Hour of the Hunter (4 page)

The truck's turn signals hadn't worked for years. Rita stuck her arm out the open window, signaling for a left-hand turn. Davy sat up straight and peered out the window.

"Where are we going now?" he asked.

"Up this road," Rita replied, turning onto a rutted, hardpacked dirt track that led off through the underbrush. Barely one car-width wide, the narrow trail wound through thick stands of newly leafed mesquite and brilliantly yellow palo Verde, up a slight rise, and then down through a dry, sandy wash. As the tires caught in the hubcap-deep sand, the steering wheel jerked sharply to the left. Rita clung to it with both hands and floorboarded the gas pedal, barely managing to maintain the truck's forward momentum.

Engine rumbling, the pickup emerged from the wash.

Ahead of them, the road gave little evidence of day-today use.

Whatever faint tire tracks may have preceded theirs had long since been obliterated by the hoofprints of wandering herds of cattle. A second dip in the road took them through a second dry wash. Beyond that, the long beside an empty streambed through clumps of brittle, sun-dried grass and weeds.

They drove past a place where the remnants of several adobe houses were gradually melting back into the desert floor. "Did this used to be a village?" Davy asked.

Rita nodded. "It was called Ko'oi Koshwa."

"Rattlesnake Skull?" Davy asked.

The old woman smiled and nodded. The Anglo child's quick grasp of Rita's native language always pleased her.

"Where did the people go?" he asked.

"Long ago, the Apaches came here. They surprised the village and destroyed it. They took most of the women and children away, although two--a boy and a girl--escaped. They hid in a cave up there in those hills."

Rita pointed to where the base of the mountain loligam, Kitt Peak, abruptly thrust itself out of the flat desert floor.

"After that, people said this was a bad place, a haunted place. No one wanted to live here anymore. When they made the reservation, they left the charco which once belonged to the village outside the boundary."

Davy immediately began looking for the charco, a man-made catchbasin used by the Papagos to catch the nutrient-rich summer-rain flash floods.

For centuries, water captured in these isolated charcos irrigated Indian fields and watered livestock.

"But why are we going to a charco, Nana Dahd? I thought we were going to a dance."

Rita stopped the truck where a barbed-wire gate barred their way. "To the charco first. Go open the gate," she said.

Proud to be assigned such an important task, Davy did as he was told.

He stood to one side, holding the gate until Rita had driven through.

Once the gate was closed and he was back in the truck, they continued to follow the faint track, stopping at last just outside a shady grove of towering cottonwoods clustered around the man-made banks of an earthen water hole.

Hard-caked mud, baked shiny by an unrelenting sun and shot through with jagged cracks and the hoofprints of thirsty cattle, was all that remained from the previous summer's life-sustaining rainstorms. It was June and hot.

Both people and livestock hoped the rains would come again soon.

Davy looked around warily. For some reason he couldn't explain, he didn't like this place. "Why are we stopping here?"

"We have work to do, Olhoni. Come. Bring the rake and shovel."

Carrying the wreath and the candle with her, Nana Dahd slid heavily out of the pickup and trudged toward the base of the largest of the cottonwoods.

The rake and shovel, half again as tall as Davy himself, were unwieldy and difficult for a six-year-old to carry, but he struggled manfully with them, making his way without complaint over the rough track from the truck to where Nana Dahd stood staring down at the ground.

It wasn't until Davy reached her side that he saw what she was looking at-a shrine of sorts, although he didn't know to call it that. In the middle of a circular patch of barren ground stood a small wooden cross.

On it hung a faded plastic wreath, and before it sat a smoky glass vase that had once contained a candle. Both cross and glass were framed by a broken circle of smooth white river rocks.

"What is this, Nana Dahd?" Davy asked. "A grave? Is this a cemetery?"

He looked up. Nana Dahd's usually impassive face was awash with emotion. A single tear glistened in the corner of her eye. In all his six years, Davy Ladd I had never before seen his beloved Nana Dahd cry.

Tears were precious and not to be spilled without good reason.

Something must be terribly wrong.

"Let's go," he begged, reaching up and tugging at her hand. "Let's leave this place. It's scary here."

