Hour of the Hunter (13 page)

Roger was offended by Andrew's headful of adorable blond curls. He insisted it was time the child have a real boy's haircut, that the curls made him a sissy. Before the two of them left for the barbershop, Myrna Louise took her son aside and talked to him, telling him how he should behave.

"You mind your uncle Roger," she said. "You do everything he tells you."

"He's not my uncle," Andrew muttered stubbornly under his breath.

"What did you say?"

"He's not my uncle. Granny said so."

Any mention of her former mother-in-law threw Myrna Louise into unreasoning rage. "He most certainly is, too," she insisted, "and that's what you're going to call him."

"No," Andrew said.

"Yes," she returned.

"Say 'Uncle."

"Uncle," Andrew replied sullenly.

ay 'Roger'.

"Roger."

"Now say 'Uncle Roger."' "I can say 'Uncle,"' her son responded, "and I can say 'Roger,' but I can't say 'Uncle Roger."' And he never did. Not once.

Without humidity to hold it back, the heat peeled away from the desert floor like skin from a sun-ripened peach.

Brandon and Diana tried driving with the Ford's windows wide open, but it was too chilly on Davy, who had stretched out lengthwise in the backseat and fallen sound asleep, so they rode with the front windows barely cracked, making conversation possible.

"Davy's a cute kid," Brandon offered tentatively. Riding with this strangely silent woman still made him uncomfortable.

Diana nodded. "He takes after his dad."

Walker had noticed Davy's physical resemblance to his father, but he hadn't wanted to mention it. The boy's wide-set blue-gray eyes and blond good looks were a long way from his mother's brown-eyed, dark-haired features.

Brandon hoped, for Davy's sake, that looks were all he'd inherited from his father. If genetics were destiny, then David Ladd was doomed.

"Sometimes he does funny things, bizarre things," Diana mused, "and I wonder if it's anything like the way his father was when he was a child, but I don't have any way of knowing."

"You don't see your in-laws?"

Diana shook her head. "They wanted me to come back, -to Chicago and live with them, but I wouldn't do it."

"Why not?"

"Rita," Diana answered simply. "They didn't understand about Rita.

Since I couldn't bring her along, we didn't go."

Diana's in-laws weren't the only ones who didn't understand about Rita, Brandon Walker thought, about the strange bond that existed between the young Anglo woman and the much older Indian. It didn't make sense to him, either.

"Davy's grandparents don't stay in touch?"

"They send Christmas presents. That's about all."

"That's too bad."

"It's their loss," Diana added.

Garrison Ladd told Diana Cooper about his parents that very first November afternoon during their three-hour coffee marathon at the I-Hop.

"I don't like them much," he said. "Especially my dad."

This was something about Garrison Ladd that Diana Lee Cooper could relate to. She knew all there was to know about hating your own father.

"What's wrong with him?"

she asked.

"He's brilliant for one thing, and expects everyone else to be the same.

He's worked his way up to being a big-cheese executive with Admiral back in Chicago. He started out in electrical engineering between the wars after graduating from the Armour Institute of Technology, with honors and two degrees. He was determined that I follow in his illustrious footsteps."

Diana Cooper would have loved to have a father who was undeniably brilliant, someone who would encourage her to go on to school of any kind rather than being, like Max Cooper, a solid wall of resistance.

"Your father doesn't sound so bad," she ventured.

"Oh yeah? This man doesn't understand the word vacation. All he does is work, work, work, and make money.

He's probably richer than Midas by now. He and my mother live in this fantastic house on the shores of Lake Michigan. They have all these smart friends, but they're boring as hell, and they don't have any fun.

They don't know how."

"That still doesn't sound so bad," Diana laughed.

"Why? What does your father do?" Gary Ladd asked, leveling that disconcerting blue-eyed gaze of his on her.

Diana flushed, both because he was looking at her and because of the question. She knew that particular question would come eventually, and she dreaded it. When she told him about Max, would Gary Ladd stalk out of the restaurant and leave her to pay for her own coffee? Sick at heart but incapable of doing anything else, Diana felt, obliged to answer straight from the hip. If, after she told him, Garrison Walther Ladd, RI, walked out and left her sitting there alone at the table, then all she'd be out was a single cup of I-Hop coffee.

"He's a garbageman," Diana replied.

Garrison slammed his cup into the heavy china saucer, slopping coffee.

"You're kidding!"

"No.,'

"This is a joke, right?"

"It's no joke. My dad runs the garbage dump in Joseph, Oregon.

"Joseph? Where's that?"

"In the Blue Mountains. On the other side of the state, a town at the end of a road. You might say I'm a dead end kid."

It was easier for Diana to make fun of herself and Joseph first, rather than waiting for other people do it. From his initial reaction, she couldn't tell if Garrison was making fun of her or not. He seemed intrigued.

"Fascinating. How many people live in Joseph?"

"Eight hundred, give or take."

"My God! That's amazing."

"What's amazing about it?"

"Look, I'm from Chicago. When I came here, I thought Eugene was small, but eight hundred people? Jeez, that's wonderful."

"It doesn't seem particularly wonderful to me."

"Just think about it," Garrison Ladd continued, his face alight with enthusiasm. "It's hard to believe that there are still places like that in this country, wide-open spaces."

"It's wide open, all right," Diana returned dryly. "It's so open there's nobody there."

"So what do people do?"

"For a living? Fanning, ranching, logging."

"No mining?" he asked.

"No mining."

Garrison Ladd folded his arms across his chest, shook his head, and grinned at her. He had a very engaging grin.

"Too bad," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Did you ever listen to Stella Dallas, or are you too young?"

"Who's Stella Dallas?"

"That's what I get for messing around with younger women- Stella Dallas used to be on the radio back in Chicago when I was growing up. They said she was a girl from 'a small mining town in the West."always told my mother that Stella Dallas was the kind of girl I was going to marry.

Right up until you told me there was no mining in Joseph, I thought maybe I'd marry you."

At that Preposterous statement, Diana Lee Cooper burst out laughing.

She couldn't help it. The few other patrons in the restaurant that afternoon, the ones who weren't at home glued to their television sets, regarded her disapprovingly.

This was a day of mourning, a day of national tragedy, as citizens of the country, regardless of political leanings, began to come to grips with the bloody drama playing itself Out in Dallas. It was not a time for levity, but Diana laughed anyway.

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 loligam.

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 gem 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 futilely. "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-inlaw, 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 Lightened 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. the, Diana," "Your father doesn't know how to read or write." 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?" "No. I tried to get him to learn before we were married, but he refused unable to get the letters correct."

"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."