Hour of the Hunter (24 page)

Little Bear did as Coyote said, and once more offered the tobacco to the man sitting next to him. This time the man accepted it, He took a smoke and then, passed it along to the man next to him, saying "nawoj" as he did so.

And so the tobacco went all the way around the circle.

When it was finished, the people decided that Little Lion and Little Bear had brought them a good gift, this tobacco, and that they should be left to live in peace to raise it.

And that, nawoj, is the story of the Cerenwny of the Peace Smoke, or the Peace Pipe, as some tribes call it, for the Tohono O'othham, the Desert People, do not use pipes.

Effie Joaquin waited until after nine when both Dr. Rosemead and Dr. Winters went home to their Saturday night poker game in the hospital housing compound. Only then did she go get the medicine man. With younger Indians, it usually didn't matter, but with older ones, people who still clung to the old ways, if the medicine man wasn't summoned, the patients might simply give up and not recover.

Effie didn't much believe in all this singing of songs and shaking of feathers, but her elderly patients did. If they wanted a medicine man, she saw to it that one came to the hospital. Usually, he arrived late enough at night that the doctors didn't notice. Effie was always careful to air out the acrid smell of wild tobacco before the doctors came back on duty the next morning.

Effie drove her pickup as far as the grove of trees where she knew Looks At Nothing would be waiting.

"Oi g hihm," she said to the old man, opening the door.

"Get in and let's go."

She drove back to the hospital and steered him down the hall. Letting him into Rita Antone's room, she left him there, closing the door behind him.

Looks At Nothing had been in hospital rooms before, but this one was worse than most. As always, he was shaken by the sharp, unpleasant odors assailing his nostrils. Mil-gahn medicine was not pleasing to the nose, but in this room there was something more besides-a sensation so fraught with danger that it filled the old man's heart with dread.

"Nawoj," he said softly, testing to see if Hejel WFithag was awake.

"Friend."

"Nawoj," she returned.

Guided by the sound of her voice and tapping the ironwood cane, he made his way to the bed. When he was close enough, she reached out and grasped his hand.

"Thank you for coming."

"It is nothing," he said. "I am always happy to help little Dancing Quail. I know you are troubled."

"Yes," she responded. "Would you like a chair?"

Looks At Nothing pulled his hand free from hers and felt behind him until he located the wall. "There are no other patients in this room."

It was a statement, not a question.

"Two other beds," Rita told him, "but no one is in them.

"We're alone."

"Good." Looks At Nothing eased his wiry frame down the wall. "I will sit here on the floor and listen. You must tell me everything."

And so she did, a little at a time, from the car wreck to the buzzards.

Looks At Nothing opened the leather pouch he wore around his scrawny waist and smoked some of the hand-rolled wild tobacco cigarettes he carried there.

Gradually, the pleasant Indian smoke overcame the Milgahn odors in the room. He listened, nodding thoughtfully from time to time. When Rita finished, he sat there in silence and continued to smoke.

"Tell me about this Anglo boy," he said at last, "the one you call Olhoni."

Rita told him about Davy then and about Diana Ladd, a mother who, like the Woman Who Loved Field Hockey, was so busy that she neglected her own child. As the hours went by, she told the medicine man everything she could remember, weaving together the threads of the story in a complicated pattern that had its beginnings with Gina's murder.

At last there was nothing more to tell. Exhausted by the effort, Rita closed her eyes, while Looks At Nothing staggered unsteadily to his feet.

"Where does your nephew live?" the old man asked.

Rita frowned. "Fat Crack? He lives behind the gas station in one of those new government houses. Why do you ask?"

"I must go see him," Looks At Nothing said. "Together we will decide what to do."

Johnny Rivkin, the well-known Hollywood costume designer, was slumming.

Fresh off the set in Sonoita, he had come to Tucson to have some fun & over the weekend. Hal Wilson, the director, had warned him that Johnny's particular brand of entertainment wouldn't be tolerated by the locals in the several small southern Arizona towns where they were filming Hal's latest Americanized spaghetti western. A search for other outlets brought Johnny straight to the Reardon Hotel.

