Dragonfly Bones (10 page)

12

I
hadn't done this for over ten years. In one day, leave my lover in a helicopter to meet another guy, have that
new
guy
and
my lover together with me, and wind up that same night invited to the new guy's house.

Brittles lived near Casa Grande National Monument. Somewhat north, out in the desert, but we drove through Coolidge, past the entrance to the monument, on our way from the place where Rich was examining all the bones.

“You ever been in there?” Brittles asked.

“Never.”

He turned around and onto the entrance road, then up to the main building.

“I know a lot of the park rangers. I come here often, I have a season pass. I come here just to get some peace from the day.”

Parking, he led me through the door, said hello to the ranger on duty, and we went through an exhibit to the back glass doors that opened up on the monument itself about fifty feet away. It was an old, simple place. An ancient building from many centuries before. A tour of high school kids chattered past us to the exit, and when we got near the monument we were all alone.

“Want to go inside?” Brittles asked.

“No.”

“Me neither. I just like to look at it against the sunset.”

Probably four stories high, the wind-and-rain-worn reddish building sat underneath an elaborate metal roof set on four huge corner posts. We sat on a wooden Park Service bench amid the low-lying smooth ruins of the original complex, but the monument was the only real building left.

“Grand, isn't it?” Brittles said. “Built by the Old People.”

“Anasazi?”

“Hohokam. Maybe the same thing. Who knows, six centuries later?”

“Hey, Nathan.”

A park ranger stopped to shake his hand.

“Laura, this is Dave Winchester. Dave, Laura Winslow. Her first visit here.”

“Visiting the state?” Winchester said.

I really didn't want to talk at all.

“Yeah,” Brittles said, “you could say that.”

“Well, park's closing in five minutes. You know the way out.”

“How do I get back to Tucson?” I said as Winchester moved away.

“I'll drive you down.”

“I'm so tired. Too much today.”

“How long since you've seen your daughter?” he asked.

“Don't want to talk about her,” I said, leaning back on the bench and falling asleep in an instant, groggy and defensive when Brittles palmed my shoulder.

“My house is only five minutes away,” he said. “I've got lots of extra rooms. Why don't you just come, spend the night, take care of yourself?”

“I can't do that.
You
can't do that. You've got to start the process, get me to this call center, to these computers, so I can find out whatever you want to know and my daughter can get out of prison.”

“It's not that simple,” he said. “Some other things have happened.”

“I don't care about other things. Fix the deal. Get me to work, then get my daughter pardoned.”

“We have to talk about this.”

Next thing I knew, he was shaking me again.

“Look. I've really got lots of space. Five minutes away. I'll fix you something to eat. You sleep. When you're ready, I'll have worked out exactly what we're going to do with this whole mess.”

“Were you really named after John Wayne?”

“Yup. Nathan Cutting Brittles. That's the character he played, and my father was one of the extras for John Ford. Made a lot of movies with Wayne and Ford at Monument Valley. My Navajo name is actually Cutting Tongue. When I was five or six and kinda wild, my mother said I ran right through some wooden fence slats, broke two of them apart with my nose.”

Ran his tongue around his lips, remembering.

“Just a scratch on my nose, but I bit through my tongue, blood everywhere. They thought I'd broken the fence with my tongue. Before I could convince them they were wrong, it was all over the village. Cutting Tongue.”

“What's the Navajo name?”

“I don't remember. Getting too far away from my roots, I guess. You got a Hopi name?”

I hesitated. Many Indians don't like to say their special name. Maybe Brittles
hadn't
forgotten, he just didn't want to say it.

“Kauwanyama,” I said. “Butterfly With Wings of Beauty.”

“You're one good-looking butterfly, Laura.”

“Just drive,” I said with a smile. “Just take me away, wherever.”

 

Set a hundred feet from the nearest road, Brittles's house spread out in modules around an atrium center. His dirt driveway led to a six-car garage separate from the house.
Parking in front of a roll-up door, he opened it for me, turned on some overhead lights and showed me three motorcycles.

“Some people paint, sculpt, throw pots, whatever. I restore old motorcycles, and these are my babies. Over there is a 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. Guy set a world speed record on it. Made several runs, couldn't break the old record, finally took all his clothes off, laid on his belly flat-out horizontal. Set the record. I paid sixty-two thousand for that one. Not many around. Jay Leno has one.

“Over there is a 1931 Henderson KL inline four-cylinder. Back at that time, it was clocked at almost one-twenty miles an hour. I got it from a guy named Dennis Henderson. Henderson, selling one of his Henderson bikes. Couldn't resist. This one's my prize. A 1928 Cleveland inline four-cylinder.”

I briefly thought of Rey Villanueva, my onetime partner. Meg Arizana's husband, who rebuilt old cars and took me on the only bike ride I ever had, in Sonora, Mexico, when we were looking for my ex-husband Jonathan Begay.

Inside the house, he took me straight down a hallway to a room filled with photographs. Picking up an ornate silver frame, he showed me an old picture of a woman in typical Navajo dress, a velveteen blouse and long skirt, sitting at a weaving loom. I couldn't see it well, so he turned on a strong light, revealing two walls of the room that were covered from floor to ceiling with photographs. Many of them were of Indians, but some were also of smiling young soldiers around helicopters.

“Nam,” he said when I looked closely on one picture. “That's me, on the right, with my crew chief for that bird. I had a lot of crew chiefs. I was kinda crazy back then. A young, wild guy from the rez, never been farther than Phoenix until I enlisted at sixteen, my mother signing a paper that I was two years older. I flew the old Huey gunships, I flew slicks, carried Marines in and out of LZs that were so hot nobody else would take the chance. I was drunk or coked
up all the time. Guys would say, over there, the greater the incoming fire, the tighter your ass puckered. The pucker factor. I never had it. I was crazy.”

