Guns [John Hardin 01] (8 page)

It was a sophisticated creation based on hard-won theory and solid scientific fact, and Sam explained the finer points to Joshua, who paid rapt attention.

Exhibits behind glass around the walls displayed the engine design, yellowed notes and calculations, and various mementos. There was a wooden wind tunnel that the brothers had built.

There was a single photograph of the first powered flight. It had been snapped with Orville’s camera by their volunteer helper John T. Daniels, who knew little of photography, but Ansel Adams could hardly have done a finer job of it.

Sam pointed at the image and said, “Look at that, will you? Talk about a Kodak moment.”

The priceless old photo showed the Flyer going away two feet above the far end of the rail, Orville prone on the lower wing, the elevators canted to begin climbing free of the shadow on the sand, the props blurred as the engine belted out all it had, the big wings tilted only slightly to the left, and Wilbur standing tensely to the right, his right elbow bent, his suit jacket blowing back in the wind, watching his brother and their creation intently, and every fiber of him obviously projecting go…go…go…

Sam, standing there imagining the staccato clatter of the four-banger engine and the icy wind in his face and the brace wires thrumming as the Flyer came alive, knew he had often felt much the same flush of elation that Orville had certainly felt at that moment captured so dramatically on that two-cent rectangle of emulsion a century ago.

Outside, Sam spread a blanket on the grass near the plane, anchoring it with two quart containers of aviation oil, and they shared a late lunch, Joshua asking questions about the Wrights and Sam trying to answer them accurately.

“It’s all because of avian envy, you know,” Valerie said.

Sam, his cheeks full of her excellent chicken salad, raised an eyebrow.

“Well,” Valerie said, “what if there hadn’t been any birds around to show us it was even possible in the first place? People watched them for centuries, and envied them. Right up there on top of that hill, on top of that monument, on top of that beacon, there ought to be a sculpture of a little sparrow in flight.”

Out over the beach, the gulls seemed to cheer raucously in agreement.

When they took off from the narrow strip and banked away southward, Sam could easily imagine the wraiths of Orville and Wilbur standing there side by side in their suits and stiff white collars and ties on the summit of Kill Devil and, in the manner of every pilot everywhere, shading their eyes with their hands and looking up as an airplane went by.

“It’s about time you got back to me,” Davis said. “Are you at a pay phone?”

“Yes,” Donny said in his childish voice.

“All right. Hang up and call me back in ten minutes at…” Davis gave him the number of a pay phone in the parking lot of the convenience store at the corner of his street.

When Donny called exactly ten minutes later Davis said, “We have a contract. One customer. Some way out of town. I’ll be driving. Bring two changes of clothes and your own tools; everything you described to me two weeks ago.”

“Do I know the customer?”

“No.”

“What’s the pay?”

“We’ll talk about that later. I’ll pick you up at your place at four-thirty Friday morning.”

“That’s pretty short notice.”

“You should have called me back sooner. Do you want to go or not?”

“Hey, I’ll be ready,” Donny said. “Hell, I’m always ready.”

10

S
AM KEPT A RUSTY BICYCLE ON THE SMALL BACK PORCH OF
his cottage and, like many other people on the island, often used it to run errands. That early Thursday morning was chilly and dew-damp when he rode through the village to the new rental cottage.

He unlocked the place, checked over the materials Brad had left inside, and spent the morning hanging sheet rock and taping joints, whistling to himself.

At eleven-thirty he dusted himself off and rode the bike over to the school. Joshua had secured his promise to have lunch with him. Valerie was at work. The boy lit up when he spotted Sam waiting outside the classroom that contained the combined kindergarten and first grade classes. Outside on the wall near the door there were twelve crayoned sheets of paper taped up in a row. The theme was obviously outer space, going by the multitude of stars and fiery-tailed rockets. Sam found Joshua’s rendition and immediately judged it to be the best of the lot.

