by J. A. Jance
Kennedy was dead, Johnson was president, and Diana Lee Cooper was falling in love.
Rita slept, and so did most of the Indian children, stacked like so much cordwood on the sweltering, screened-in wooden porch of the outing matron’s red brick home. The children had been there for varying lengths of time, from several days to only one or two, while Big Eddie completed his annual boarding-school roundup. The children from Coyote Sitting were the last to arrive. They lay in a miserable huddle at the far end of the long room.
As before, it was noisy in Chuk Shon, far too noisy for Dancing Quail to sleep. Just then another huge wainomikalit rumbled down the metal tracks a few blocks away. The whole house shook, and Dancing Quail did, too. She shivered and clutched her grandmother’s precious medicine basket close to her chest. The sound terrified her. The other children had told her that the monster was called a train and that the next night they would travel to Phoenix riding on that huge, noisy beast.
To calm herself, she slipped her fingers inside the basket. On the way to Chuk Shon, Dancing Quail had examined each of the precious items in Understanding Woman’s basket. For the Tohono O’ othham, four is a powerful number, and there were four things in the basket—a single eagle feather, a shell Understanding Woman’s dead husband had brought back from his first salt-trading trip to the sea, a jagged piece of pottery with the sign of the turtle etched into the smooth clay, and half a round rock that looked like a broken egg.
The outside shell of the rock was rough and gray, but inside it was alive with beautifully colored cubes. The cubes reminded Dancing Quail of the sun setting behind dark summer rain clouds that sometimes wrapped themselves around Ioligam.
Now, as the iron beast’s whistle once more screeched through the night, Dancing Quail’s groping fingers closed tightly around the rock. She held it and willed herself not to cry. Gradually, a feeling of calm settled over her. Somehow she knew that this mysterious rock was the most important gift in Understanding Woman’s basket. Nothing on the coarse gray outside hinted at the beautiful secret concealed within. That was her grandmother’s secret message for her—to be like the magic rock, tough on the outside but with her spirit hidden safely inside.
No matter what the stern, tall woman with her fiery red hair said, no matter what strange name the Mil-gahn woman called her, Dancing Quail would still be Dancing Quail.
With the geode clutched tightly in her fingers, the child drifted into a fitful sleep.
“Look,” Brandon said, as they sped around the long curve at Brawley Wash just before Three Points. “Why go all the way out to the house for your car? You’ll have to drive on into town by yourself. I’d be happy to drive you to the hospital and bring you back home afterward.”
“You’ve done enough already,” Diana responded. “More than you should have.”
But Brandon Walker didn’t want the evening to be over, didn’t want to go home to the house where his father, who didn’t have a brain tumor and who didn’t have anything definite wrong with him that the doctors could point to, sometimes didn’t recognize his own son’s face.
“The boy’s asleep,” Brandon continued. “If you change cars, you’ll wake him up.”
“I’ll have to wake him up in half an hour anyway. That’s what the doctor said.”
“By then we’ll already be at the hospital. Besides, you must be worn out.”
Diana surprised herself by not arguing or insisting. “All right,” she said, leaning back in the car and closing her eyes. It felt good to have someone else handling things for a change, to have someone taking care of her. That hadn’t happened to her for a long time, not since her mother died.
With her daughter away at school, Iona Dade Cooper avoided telling anyone she was sick. Once Diana found out about it, Iona brushed aside all alarmed entreaties that she go someplace besides La Grande for tests, that she utilize one of the big-city hospitals in Spokane or Portland with their big-city specialists.
“Too expensive,” Iona declared firmly. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to be that far away from your father.”
Diana had bitten back any number of angry comments. As usual, her father was a bent reed, not strong enough for anyone else to lean on. Max Cooper had refused to come to the little community hospital in La Grande the night before his wife’s exploratory surgery, claiming that being around hospitals made him nervous.
