Hour of the Hunter (20 page)

George eased the horse out of the trailer and handed the reins over to Diana. "You'd better try leadin' him. He'll need to be gettin' used to you, and you'd better plan on spendin' plenty of time with him, too."

Diana led the way around to the old barn where a newly cleaned stall was waiting. When had her mother had time to do so much extra work along with all the other things that demanded her attention?

"Know anything about takin' care of horses?" George Deeson asked.

"Not very much. I've never owned one before. Some of my friends have horses, but I don't get to ride very often."

"Reckon I'll be over of a Saturday mornin' to give you a lesson or two as long as your mama throws in some of her coffee and homemade biscuits."

"How come, Mr. Deeson? I don't understand."

"How come? Why, girl, hasn't your mama told you yet?

Me and her's gonna turn you into a rodeo queen."

"Me?" Diana asked in stunned disbelief "Yup, you. You're how old now?

Thirteen?"

Diana nodded.

"It'll take around four years, I reckon, give or take." He leaned over and studied Diana's face.

"Yup," he said, "this girl's got good bones. She'll do just fine, but take it from me, missus, them braids gotta go. Braids don't win no prizes these days, although they used to. They sure enough did, and not so very far back, neither."

That evening, after supper, Iona cut off Diana's braid.

The following day, when school got out, Iona drove Diana to the drugstore in La Grande and bought her rollers, hair spray, combs and brushes, and makeup. When Diana came downstairs the next morning wearing her first tentative attempt at makeup, she waited for her father to say something, but he was strangely silent on the subject, almost as though he didn't notice.

The next Saturday morning and for almost every Saturday morning that followed during the next four years, George Deeson appeared at the Coopers' house bright and early to spend hours working with Diana and Waldo. When it was too cold to be outside, they worked in the barn.

He taught her saddling and bridling and grooming. Together, Waldo and George Deeson taught Diana barrel racing. George taught her how to sit astride the horse so girl and horse were a single, symbiotic unit. He taught her how to read Waldo's moods, how to calm him down during rumbling thunderstorms and barrages of exploding firecrackers, how to coax him in and out of unfamiliar horse trailers.

George Deeson taught Diana self-reliance, encouraged her to take Waldo off on long, solitary trail rides to one of the fifty-two alpine lakes in the Blue Mountains surrounding Joseph, Oregon. There, with only her horse and her books,

alone sometimes for days at a time, Diana could read and fish and care for her horse far away from Iona and Max Cooper's day-to-day conflicts.

And those trips weren't good only for Diana, either.

Starved for human companionship by his previous owner, Waldo thrived on the generous doses of attention Diana lavished on him.

But more than all that, George Deeson educated Diana Lee Cooper in something she never could have learned from her own mother. George Deeson taught Diana presence, schooled her in how to carry herself He tutored her in the art of smiling and helped her master the rodeo-queen wave. Most of all, he infected her with his unshakable belief that one day she really would be queen of the Chief Joseph Days Rodeo.

George Deeson taught Diana all that and more. It didn't dawn on her until years later that he never told her why.

And she didn't ask.

Chapter Eight

LOOKS AT NOTHING rode in the truck without saying a word, offering no explanation and asking for none. Fat Crack did the same.

Halfway back to Sells, a call came in from Law and Order on the truck's two-way radio. The tribal-police dispatcher told Fat Crack that he was needed near the QuiJotoa Trading Post, where an Anglo lady's Winnebago had broken down on her way to Rocky Point. She wanted a tow back home to Casa Grande.

Fat Crack was disappointed. He had wanted to go along to the hospital and watch the old medicine man strut his stuff. Now, that would be impossible.

In the early afternoon, Fat Crack came through the low pass outside Wedged Turtle Village, which Anglos can Sells. As the truck slowed for the cattle guard marking the village boundary, Looks At Nothing held out his hand.

"Stop here," he said.

"My aunt is in the hospital," Fat Crack objected. "Let me take you there."

"No," Looks At Nothing responded. "I will go to her later. Not now.

Let me out."

Fat Crack stopped, and Looks At Nothing climbed down.

"But there's nothing here," Fat Crack said through the open window.