But Nana Dahd had no intention of leaving. His touch seemed to jar her out of her reverie. Patting his shoulder, she reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a huge, wrinkled hanky. She blew her nose and wiped her red-rimmed eyes.

"I'm okay, Olhoni. We will leave, but after, not right now. First we work."

Nana Dahd showed Davy how animals had scattered some of the white border stones into the brush. She directed him to find and rearrange as many as he could.

Meanwhile, she retrieved the hoe and began scraping the small circle clean of all encroaching blades of grass and weed. As soon as the clearing satisfied her, she carefully removed the faded wreath from the cross and replaced it with the new one.

It was summer, and the harsh early afternoon sun beat down on them as they worked. Davy rebuilt the stone circle as best he could. Rita nodded with approval as he moved the last piece of border into place.

"Good," she said. "Now for the candle."

While Davy watched, she placed the new candle before the cross, bracing it around the base with a supporting bank of rocks and dirt.

"This is to keep the candle from falling over by accident," she explained. "It would be very bad if our candle started a range fire.

Finished at last, she knelt before the cross one last time and examined their handiwork. It was good. She motioned for Davy to join her.

"Light the candle, Olhoni," she said gravely, handing him a book of matches.

Davy scratched his head in exasperation. How could grown-ups be so stupid? "But, Nana Dahd," he objected.

"It isn't even dark yet. Why do we need a candle?"

"The light is for the spirits, Olhoni," she told him. "It's not for us."

Davy had used matches a few other times, but always in the house, never outside. It took three sputtering attempts before his small fingers managed to strike a match and keep it burning long enough to touch the flame to the wick of the candle. Nana Dahd watched patiently and without criticism, allowing the child to learn for himself of the need to shelter the match's faltering flame from unexpected breezes.

At last the wick caught fire. Davy glanced at Nana Dahd to see what he should do next. When she bowed her head, closed her eyes, and crossed herself, Davy did the same, listening in rapt silence while the old woman prayed.

To most Anglos that prayer, murmured softly in guttural Papago, would have been incomprehensible, but not to Davy, not to a child whose first spoken word, uttered almost five years earlier, had been a gleeful shout of 11gogs"-Papago for dog--on the day Nana Dahd brought home an ungainly, scrawny puppy. She called the pup "Ohlo," Papago for "Bone."

From that small beginning, Davy had learned other Indian words at the same time he learned the English ones. He spoke his godmother's native language with almost the same ease as his mother's English.

Listening now, he heard Nana Dahd's prayer, a fervent one, for the immortal soul of someone Davy didn't know, someone named Gina. The child listened quietly, attentively. When the prayer was finished, the old woman discovered that her legs and feet were painfully swollen.

She had to ask Davy to untie her shoes and help her to her feet.

Once standing, Rita reached over and picked up the rake and hoe. "I'll take these. Get the old wreath, Olhoni. If we leave it here, hungry cattle may try to eat it."

He gathered the wreath and the empty candle glass, then followed the limping woman to the truck, straggling a few thoughtful paces behind her.

Only then, as they walked, did he ask the question.

"Who's Gina, Nana Dahd?"

"My granddaughter, Olhoni. She died around here."

Surprised, Davy paused and looked back at the grove of trees.

"Here?"

Rita nodded. "Seven years ago today. Each year, on the anniversary, I decorate her cross to let her know she's not forgotten."

"Is that why you lit the candle? Because it's the opposite of a birthday?"

It was a precocious question from a child whose mother gave him plenty of words to use but little of herself "Yes, Olhoni."

For a moment, Davy frowned, trying to assimilate this new and unexpected piece of information. He thought himself as much Rita's child as his own mother's. The idea that Nana Dahd had another child or a grandchild of her own came as an unwelcome surprise.

"What's the matter?" Rita asked.

"I didn't know you had a daughter," he said accusingly.

"Not a daughter, 01honi, a son. Gina was my grandchild, my son's only daughter."

"She's just like my father, isn't she?" he said.

Nana Dahd frowned. Had Diana told Davy about the connection between the two deaths? That didn't seem likely. "What do you mean?" Rita asked.