Larry Hudson, Johnny's lover of some fifteen years' standing, had recently thrown him over in favor of a much younger man. Johnny's ego damage was still a raw, seeping wound. In public, he tried to shrug it off, to act as though it didn't matter, but it did-terribly.

For years, Johnny Rivkin had successfully negotiated the treacherous costuming end of the movie biz, but despite .having a name for himself, he was still basically shy. He didn't like the meat-market pickup scene. He didn't like shopping around, making choices, and maybe being turned down. He still looked good. He had the plastic-surgeon receipts to prove it, but truth be known, the hunks were all out looking for younger stuff these days.

This is Tucson, he reminded himself, trying to ward off discouragement.

He hoped that since the place was a real backwater, maybe he'd be able to find someone not quite so jaded as those back home in L.A. Maybe one or two-two would be much nicer than one-would be dazzled enough by Johnny Rivkin's name and connections that they would follow him anywhere, opening up the possibilities for a long-term menage d trois.

That was what he wanted--the illusion of permanence with a little excitement thrown in for good measure.

Outside the Reardon, Johnny paused at the bar's dismal entrance with its broken neon sign. No one would ever mistake the place for a Hollywood glamour spot. From inside, he heard the sound of intermittent laughter, smelled the odor of stale smoke and the sour stench of spilled beer.

For the hundredth time, or maybe the thousandth, Johnny Rivkin cursed Larry Hudson for throwing him out for forcing him back into the open market. Johnny was too old to be out making this scene again, to be playing the game, searching for warm bodies. He wanted his old life back-his comfortable, boring, settled life. This was too much effort.

Steeling himself for the ordeal, Johnny pushed open the door. The bar was long and smoky and dimly lit. A series of shabby booths lined one side of the room. All occupied, they were filled with small groupings of men in twos, threes, or fours talking in low voices. A televised baseball game flitted across the color screen above the bar, but the sound was off. No one except the bartender was paying any attention to it.

When the door opened, an uneasy silence filled the room as the regulars noted and evaluated the newcomer. Was he one of them or not? Had a straight arrow mistakenly wandered into their midst? That happened occasionally, often with disastrous results.

The roomful of men gauged everything about Johnny Rivkin, from the quality of his expensive but casual clothing and his seasoned California tan to the several gold chains peeking coyly out from under an artfully unbuttoned collar.

Johnny had dressed carefully for the occasion, calculating exactly the kind of impression he wanted to make, but he loathed the unabashed scrutiny of strangers. Unfortunately, in places like the Reardon, that was always the real price of admission.

Eventually, with a collective shrug, the regulars looked away. The inspection was over, and Johnny Rivkin had passed. He belonged.

Relieved, Johnny made his way down the crowded bar.

The only unoccupied stool was halfway down the room next to the only woman in the place. That was too bad. It might give people the wrong idea, drive away some of the most likely prospects. The pickup process was painful enough without people jumping to erroneous conclusions.

He settled onto the bar stool and ordered a Chivas on the rocks, which he paid for out of a good-sized roll of bills.

He didn't like showing that kind of money. Some people said it was dangerous, but at his age, money-lots of it was often the only insurance against ending up alone.

Next to him, the blonde bestirred herself and ordered a whiskey sour.

As soon as she spoke, Johnny realized she was a he in drag, a man almost as old as Johnny himself.

Doing a quick professional evaluation of the blonde's clothing, the costumer almost choked on his drink. The outfit was appalling. The shoes and purse were worse. Rivkin didn't know where or when he'd seen such cheap, ugly stuff. If you're going to go to the trouble of dressing up, he thought, why not put on something decent?

The bartender brought the whiskey sour, and the blonde paid for it, pocketing every penny of change. Johnny Rivkin felt a faint tweak of sympathy. He still hadn't forgotten his own impoverished early days.

The blonde was someone for whom money, or the lack of it, was a major issue. You had to feel Pretty damned poor to stiff the bartender out of his tip.

Maybe abject poverty explained the awful clothing as well.