"At least let me take you to the trading post."

Looks At Nothing shook his head. "I have what I need," he said. "I will wait under a tree until it is time."

As Fat Crack drove away, he glanced back in the rearview mirror. Looks At Nothing, shimmering like a ghost in the rising midday heat, poked around with his cane in the nearby dirt and loose gravel. Then, after locating the soft shoulder of the road, the old man carefully made his sightless way down the steep embankment, heading unerringly toward the shade of a small grove of trees.

Fat Crack shook his head. Some things defied explanation. This was certainly one of them.

Long ago, a medicine man raised his daughter alone.

She was good and beautiful and hardworking. The wise man taught his daughter that she must not laugh at silly things, or men would think she was too easy.

When the girl grew up and was ready to marry, her father said she would marry whoever could make her laugh. First Coyote tried, and then Whippoorwill, and even Horned Toad, but none of them could make her laugh.

One day Coyote was sitting on a hill when he saw the girl he still wanted to marry. She was walking around gathering wood, and her burden basket was walking behind her. Burden baskets never walk on their own sticks, but, as I told you, the girl's father was a very powerful medicine man.

Coyote kept watching. The girl gathered a large stack of wood and loaded it into the basket, and still the burden basket followed her.

As she started back to the village, Coyote came down to where she and her basket were walking.

"So," Coyote said. "Your basket walks around."

As soon as he said that, the basket stopped walking and turned into a mountain-Giwho Tho'ag or Quijotoa, as the whites call it.

And that, nawoj, is the story of Burden Basket Mountain.

Early afternoon passed with no word from Fat Crack and Looks At Nothing.

Worrying that perhaps the medicine man would not come, Rita closed her eyes once more.

By age sixteen, most Papago girls were married. With the outing matron's help, educated girls could now find domestic jobs in Tucson, Phoenix, and even California.

Girls like that were especially prized wife material on the cash-poor reservation, but Dancing Quail was no prize. No one wanted to marry her.

Earnings from domestic service were far more than Dancing Quail made selling baskets and ollas. Not only that, anyone marrying Hejel Wi'ikam, as people now called her, would assume the added burden of her ready-made family-a blind, useless old grandmother and an arrogant younger sister named Juanita.

Once more the determined Franciscan sister saw a chance to redeem Alice Antone's elder daughter. Once more they sent Father John to carry their message.

"Come to Topawa and work in the mission," he said.

"The sisters will teach you how to clean houses so that one day you, too, will be able to work in Phoenix or Tucson."

For the first time, even Dancing Quail saw her lack of education as a liability. "But what of my grandmother?"

she asked. "I can't leave her here alone in Ban Thak."

For this, Father John had a prerehearsed answer. "Bring her along.

There's a little house near the mission where you can both live. She won't be far away. You'll be able to care for her and still work and earn money."

Dancing Quail considered the offer for several long moments. Without men to look after their fields and livestock, she and Understanding Woman had struggled desperately just to survive. White man's money was the key, and the girl knew it.

"How would I get her there?" she asked. "My grandmother is old. It's a long way from Coyote Sitting to Burnt Dog Village."

"Don't worry," Father John told her. "Pack your things.

In two days, I'll come back and take both of you in my car."

Dancing Quail was dubious. "What if she won't go?"

But the old woman surprised everyone and voiced no objection. It was time her granddaughter married. Burnt Dog Village offered far more potential suitors than Coyote Sitting.

With Dancing Quail's help, Understanding Woman began to pack. One by one, she gathered her possessions and placed them in two old-fashioned crossed-stick burden baskets. The most treasured item was Understanding Woman's only remaining medicine basket, the last one she had made before her eyesight failed.

"Ni-ka'amad," Understanding Woman said. "Granddaughter, do you still have the medicine basket I gave you that time?"

Dancing Quail hung her head in shame, grateful for once for her grandmother's blindness. She had never admitted to' anyone how she had lost Understanding Woman's beautifully colored spirit rock or how the school attendants had taken the medicine basket away from her as soon as they found it rolled up in her blanket. They had confiscated it, and she never saw it again.