Joshua’s teacher, a pleasant woman just shy of 50, greeted him with a smile. “I’m Belinda Jameson,” she said. “So you’re the famous Mr. Bass. We’ve heard quite a lot about you. Joshua ranks you right up there alongside Spiderman.”

“He’s a pretty neat kid.”

“He surely is. They all are. They keep me young. No matter what happens, they start out each day as brand new. They don’t hold any grudges and everything they learn carries a touch of magic for them. Their imaginations are just boundless.”

She led the line of them down the hall to the small cafeteria, Sam walking along beside Joshua, who proudly held his hand. They went through the food line, Joshua slipping an extra two peanut butter cookies onto Sam’s tray. Joshua gave his lunch number to the woman at the end of the line and Sam paid for his own tray.

Trying to fold his frame up enough to sit beside Joshua at a table on one of the somewhat undersized chairs was a project, but he managed by keeping his legs out to one side.

“What have you been doing today?” he asked the boy.

“Miz Jameson showed us how to make paper-bag puppets. I made a bear. And I’m in the count-to-fifty club. Sam, you can take one of those cookies with you for a snack this afternoon.”

“Thanks, I will. I saw your space drawing. Good job.”

Joshua smiled and took a bite of cookie and a gulp from his small carton of chocolate milk.

A little girl across the table frowned, squinted, and said, “You’re all dusty, mister.”

“Oh, yeah, well, he’s been working,” Joshua said.

“My favorite color is purple,” the girl said. “Are you Joshua’s daddy?”

“No, honey, I’m just a good buddy.”

“Where
is
Joshua’s daddy?”

“He can’t be here.”

“Does Joshua
have
a daddy?”

“Eat your broccoli,” Sam said.

The girl made a face and said, “I think broccoli’s ahs-gusting.”

A hefty freckled boy at the table behind them tugged on Sam’s sleeve and said, “Listen, listen. My Mom got this at a yard sale.” The boy pushed a button on his plastic watch and the watch said, “A baby’s gotta do what a baby’s gotta do.”

“Well, I hear that,” Sam said.

The smiling teacher walked by and said, “It’s nice to have Mr. Bass here with us today, children, but we still have to eat our lunches, now, don’t we?”

Sam took a sporkful of his broccoli.

After lunch he stopped at the General Store and looked over their small faded stock of movies. It wasn’t exactly Blockbuster. He picked out the gritty Elmore Leonard story
Last Stand At Saber River,
with Tom Selleck as a rancher fighting to reclaim his land and the love of his wife after the Civil War.

He chose another one he hadn’t watched in some time, Larry McMurtry’s
Streets Of Laredo,
a sequel to
Lonesome Dove,
about the flinty Texas Ranger Captain Coll, played by James Garner, who goes on a hunt for a blond, blue-eyed Mexican boy filled with an icy killing rage and wearing the chilling aura of a cocked pistol, loose on a murderous rampage with a scoped rifle. Sissy Spacek plays a two-dollar whore gone good who eventually saves Coll after the ruthless boy killer leaves him for dying. Sam liked to watch the intense tale to study the ribbons of honor and raw courage running through it. That was probably the distilled reason he liked to watch most of the great westerns. He remembered two particularly powerful lines from
Streets Of Laredo.
Commenting on the fallen Coll, Sheriff Goodnight says, “Life’s but a knife edge, anyway. Sooner or later a man slips and gets cut.”

“Mr. Bass, I think you’re the only one on the island who rents those old westerns,” Danielle said, “so why don’t you just keep these for a week or so? No extra charge.”

“Waaal, I’m surely much obliged, ma’am.”

“That’s a terrible John Wayne.”

“Hey, you recognized him, didn’t you?”

He worked until dusk, stopped in at The Privateer for a cheeseburger plate and a draft, and then rode home in the early darkness to clean up. Valerie would be working until nine and Mrs. Bradley was watching Joshua. He might as well spend a while doing much-postponed paperwork while he watched one of the movies.