I studied his young face, an insane grin, arms around two buddies.

“Doesn't even look like you,” I said.

“Ever think about being something else?” Brittles asked abruptly.

“Like…who? What?”

“Anybody. Anything.”

“No.”

“Not ever?” he said.

“Well. Yeah. Sure.”

“Sure, what?” he asked.

“I think about it,” I said.

“Doing something else? Or
being
somebody else?”

“Done that. I've had so many fake identities, I've lost track of the real ones.”

“Lost track of the real you?” he asked.

“Yeah. God, why am I telling you this?”

“Because you know I've got the same problem.”

“You've been thinking about this lately?” I said, more than a bit incredulous.

“For years.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. How about that?”

“Do you ever really let your head just relax?”

“You mean, relax from thinking about it?”

“Yes.”

“Never,” he said. “Not since that first group of North Vietnamese regulars I lit up with three rockets in 1974. My crew chief raked them with the .50 cal. Made sure they were KIA. Come on. Let me show you your bedroom, get you settled.”

 

But I never made it to the bedroom that night. We had more wine, I watched him light some incense stalks, watched him
play with his two German shepherds, listened to several of his Indian flute CDs while I looked over his monster collection of DVDs.

“You watch a lot of movies,” I said. “Why?”

He finished playing something on the CD, set it back in the rack.

“Nobody's ever asked me that.”

“I watch them with the sound off.”

“So do I,” he said. “Sometimes I do. Like, I watch continuity. You know, from scene to scene, where the continuity checker is supposed to take Polaroids and make sure both costume and makeup fit the matching scene before. Like, my favorite example is
Run Lola Run.
Most all the edits show her bra straps in different places.”

“And you watch bra straps because…?”

“When I'm trying to piece together bits of a case I'm working on. Like this thing with the bones and all. None of it fits. So I look at the jump cuts, try to imagine what happened between.”

“When do you turn the sound on?” I asked.

“Say, Robert Altman. Say,
McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Altman had all these different sound mikes set up on the set. He'd take all the voices, throw them in the pot, do a master mix, totally confuse the obsessive in the audience who had to hear every word. With Altman, you
never
really heard every word. He layered them on top of each other in crowd scenes. So I close my eyes and listen. Same kind of thing as the jump cuts. Try to eliminate the crap. Sort out what's important.”

“Look,” I said, setting my wine glass on the floor, standing up. “I can't do this stuff right now. “I…this is confusing…I really need to go home.”

“Let me drive you.”

“No! Just loan me a car.”

“You're in no shape to drive all the way to Tucson,” Brittles said.

“A car. Just…anything.”

“Okay.”

He wrote a cell phone number on my palm.

“Call me. Here. If there are any problems.”

“Sure,” I said, not wanting to call him at all.

He saw that in my eyes and wrote the number on my other palm.

“It's nothing personal. Just don't forget your daughter.”

“You bastard,” I said. “You're playing me.”

“So go home. Get a good night's sleep. We'll talk again tomorrow. Just don't go washing your hands before you write this number down on a piece of paper. Promise?”

“Sure,” I lied. “You've got this all figured. You've got
me
all figured.”

“No!” he said, folding both my hands into fists, holding the fists. “I have absolutely no idea what this is all about. I have absolutely no idea why your daughter just happens to be the one person who connects to the prison, and connects me to you. Like it or not, you're in this now. Up to your neck.”

“That's from a movie.” I giggled. “Gregory Peck says it to David Niven.
Guns of Navarone
. But Gregory threatened David with a pistol. All you've got are words.”

He folded a set of car keys into one of my hands.

“Ford Taurus. Government car. Don't ding the fenders.”

13

B
rittles had tried to stop me from returning to my house, but I needed too much gear. My Mac titanium laptop, some special software and data backed up on CDs, and my running shoes and some clean underwear. But when I got there, Rich was waiting.

“Can we talk about things?” Rich asked.

“Not tonight.”

“When?”

I hoped he'd go out for a walk or clean the fridge or wash the dishes again.

“Why?” he asked.

“Rich, I don't know what to say.”

“Maybe…we could just talk. We could find out what you don't know. Talking's good, you know.”

“What would we talk about, if I don't know what to say?”

“Things.”

“Things,” I said to myself.

“Yeah. What you're feeling. What's happening.”

“Between us, you mean.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “What's happening between us.”

“Nothing's happening, Rich.”

“It's that guy, isn't it?”

“What guy?”

“The fed, the whatever he is. Who brought you to the excavations.”

“He's nothing,” I said

“Yeah. I saw you looking at him.”

“Rich. Please. Nothing's happening between us.”

“I know,” he said reluctantly. “That's how I feel, too.”

“This has nothing to do with you, Rich.”

“Bullshit! It has
every
thing to do with me.”

Angry, he started to straighten up the bookshelf, caught himself doing that, swiveled his head in wide circles, trying to loosen up his neck muscles, trying to loosen up his attitude so he'd gain control of his emotions enough to start talking to me again. But I didn't give him the chance. I went out on the patio, went down through the lemon trees to the place where Don had seen me half naked, just a short time ago.

Years ago, I thought. In another life.

An open bottle of cabernet sauvignon sat on the wooden table. I drank from the bottle, scarcely breathing the first time I held it to my lips. Cradling the bottle between my thighs, I
sat there for a long, long time. Sunset, sundown, twilight, evening, dark.

There are few cities in the world with such dark nights. Decades before, Tucson adopted special zoning ordinances that prohibited street lighting because of all the astronomy telescopes in the surrounding area. My rented house sat in a newer developed area, but even with zoning variances the builders and developers informally agreed to not install streetlights.

I could see the night stars, the evening and morning planets.