"No, ni-kahk," Dancing Quail said softly. "No, Grandmother. I lost it long ago."

She was afraid her grandmother would think she hadn't appreciated the gifts, hadn't treated them with proper respect.

"The rock, too?" Understanding Woman asked.

"The rock, too."

For a time, the old woman sat fingering that final medicine basket It wasn't nearly as well made as earlier ones had been. The seams were crooked. Some of the weaves were as rough-edged as if the work had been done by a rank beginner. Rough or not, though, this had been her own special basket, the one she had kept entirely to herself.

Instead of packing it along with her other household goods, she placed it on the ground beside her.

"It does not matter, ni-ka'amad," Understanding Woman said. "I will teach you to make another."

The next day, when Father John drove up in his spindlewheeled touring car, the two women waited outside their adobe house with two fully loaded burden baskets standing between them.

"Ready?" he said.

In the two years since first coming to the reservation, Father John had learned to speak some Papago. He sensed that the old woman had never ridden in an automobile before and that she was anxious about it.

Dancing Quail went to load the burden baskets while Father John eased Understanding Woman to her feet and helped her to the car. "Are you afraid, Grandmother?" he asked.

The old woman shook her head. "No," she answered, although her voice quivered. "I am not afraid."

Just then something slipped from her hand. She gasped and bent to retrieve it, but the small basket rolled out of the car onto the ground, spilling as it fell.

Father John quickly gathered the fallen basket and its scattered contents, scooping things back into it almost without looking-a tiny straw doll with a strange clay face, a small fragment of broken geode, and something that looked like a Thank of human hair, a chipped arrowhead.

The old woman's hands were still desperately searching the floorboard of the car when Father John placed the restored basket safely under them.

"Is this what you're looking for?" he asked.

Understanding Woman nodded gratefully and clutched the basket to her shriveled breast as though it were a precious newborn baby.

"Yes," she murmured, settling back. "Thank you."

Rita had no idea Juanita had gone home. When she opened her eyes, she saw a brown-robed figure sitting there in her sister's place, head bowed in the afternoon sun. She knew at once who it was, although she hadn't seen him for twenty years. In the mid-fifties, she had gone to San Xavier for a Saint Francis feast and run into him by accident not realizing that after years in California, he had transferred back to the Papago.

Unaware she was awake, Father John's beads cocked quietly in liver-spotted hands as he intoned a whispered rosary in her behalf Silently, she examined every minute detail of him-parchment-like skin stretched across bony knuckles, sparse hair white now rather than the color of dried grass. Like his hands, the bald place on his head was dotted with large brown spots. Underneath the brown cassock, he was precariously thin.

He's old now, too, Rita thought. Were both old. She said, "Are you still trying to save my soul?"

Father John's head jerked up at the sound of her voice.

"And mine," he answered quietly. "Yours and mine."

She turned her face to the wall, surprised that after all this time unbidden tears still sprang to her eyes at the mere sound of his voice.

What was he doing here in the hospital room with her? How had he found her? She had never asked for his help. Who had called him?

"Your sister called me," he said, answering the unspoken question.

"After what happened to Gina years ago, I asked Juanita to let me know if anything..."

"Go away," Rita said, refusing to turn and face him again.

"But ...

"Go away," she insisted.

She heard the heavy swish of his robe as he rose to his feet. Beads rattled when he dropped them into a pocket.

"If there's ever anything I can do ...

Still she didn't look at him.

"Ni-gm hu wabsh oan," he began. "Forgive me. Dancing Quail, please forgive me."

Rita didn't answer. Father John left, closing the door gently behind him. Afterward, Rita tried to blot him from her mind, but he wouldn't leave. He was there, walking around in her soul, not as he was now, old and liverspotted, but young again, tall and straight, with a headful of palomino-colored hair.

Before he visited the storage locker, Andrew Carlisle stopped at Woolworth's and bought himself a long blond wig, a selection of makeup, and some suitable women's clothing, including a frilly blouse, an obscenely padded bra, and a pair of thongs. He had concluded it would probably be best if a woman showed up at the locker, and the clothing would come in handy for his private fund-raising program later on in the day.