Sleepwalk (7 page)

It was nearly one-thirty in the morning when one of the policemen brought a dog in and the tracking began. The scent was fresh, and the dog had no trouble picking it up. Sniffing eagerly, it moved steadily through the desert. After fifteen minutes the flashlights the men carried began to pick up spots of blood, still clear on the hard-packed earth of the desert floor.

At last they came to the top of the canyon, where the trail came to an abrupt end at the very edge of the precipice.

“Jesus,” Billy Clark said softly, staring down into the dark chasm. “What the hell happened up here?”

He and his men studied the terrain carefully, searching for any sign of struggle, any sign at all that Heather had not been alone. But there was none.

Only a set of bloody footprints, a dark outline on the windswept sandstone of the precipice. Heather seemed to have been walking normally; there was no sign that she was dragging her feet as if someone were forcing her toward the edge, nor was there any hint that she might have been running and seen where she was going too late to stop herself.

At the very edge of the cliff there were two prints, side by side, as if she’d stood there, staring into the abyss.

Stood there for a few seconds, then jumped.

“Jesus,” Clark said once again, shaking his head slowly. “What the hell would make a kid do something like that? Doesn’t make sense.”

One of the other men shrugged. “Who knows?” he asked. “Maybe she was drugged up. Kids these days do all kinds of crazy things.”

They stood silently at the edge for a few moments, looking down, then finally turned away and started back toward the town. They moved slowly, unconsciously putting off the moment that they would have to tell Reenie Fredericks that her daughter, an ordinary kid with no seemingly extraordinary problems, had committed suicide.

Frank Arnold said nothing as he drove his son home from the police station for the second time in the space of a week. He sat stolidly behind the wheel of the truck, his jaw set, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the road ahead. But the tension in the heavy frame of his body was an almost palpable force within the confines of the truck’s cab. Jed, his face drawn, sat silently in the passenger
seat next to his father, staring out into the night, oblivious to his father’s silent anger, still seeing Heather’s dead eyes staring at him. When Frank finally turned into the driveway of their small house on Sixth East and switched the engine off, Jed made no move to get out.

“We’re here,” Frank said, opening the door on his side and jumping out of the cab. For a moment he wasn’t sure his son had even heard him, but just as he was about to speak again, the other door of the truck opened and Jed slid out.

They walked down the driveway, entering the house through the back door, and Frank flipped on the kitchen light. Going to the refrigerator, he pulled out a beer. He thought a moment, then pulled out a second one and held it up toward Jed. “Want one? Or would you rather have a shot of brandy?”

Jed looked at his father uncertainly, and Frank managed a wry grin. “I’m still pretty damned mad at you, but I’m not so mad I don’t have any idea what you’re feeling right now. If you’re old enough to pull a corpse out of a river, I guess you’re old enough to have a shot of brandy to take the edge off it.”

Jed hesitated, but shook his head. “I think maybe I’ll just have a Coke,” he said.

Frank waited until Jed had opened the soft drink and sat down at the table across from him before he spoke. After his son had taken his first long drink of the soda, Frank pulled at his beer, then set the bottle on the table. “You okay?” he asked.

Jed started to nod, but then shook his head. “I don’t know. I just keep seeing her, looking at me. I—” His voice trembled, and he fell silent as his eyes welled with tears.

“What the hell were you doing out there, Jed?”
Frank said quietly, staring at the bottle in front of him. “Didn’t you think I meant it when I grounded you?”

“I didn’t go out there to get in any trouble—” Jed began, but his father cut him off.

“Bullshit! Kids like Randy Sparks and Jeff Hankins don’t go out and get drunk in the middle of the night without intending to get into trouble.”

“They weren’t drunk,” Jed protested. “They’d had maybe one beer apiece when they came over here, and—”

“And nothin’!” Frank exploded, his fist slamming down on the table with enough force to knock the beer bottle over. He snatched it up just as the beer itself began to foam onto the table, but ignored the puddle as he glared at his son. “What the hell’s going on with you, Jed? You’re twice as smart as those jerks, but you keep on letting them get you into trouble. Why the hell don’t you start listening to yourself for a change, instead of those two assholes?”

