waited. A long shot that Todd would be here. There were a thousand places in the city where a young graduate student might go after classes. She should have called first, she thought, giving the button another hard push. The air inside the small space was hot and smelled of burned coals, like the smoke from an outdoor barbecue.

  She was about to give up when she noticed that Todd’s box was jammed with brown and white envelopes, various colored flyers. Her eyes scanned the cardboard carton on the concrete floor, the folded newspapers and magazines stuffed inside. Stooping down, she began shuffling through. The newspapers belonged to Todd—a collection of the Rocky Mountain News for most of a week.

  She stood up and surveyed the names on the mailboxes until she found the one labeled MGR. She held down the button a long moment. No answer. Outside an engine backfired—a reverberating boom in the heavy heat. She gave the button another push and waited. Then she began pushing the other buttons—top, m
iddle, bottom.

  A voice burst into the heat-filled entry. “Who is it?” It sounded like an elderly woman. The name next to the last button was M. EVANS.

  Vicky leaned toward the speaker, gave her name, and said she was a friend of Todd Harris. “Do you know him?” She stopped herself from addressing the woman as grandmother. Grandmother was not a term of respect in the white culture.

  “Todd?” A hesitation in the voice. “Ah, yes. A very nice boy. He’s okay, isn’t he?”

  The question hit Vicky like a cold blast of wind, like a confirmation of her own misgivings. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m trying to find him.”

  “Well, I’m very glad,” the woman said. “I haven’t seen him in a while. Not since—oh, my, it must have been last Sunday. Yes, I was on my way to church, and he was just coming in. He looked, well . . .”

  “How did he look?” Vicky prodded.

  “Very tired, I would say. Yes. Very tired indeed.”

  Sunday, Vicky was thinking. Annemarie had said Todd was on the reservation the day before. He must’ve just gotten back to Denver.

  “Could I come up?” Vicky asked.

  “Oh, my.” The fear in the voice was so strong, Vicky could almost feel it. “I always make it a rule never to open the door for anyone I don’t know. It’s a very sensible rule, don’t you believe?”

  “Yes, of course,” Vicky said, struggling to hide her own frustration. “Would you give Todd a message when you see him?”

  “Well, I’ll try.” The voice seemed faint and far away, as if the old woman had grown tired and sought a chair somewhere.

  “Ask him to call me at this number.” Vicky fumbled through her bag for her Day Timer. Finally she had it. Slowly she read off Marcy’s number, hoping the old woman was jotting it down.

  * * *

  The rush-hour traffic seemed heavier as Vicky drove back across the city. She couldn’t shake a nagging sense that Annemarie was right, that Todd was in some kind of trouble, even though her rational mind—the lawyer part—insisted there was nothing to worry about. Last Saturday he was fine. Upset and stressed perhaps, but what graduate student finishing a thesis wasn’t upset and stressed? True, his fiancée hadn’t talked to him since, and the old woman—Miss Evans, she suspected—hadn’t seen him since Sunday. At least he had gotten back to Denver safely and hadn’t flipped his car into a ditch somewhere along the empty roads of Wyoming. More than likely her first instincts were correct. Todd had met someone new. He’d driven to the reservation to tell Annemarie and had lost his nerve. So he’d gone to St. Francis to see Father John. It could even explain the young man’s absence. He was probably staying with his new girlfriend. A plausible story.

  Why, then, didn’t she believe it? Vicky wondered as she caught Speer Boulevard and drove to old North Denver, a section of Victorian homes climbing over gentle hills. The sun rode above the mountains ahead, shooting blinding rays across the hood of the Taurus. The windshield refracted a thousand colored lights that spun in front of her like a kaleidoscope. She drove with the visor down, one hand cupped above her eyes. Still, there were half seconds as the boulevard curved into the sun when she was blinded in the moving traffic.

  She parked in front of a red-bricked bungalow sheltering among giant oaks and elms, like the other bungalows lining the street. The front door flew open before she could set down her carry-on bag and ring the doorbell. Marcy stood in front of her, about forty pounds heavier than Vicky remembered, in a flowing, blue-splashed kimono with wide, cubelike sleeves. So different from the tailored, conservative suits Vicky remembered. Her hair was blond, not the chestnut of several years ago, and piled on top of her head, curls corkscrewing in different directions. But her eyes were the same, dark blue and speckled with lights.

  “My dear.” Two fleshy arms came out of the kimono and pulled Vicky toward her. “It’s good to see you.” Then, stepping back, her hands on Vicky’s shoulders, she added, “You haven’t changed at all. Not at all! You are absolutely the same.”

  Vicky bit back the impulse to protest. Of course she had changed. She felt older, sadder perhaps at the realization that not everything she had hoped for would be included in her life. But in a strange way, the realization had brought her a calmness she’d never felt in the years in Denver. She said, “How are you, Marcy?”