“Well, stay here then!” Diana had flared at him. “For God’s sake, don’t go out of your way!”
In the old days, Max would have backhanded his daughter for that remark, but not with Gary, his brand-new son-in-law, standing there gaping.
“I have an idea, Mr. Cooper,” Gary Ladd said soothingly, stepping into the fray.
Max loved the fact that his son-in-law insisted on calling him “Mr. Cooper.” No one in Joseph accorded the Garbage Man that kind of respect.
“Diana can go down to La Grande to be with Iona tonight, and I’ll stay here. That way, neither one of you will be alone.”
Max nodded. “I appreciate that, Gary. I really do.”
So Diana spent the night in the hospital with her mother, sitting on a straight-backed chair near the bed, talking because her mother was too frightened to sleep despite the doctor-ordered sleeping pills.
“You’ll look after your father when I’m gone, won’t you, Diana?” Iona asked.
“Don’t talk that way, Mom. It’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”
But Iona knew otherwise. “He’ll need someone to take care of the bills. No matter what happens, as soon as you get back to Joseph, go down to the bank and have Ed Gentry put you on as a signer on both the checking and savings accounts.”
“That’s crazy, and you know it. Daddy’ll never agree to having me as a signer on his bank account.”
“He’ll have to,” Iona replied. “He’ll need someone to write the checks for him.”
“Write the checks?” Diana echoed stupidly.
“Your father doesn’t know how to read or write, Diana,” Iona explained. “He never learned. He never wanted you or anyone else to know, but if something happens to me, if I die, he’s going to need someone to look after him.”
Diana was dumbstruck. “Daddy can’t read?”
“I tried to teach him years ago when we first got married, before you were born, but the letters were always jumbled and funny. He couldn’t do it.”
“If he can’t read, how did he keep his job all these years?”
“He’s always been able to do math in his head, so nobody ever knew. When there were receipts that had to be written up or reports of some kind, I always handled those.”
“Will he lose his job?”
Iona nodded. “Probably, and the house, too. I’m worried about what will happen to him.”
“I’ll take care of him,” Diana promised. “I don’t know how, but I will.”
Iona lapsed into silence. For a while, Diana thought maybe her mother had fallen asleep. Diana sat there stunned, still grappling with the sudden knowledge that her father was illiterate.
She remembered his angry tirade when she had told him she was going to go to the University of Oregon to learn how to be a writer.
“A writer!” he had roared. “You, a writer?”
“Why not?” she had spat back at him, daring him to hit her but knowing that he wouldn’t because the rodeo was just days away. Max Cooper couldn’t afford to give his daughter a black eye just before the Chief Joseph Days Parade and Rodeo.
“I’ll tell you why not. You’re a woman, that’s why not.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Was Shakespeare a woman?” he demanded. “Were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John women? I’ll say not. They were all men, every last one of them, and let me tell you, sister, they’re good enough for me!”
She remembered the conversation word for word, and all the time that lying bastard had been berating her about how good Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were, he couldn’t read a one of th
em. Sitting there in the darkened hospital room, Diana felt doubly betrayed, not only because her father had fooled her, but because her mother had helped him do it.
“I’m glad you married Gary,” Iona said at length. “He seems like a very nice boy.”
“He’s not a boy, Mom. He’s twenty-five, five years older than I am.”
“Well, I just wish you’d start a family soon. I so wanted to have grandchildren.” Iona’s eyes filled with tears, which she wiped away with a corner of the sheet.
Diana didn’t have the heart to tell Iona that her good Catholic daughter was a mortal sinner who had been taking birth-control pills for a year now, ever since the first week of December of 1963. Gary had just happened to know of a doctor who wasn’t averse to giving single girls prescriptions for the Pill.
Now that they were married, she and Gary had agreed it wasn’t time yet for them to consider starting a family, especially not until he finished his master’s degree. He was thinking about applying for a creative-writing program in Arizona. Diana still had two more semesters to go before she’d have her teaching credential.