At eight-thirty his beeper went off and he called Val at Sonny’s. She asked if he’d eaten and he said more or less, so she told him she would grab a bite after work and then head home, inviting him over for coffee and some of her date-filled cookies at about nine-thirty.

“Talk about an offer I can’t refuse,” he said.

Joshua was in bed asleep by the time he got there, and Valerie had just bid goodnight to Mrs. Bradley, who always walked to and from her house two sandy streets away.

“You know, I wouldn’t mind watching Josh on nights like this,” he told her.

“No. It’s not right to expect you to do that on a regular basis and besides, Mrs. Bradley needs what little I pay her.”

She lit three clustered candles on the coffee table and set up a classical CD to play low on her stereo. She arranged a plate of date cookies, poured fresh-brewed coffee, and they got comfortable on the couch.

“How was your day?” he asked.

“Bearable. I found out the Geo’s heater won’t work but you know I bought the car from Fred, Sonny’s brother-in-law, so Fred says he’ll fix it. I’ll go over to his place in the morning, he’ll bring me back here, then take the car to work on it. Josh can ride the school bus. So, no problem. It’s my regular day off and I know you need to work, so I’ll spend it cleaning up around here and making something really special for our supper.”

She turned toward him with a serious expression. “I’ve been thinking, Sam. I can get a few days off around Christmas when Josh is out anyway. What would you think about us going up to the mountains? I want you to meet my people. Especially my grandfather and my uncle and his family, but the others, too.”

“What if they don’t approve of me?”

“Besides the facts that you’re a white cowboy and they’re at least part red Indians, and you pilot a machine that’s only about the size of that Wright Brothers’ string bag, and you do a really bad John Wayne, and if left to your own devices you’ll eat like a junkyard dog, and you drive a Jeep that sounds like a stock car race, what’s to not approve of?”

“You Indians can be cruel. I should have known. I’ve seen enough westerns. I guess this means we’re getting serious here.”

“If you’re saying you haven’t
been
getting serious, mister, you can put that cookie right back on that plate.”

Sam smiled and took a bite of cookie and a sip of coffee. “All right. We’ll fly if you want to. Maybe get them to pick us up at the airport? Maybe there’ll be snow. Josh would like that. Me, too. We can build us a snow person.”

“Uncle John has a pickup I know he’ll let us use. Don’t worry, you’ll like them all. Grandfather will probably ask you a lot of questions. He’s from a generation when the elders were supposed to seriously question a young man who was courting one of their young women.”

“Tell me about the Cherokee. And tell me about your family. And about what it was like growing up on the reservation.”

She drew her legs up and sat sideways facing him, leaning her head slightly onto the couch back, her hair glossy in the candlelight and her dark eyes bright, looking off into a distance, and her voice became mesmerizing.

“Cherokee was never an Indian name. We were the
Tsalagi,
and we went back ten thousand years to the first people who wandered here from Asia. When DeSoto came in 1540 there were twenty-five thousand of us and we claimed as our hunting grounds an area that’s now parts of eight states. We were the strongest of all the Southeastern tribes. We never lived in teepees. Our cabins were made of poles woven with split river cane, covered with smooth plaster that was mixed from clay and grass. We had a chief and he had a right hand man and a speaker. The center of government and ceremonial life was a seven-sided council house that held five hundred, and there were seven clans. Seven women sat among the council members and their opinions were always respected. The fire in the center of the council house was kindled from seven woods. The council held court and made laws, but most crimes were avenged by members of the wronged family. If we had to fight against the Creek or others the
Kalanu
or war chief would take over, there would be a ceremony, and the warriors would vow never to stain their weapons with the blood of children or old people or those who couldn’t defend themselves.