  “At peace. At peace.” The other woman moved backward, holding the door open, and Vicky stepped into a large room of white walls and polished wood floors, like a modern sculpture enclosed in brick. Sunshine streamed through the bare windows and played across the white sofas and glass coffee table, the abstract oil paintings, the Indian rugs scattered about. In the far corner, an array of copper pans dangled above a kitchen island.

  “Welcome to my space.” Marcy allowed one arm to flow toward the room, like the movement in a ballet.

  “Where does Mike keep his easy chair?” Vicky asked. A mistake, she knew instantly by the startled look in her friend’s eyes.

  “In his living room,” Marcy said, a lighthearted falseness in the tone.

  “I’m sorry.” Vicky reached out and touched the other woman’s arm. “I didn’t know you were separated.”

  Marcy shrugged away. “Separated is not how I prefer to think of our living accommodations. We have decided to find our own space.” A short pause, then: “Life is a stream, Vicky, rolling relentlessly onward. But there are eddies along the way. I prefer to think of my little house as an eddy, a place where I can emerge into the sacred space of the center.” She stopped, her eyes on Vicky’s. “Now, why am I telling you this? You came to Denver—what, thirteen years ago?—to find your center.”

  Vicky gave the carry-on a little swing into the room. “Where would you like me to take this?” she asked, making an effort to conceal the prick of irritation. How easy Marcy made it sound, as if leaving Ben and moving to Denver had been nothing more than a swift glide over an iced-smooth lake, when it had been like cutting herself in half. She had never wanted to divorce her husband, had never meant to break her vows; she had only wanted him to stop hitting her.

  Had they lived in the Old Time, she could have gone to her father and his brothers, who were also her fathers in the Arapaho Way, and they would have called Ben to a council and told him, “No more. No more.” It would have stopped, or Ben would have been the one punished, and her family would have taken her away from him.

  But it was not the Old Time. It was the modern time, and she had been forced to take herself away. Even now she was not certain of the exact moment she had known she must make another life for herself and the kids—Susan and Lucas were so young then. But lately, when she thought about it, it seemed the day had always been arriving, coming toward her like an arrow shot out of her own destiny, when she would have to leave.

  She followed Marcy down the hallway on the right, the unbidden memories flooding over her: the long drive across Wyoming and into Colorado, the rush of students on the CU campus in Denver—a sea of white faces surging around her. And Marcy. Appearing from nowhere, chattering like a magpie. Sign up for this class, stay away from that one—walking her through registration. The first white person who had looked at her, talked to her like another human being, as if the differences between them, the shades of their skin, their different cultures, were no differences at all.

  Later, when she’d admitted to herself she couldn’t wait tables, go to class, and care for her children, and had sent them to her parents on the reservation—when the earth had dropped out from under her—Marcy had been a phone call away. They’d been friends through the endless hours of briefing cases in the law library, the weeks of studying for the bar exam, and the three years at the firm. When she’d decided to return to her people, it was Marcy who had helped her pack up the Bronco. And now, if this fuzzy-headed woman in the flowing kimono had left her husband to find her sacred center, well, they were still friends.

  Vicky followed her into a small bedroom. The afternoon sun filtered around the edges of fil
my white curtains and slanted across the bed piled high with ruffled pillows, the dresser and mirror, the little nightstand with a phone and digital clock. “May this be a small eddy for you,” Marcy said, extending one hand into the room. “I hope you’ll find this space comfortable.”

  Vicky laughed. “I’d have to be dead not to.” She propped the carry-on on the bed, unzipped it, and began lifting out the few things she’d packed: another attorney dress, blue jeans, a couple of T-shirts, a pair of sandals. She wished she had brought a few extra changes of clothes. She’d be lucky to get home by the weekend.

  Marcy was fitting the dress over a hanger she’d extracted from the closet, chatting about work: she’d left the firm, did Vicky know?

  Vicky set her cosmetics bag on the dresser and stared at her friend in the mirror. She didn’t know. She had never imagined Marcy would leave the firm.

  “A mutual parting of the ways.” Her friend wheeled around, hung the dress inside the closet, and shut the door softly behind her. “I like to think I have evolved to a higher consciousness,” she explained.

  Vicky smiled. She remembered a client droning on about the lousy two mil he’d made when he would have made more if his partner hadn’t reneged on a deal, about how he wanted her to nail the bastard’s hide to the wall, sue him into next week. And she, wondering how she was paying out her life. It was such cases that had finally sent her to the one-woman law office on Main Street in Lander, buoyed with the hope her life might better be paid out helping her people.

  Marcy was droning on: her new job at the West-Side Clinic, so spiritually rewarding. “Even if . . .” A wave encompassing the house. “I have to give up my space here. It depends upon the divorce settlement.” She gave a little shrug. “It’s a matter of simplifying your life,” her friend said, a solemn, earnest tone. “You must learn that you require much less in life if you are to continue evolving.”