"Gina died before I was born," he answered. "So did my father. Why did everybody have to die before I was born so I couldn't meet them?"

The question was far less complicated than Rita had feared, and so was her answer. "If you had a father, little one," Nana Dahd said gently, "then you wouldn't be my Olhoni. Come. We still have to go up the mountain."

When she reached the truck, Rita turned and looked back at the disconsolate child shambling behind her, kicking up clouds of dust with the scuffed toes of his shoes.

"Now what's the matter?" she asked.

"Where's my father's cross?" he demanded. "Does my mother put flowers and candles on it?"

Nana Dahd shook her head. She doubted it. "I don't know," she said.

It was high time the boy knew the truth about his father, but telling him wasn't Rita's place. She wouldn't tell Olhoni about that any more than she would have told him about his mother's rhinestone-studded cowboy boots.

"That's another question you'll have to ask your mother, Olhoni. Now, climb into the truck. It's getting late."

Andrew Carlisle didn't have to wait long for a ride. The fourth car to whiz past him on the entrance ramp, a green Toyota Corolla, slowed and pulled over the side to wait for him. The set of yellow lights trapped to the top told him the car was an oversized-load pilot car. The driver, a woman, leaned over and rolled down the passenger window just as he reached the car.

"Where to?" she asked.

The woman, a faded, frowsy blonde in her late thirties or early forties, was moderately attractive. She wore shorts and a halter top and held a glistening beer can in one hand while a lipstick-stained cigarette smoldered in the ashtray.

"Prescott," he said.

Over the years, lying had become such a deeply ingrained habit that he never considered telling the truth.

She tossed her purse into the backseat, clearing a place for him. "I'm only going as far as Casa Grande," she said, "but it's a start. Get in.

Care for a beer? Cooler's in the back."

Andrew Carlisle hadn't tasted a beer in more than six years. "Don't mind if I do," he said, reaching around behind him to grab a Bud from the cooler. Personally, he would have preferred Coors, but beggars can't be choosers.

He took a long swig, then held the beer in his mouth, savoring the sharp bite of flavor on his tongue. Beer wasn't all he hadn't tasted in six years, he thought. Not by a long shot.

He stole a surreptitious glance at the woman. He'd heard stories about these pilot-car women, about how much they made on the job itself and how much they made moonlighting on their backs. Andrew Carlisle had spent so many years fantasizing about Diana Ladd and her swollen belly and what he'd do to her when he finally got the chance that he had almost missed this golden opportunity when it all but fell in his lap.

"Why Prescott?" the woman was saying.

"My dad's in the hospital up there," he said. "He isn't expected to make it."

The woman clucked her tongue in sympathy. "That's too bad."

"My car broke down in Lordsburg," he continued. "The mechanic said it would take at least two days to get parts and another day to put it back together. According to my mom, Dad doesn't have three days. So I decided to hitchhike there and go back for the car later."

Carlisle let his index finger stroke around and around the smooth lip of the can, sensuously wiping the beads of moisture off it and wondering how many places besides the door handle, the cooler, and the beer can he had touched.

Where else would he have left prints? He would have to remember all those places later so as not to miss any when he wiped the vehicle clean.

The woman set the beer can between her legs and reached for the still-burning cigarette. A few stray ashes rained down on the seat as she took a long drag, but Andrew Carlisle was conscious only of the cool beer can resting unselfconsciously between her deeply tanned legs.

Looking at it caused a sudden, insistent stiffening between his own.

"Do you do it for money?" he asked.

She looked at him and laughed. "Drive pilot cars? Of course I do it for money. Even with air-conditioning, working for mobile home-toters is a lousy job, but it's better than no job at all, which is where I was after they laid me off at Hecla."

Andrew Carlisle hadn't been talking about driving pilot cars. He had meant something else entirely. He liked the fact that she was too dumb to pick up on the double entendre. Women were stupid that way.

Sometimes you had to hit them over the head just to get their attention.

Ahead of them, Picacho Peak loomed in the distance, its rugged gray silhouette shimmering in the heat waves that rose off the freeway's pavement. Carlisle knew the mountain's name as well as he knew his own, but he didn't let on. "What's that?" he asked, pointing.