Sipping his drink, the blonde stared straight ahead toward the ranked bottles standing at attention behind the bar. There was an almost palpable sadness about the drag queen, a loneliness and despair that matched Rivkin's own and touched a chord of sympathy in him.

Johnny had never been a particularly good conversationalist where strangers were concerned. He didn't mind being in groups of people he knew, -but with strangers, instead of talking, he froze up and contented himself with making Up imaginary scenarios about the people around him.

Now, he found himself wondering if the blonde, like him, hadn't been recently thrown out of a long-term relationship with nothing more than the clothes on his/her back. Johnny knew how that felt. It wasn't any picnic.

"Mind if I smoke?" Rivkin asked.

The blonde looked up, seemingly noticing Johnny for the first time.

"No. Go right ahead."

Johnny opened his gold cigarette case, took out a cigarette, and offered one to the blonde. "Thanks," she said, taking it. "Am you new to town?"

"Just passing through, really," Johnny answered. "I'm working on that new Hal Wilson film. We've been on location in Sonoita all week. That place is a hellhole."

Dropping Hal Wilson's name didn't seem to have any visible effect.

Maybe the blonde wasn't into films.

Johnny polished off his drink, probably sooner than he should have, but being in a dump like the Reardon made him nervous. He wanted to make a connection and get the hell out of there.

"May I buy you a drink?" he asked, when the bartender responded to his signal.

"Sure," the blonde said without enthusiasm. "That would be nice."

Johnny believed in his intuition, in his ability to read other people.

He decided in this instance to put it to the test.

"If you don't mind my saying so, you look like you just lost your best friend."

The blonde met Johnny's gaze with a rueful shake of blonde mane. "It shows that much, does it?"

Johnny raised his glass. "It takes one to know one."

"Really. You, too?"

Rivkin nodded. "After a mere fifteen years."

"I guess I got off lucky," the blonde said. "For me, it was only six."

"Cleaned you out?"

For the first time, the blonde smiled and then laughed aloud. "You could say that. I got away clean but broke."

. Mentally, Johnny patted himself on the back. He had been right all along. He returned the smile over his glass.

"So misery loves company," he said in his best imitation New York accent. "Maybe we could cheer each other up later, in my room, make a little revenge."

"Here?"

"Are you kidding? In this flea trap? Not on your life."

Johnny picked up the blonde's cigarettes, deftly placed his room key under it, and slipped the package and key down the bar.

"The Santa Rita. Room 831. in about half an hour."

"Sounds good to me," the blonde said.

Relieved to have scored with so little wasted effort, Johnny got up to leave. "By the way, do you like champagne?"

The blonde nodded.

"Good. I'll have a bottle on ice by the time you get there.

Don't be late."

"I won't," the blonde told him with another brave smile.

"I have a feeling my luck just took a turn for the better."

When Looks At Nothing left Rita's room, Effie Joaquin expected to take him back to his camp near the outskirts of town. He thanked her for the offer and said he'd find his way alone.

"But it's dark out there," Effie objected.

The old man smiled. "Darkness is my friend," he told her.

Effie considered herself personally responsible for bringing the old man to the hospital. She didn't want anything to happen to him on his way home.

"It's just that other people might not be able to see you," she snapped impatiently.

"Don't worry," he said. "It isn't far."

Keeping to the shoulder of the road, Looks At Nothing made his way to the gas station. At once a dog began to bark. The old man followed the sound, making the dog bark even louder.

"Who is it?" a woman's voice demanded from inside the house.

"Looks At Nothing," the medicine man answered. "I'm looking for Fat Crack."

"Just a minute," she said. "I'll get him."

Moments later, a door opened. "What do you want?" Fat Crack asked.

"To speak to you," Looks At Nothing answered. "About your aunt. She needs your help."

"My help? I thought she wanted your help. After all, you're the medicine man."

Looks At Nothing settled cross-legged on the ground, took a cigarette out of his pouch, lit it, and offered it to Fat Crack. "Nawoj," he said.

"Nawoj," Fat Crack returned, accepting the cigarette gracefully because it would have been rude to do otherwise.

"What's this all about?"

"Sit," Looks At Nothing ordered. "We must not rush."