“He’s a lot like your father, isn’t he?” Iona said.
Diana was offended by the question and didn’t answer. Gary wasn’t at all like her father. She’d gone to great lengths to find someone as different from Max Cooper as he could possibly be. Gary was smart. He had a good education and a sense of humor, and he had never once raised a hand against her in anger. Maybe he was a little lazy. If there was a right way to do something and an easy way, Gary would choose the easy way every time. Maybe in that regard there was a certain similarity between her husband and her father, but other than that, Garrison Walther Ladd was as different from Max Cooper as day from night.
“Does he treat you nice?” Iona asked.
“He treats me fine, Mom. Don’t worry.”
Relieved, Iona Cooper finally relaxed enough to fall asleep. They did the surgery early the next morning. When the doctor came looking for Diana in the small waiting room, his shoulders sagged under the weight of the news. As soon as she saw the haggard look in his eyes, Diana knew the prognosis wasn’t good.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Very bad, Diana. I’m sorry. It’s already metastasized. Completely inoperable. There’s nothing to do but take her home and make her as comfortable as possible.”
“How long does she have?”
“I don’t know. A few months maybe. A year at the most.”
Iona was still under sedation and wasn’t expected to come out of it for several hours. In tears, Diana fled the hospital and drove like a maniac along the twisting road from La Grande to Joseph, wanting to fall into Gary’s arms, to have him hold her and tell her that everything would be fine.
But when she got home, the house was deserted. She couldn’t find the men anywhere. After waiting one long half hour and doing two days’ worth of dirty dishes that had been allowed to accumulate in the kitchen sink, she finally thought to go check the bomb shelter behind the house. Dug into a hillside, the shelter was Max Cooper’s pride and joy. He had built it himself, cinder block by cinder block, with plans he had ordered by mail and which his wife had patiently helped him decipher.
And that was where Diana found them, both of them, father and husband, passed out cold on two of the three army cots. A litter of empty beer bottles covered the floor around them.
Sick at heart and without waking them, Diana turned on her heel and drove back to La Grande. She never told Gary she’d seen them like that, and if either one of them noticed that someone had come into the house and done the dishes while they were drunk and passed out, no one ever mentioned it.
“We’re here,” Brandon said quietly, pulling up under the brightly lit emergency-room canopy at St. Mary’s Hospital. Diana jerked awake from an exhausted sleep. She started to waken Davy, but Brandon stopped her.
“You go on inside and start filling out paperwork. I’ll park the car and carry Davy in. He’s way too heavy for you.”
The detective eased the child out of the backseat, hoisting him up to his chest and wrapping his arms around the narrow, bony shoulders. The child stirred enough to look at him once, but he was far too tired to object. With a weary sigh, Davy snuggled his head against Brandon Walker’s neck. Scents of an improbable mixture of hospital disinfectant and wood smoke drifted up from Davy’s sweaty hair, reminding Brandon of something missing from his own life—little boys and Cub Scout camp-outs.
Battling the lump in his throat, the detective carried Davy Ladd inside and sat with the boy cradled in his arms while Diana talked to the emergency room clerk. Walker missed his own boys right then with a gut-wrenching, almost physical ache. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d actually held either Tommy or Quentin like this.
The boys were tiny when he went off to Nam, and Janie had taken them with her when she moved out and divorced him four years ago, claiming she was tired of playing second fiddle to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Louella Walker had raised her son right. Brandon was only too happy to sop up all the guilt Janie dished out. He agreed completely that the failure of their marriage must have been all his fault, accepting as gospel the idea that he had somehow let Janie and the boys down.
That, of course, was before he heard about the new addition his former wife was expecting, about his own sons’ soon-to-be half brother, Brian, a nine-pounder who was born a scant six months after Janie left home. Brian’s birth was also a full year and a half after Brandon Walker’s vasectomy. Later, when he was back at the house getting it ready to sell, a neighborhood busybody had told him that Janie and her second husband had been playing around the whole time Brandon had been off doing his duty to God and country in Vietnam.