“Each family had a hothouse for ceremonies and for keeping warm through the coldest nights. A family would gather around the fire in the hothouse and a myth-keeper would recite the sacred legends. One of my favorites that my grandfather told me when I was a little girl, by the fireplace in his house, was about
Ataga’hi,
the magic lake. Way back up in the high mountains, beyond the headwaters of the Oconaluftee River, there’s a place where if you listen carefully, mingled with the whisperings of the wind in the trees you can hear hundreds of birds in flight. If you fast and you say all the right prayers and you keep a vigil through the night, at dawn you might catch a glimpse of
Ataga’hi.
Its waters are violet, fed by springs in the cliffs, and there are many birds and fish and the tracks of animals are all around. If a bear is wounded by a hunter and if he can make his way to the lake and go in, when he comes out his wound will be healed. It’s the medicine lake of the animals, so they keep it invisible from humans.”

She told him how, in 1738, half their number had died of white man’s small pox. And how, in 1838, 7,000 soldiers had driven 17,000 Indians from their mountain homes to the Oklahoma wastelands, 4,000 dying on the way from exposure and brutality.

“That was the Trail Of Tears,” Sam said.

“Yes. About a thousand had hidden back in the high woods of the Smokies. An old man named Tsali was one of the last to be rounded up, with his wife and two sons and his brother-in-law Lowney. As two soldiers were pushing the small group along a trail one of them prodded Tsali’s wife with a bayonet. Tsali talked to his sons and Lowney quietly in the old tongue, setting up a trap for the soldiers at a bend in the trail. Tsali feigned tripping. Lowney and Tsali’s son Ridges grappled with one of the soldiers and Tsali swept the other soldier’s legs from under him. As the soldier fell his gun went off and he shot himself in the head. He was dead. The other soldier ran, and Tsali and his family went way back up into the caves. The Army put out word that if Tsali and his family would give themselves up the remaining Indians would be allowed to stay in the mountains. Old Tsali surrendered and they sentenced him, Ridges, and Lowney to die.”

She took a sip of tea and said, “The soldiers stood them against three trees. Tsali said if he was to be shot he would rather it be by his own people than by the white soldiers. They gave guns to three Indian men and Tsali told them to go ahead and do it. So because of Tsali and his son and brother-in-law, we have that scrap of land in the most rugged part of the mountains. The Qualla Boundary.

“It was beautiful and strange growing up there. You have this wonderful ancient culture always pulling at you, and then you have a friend whose father earns extra money by letting tourists take his picture standing beside a little tin teepee, wearing a plastic war bonnet from Taiwan. Some of the teenagers have this current of anger running in them. The reservation is dry because liquor really does poison something in us, but bootleggers near the reservation sell bonded booze and moonshine so there’s alcoholism. There’s depression. But there are also some of the finest wood carvings and jewelry and pottery and crafts you’ll find anywhere. We still have a chief and a tribal council, all elected now. Some of the people try to preserve what was best about the old ways. And it’s so beautiful up there, the worst of the land for cultivating when they let us keep it, but some of the most attractive, it turns out, for the tourists. There’s a big casino. Draws white men and their money from all over. I’d like to think it’s the Indian way of getting even, but the place carries a white name and I’d be willing to bet that if you took a close look at the books you’d find the profits are mostly white, wouldn’t you?

“No bet from me,” Sam said.

“You know my parents died when their pickup slid on a patch of ice on a mountain road, and I went to live with my grandfather, Wasituna. He taught me a lot. He’s an expert with the blowgun, and one of the last who knows how to make the best kind from river cane and the darts for it from locust feathered with thistledown. He can still kill a running rabbit with it at sixty feet. His father, Goingback Lightfoot, lived to be a hundred and five, and was said to be a witch, maybe the last of the
Tskilegwa.

“Grandfather Wasituna tried to teach me
Kituhwa,
the old language. I can understand it but I’m not fluent. I have a book by Mary Chiltoskey and I’m teaching Joshua a little of it, trying to relearn it myself. So many of the words have a simple beauty in them.
Talutsa
means basket. Bluebird is
tsaquoladagi.
Colt is
aginasoquili.
Wolf is
waya.
Candle is
ukanawiatsvsdodi.
Don’t attempt that one.” She smiled. “A white man can tie a knot in his tongue just trying it.”