He saw Tommy and Quentin sometimes, but not often enough. Eight and nine years old now, they barely knew him. He was the obliging stranger who showed up on the front porch periodically to take them to ball games or movies or to the Pima County Fair. Now that little Brian was old enough, he wanted to go along, too.
At first Brandon said absolutely not. No way! He did his best to hate the little bastard, but he wasn’t able to keep that up forever. The sweet little sad-eyed guy, left crying on the porch once too often, had worn down Brandon’s resistance. More of Louella Walker’s guilt, perhaps, but after all, it sure as hell wasn’t the kid’s fault that his parents were a matched pair of creeps. So lately, Brian was usually the fourth member on the infrequent Saturday afternoon outings.
Afterward, Brandon would sometimes kick himself for being a patsy, for being too goddamned easy, but that’s just the way he was. Besides, Brian appreciated going to ball games even more than Tommy and Quentin did.
When Andrew Carlisle finished shaving his head, his tender scalp was screaming at him, but as he examined himself in the mirror, he knew a sore head was well worth it. He looked like a new man, felt like somebody else completely. He’d have to be careful to wear a hat the next few days so he didn’t blister his bare head, but no one would put this smooth-headed man—Phil Wharton, Andrew told himself—together with the bushy-haired Andrew Carlisle who had been released from prison early that afternoon. The previous afternoon, he corrected, glancing at his watch—Jake Spaulding’s watch, which was his now.
He went into the living room and checked on his mother. Myrna Louise was sound asleep in the rocker, head resting on her chin, mouth open, a thin string of spittle dribbling from one comer of her mouth. He waved his hand in front of her face to be sure she was asleep, then he went back into the bathroom and shaved his legs.
When he finished with that, he returned to his room and retrieved the gun, Margaret Danielson’s automatic. Long ago, Myrna Louise had been known for going through her son’s things. Andrew didn’t want to take any chances.
Besides, she had given him the keys to Jake’s old Valiant. She told him the tags were still good and he was welcome to use it anytime he wanted. He went out to the little one-c
ar garage and slipped the gun under the base of the jack in the trunk’s spare-tire well. That way it would be safely out of the house should he need it.
The other key his mother had given him was to his storage locker, the place where he had directed her to leave all his furniture and belongings once she emptied his house in Tucson before selling it. At the time, Myrna Louise had questioned what he was doing with all that camping equipment in storage and what did he keep in the huge metal drum? He had reassured her that his survivalist gear was nothing more than a harmless interest in camping, a hobby he might want to take up again once he got out.
Andrew was reasonably certain all his equipment was there, at least most of it. He’d have to go down to Tucson as soon as possible and do a thorough inventory to make sure everything he needed was in good working order. Once he finished that, he’d be ready to go hunting again.
He could hardly wait.
After what she’d been through with her mother, the last thing Diana Ladd expected to happen in the emergency room was for her to get queasy when the doctor started to put stitches in Davy’s head. The doctor asked her if she’d be all right, and she confidently assured him that she would be, but that was before she knew that they wouldn’t be able to deaden it, that the stitches would have to be done with only ice cubes as anesthetic.
As Davy winced and cried out under the needle, she felt herself getting weak-kneed and woozy. A nurse helped her from the room. While she sat in the lobby with her head dangling between her knees feeling both foolish and helpless, Brandon Walker hurried into the emergency room and held Davy Ladd’s hand while the doctor sewed the little boy’s scalp back together.
It didn’t seem like that big a deal, really, but when Brandon Walker carried a wide-awake Davy back out of the emergency room and delivered him into his mother’s waiting arms, Diana’s tearful gratitude warmed his heart. No matter what Louella said, maybe Brandon wasn’t such a poor excuse for a human being after all.