“They’re not assholes,” Jed flared, his own anger rising in the face of his father’s wrath. “There’s nothing wrong with them, and they don’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. I didn’t have to go with them tonight! I could have sat home by myself, just like I did last night, and the night before, and the night before that. But why the hell should I? You’re either sleeping or at work or at some goddammed meeting or something. What am I supposed to do, sit around talking to the walls all the time? And when I do see you, all you ever do is yell at me!”

Frank’s eyes narrowed angrily and a vein in his forehead stood out. But then, taking control of his anger, he bit back the furious words on his lips and found himself slowly counting to ten, just as Alice had always insisted
he do when his temper—almost as quick as his son’s—threatened to get the best of him.

When he reached ten, he started over again.

By the third time through, his rage was back under control, and he finally began to think about what Jed had just said. For the last four years, ever since Alice had died, he’d tended more and more to let Jed raise himself. Part of the problem was the simple fact of his shift work, that his schedule matched Jed’s only once every three weeks. During one of the other weeks he was just going to work as Jed was getting home, and the third week, he was just getting up, still groggy from the restless sleep that was all he was ever able to get when he came home from the graveyard shift. And Jed had a point about the meetings too. But what could he do? He was the president of the union local, and no matter how hard he tried to organize his schedule so he could spend as much time as possible with his son, there always seemed to be something in the way.

Recently, for the last six months, there had been a series of rumors that Max Moreland was finally going to have to sell the refinery. Max insisted there was nothing to the talk, but it had long been Frank’s experience that when gossip was as plentiful as it was now, there was something to it. And so, ever since last winter, he’d involved himself in union business more than ever before, working with a group of lawyers and accountants in Santa Fe to see if an employee buyout of Borrego Oil might be possible.

Which meant that Jed was alone even more than usual, for too often Frank found himself spending most of his waking hours driving back and forth over the 150 miles between Borrego and Santa Fe. And, if he was honest with himself, he knew that Jed’s problems—the
problems Frank had been doing his best to ignore, or attribute to nothing more serious than typical adolescent angst—had increased in these last six months.

During the spring semester of school Jed’s grades, which had never before been a problem, suddenly took a nosedive. Before Frank had even become aware of the situation, it was too late. It had been a failing grade in geometry that had sent Jed to summer school.

He and his son had a terrible row about that. Only Frank’s threat to take Jed’s car away from him had finally convinced the boy that he had no choice.

In the end, Reba Tucker had suffered a stroke, putting a quick end to the summer school session, and now Jed was without his car anyway.

“Look,” he said at last, slumping in his chair and wondering why conversations like this always had to take place in the small hours of the morning rather than at a more reasonable time, “I know things have been tough for you lately. But they haven’t been easy for me either. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to do everything, and I guess I tend to let you take care of yourself too much. But up until recently, there’s never been a problem.”

Jed’s eyes clouded. “There’s always been a problem,” he said, his voice taking on a defiant note. “If there hadn’t been a problem, Mom would still be alive, wouldn’t she?”

Jed’s words hit Frank like a blow. He stared at Jed mutely, trying to decide whether what his son had said was only caused by his momentary anger or if this was something that had been eating at him for months, even years. And yet, as he studied the pain in his son’s eyes, he knew the words had been prompted by something the boy had been harboring for a very long time.

“Is that what all this is really about?” Frank asked quietly. “Your mother?”

Jed’s expression hardened. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” he asked, his voice taking on an almost childish petulance. “Isn’t that why she’s gone? Because you treated her the same way you treat me?”

Fury welled up in Frank and he rose to his feet, towering over his son. “No, God damn it!” he roared. “What happened to your mother had nothing to do with me at all. I loved her, as much as I’ve ever loved anybody in my life, and she loved me too.” And yet even as he spoke the words, Frank knew deep within himself that it was that very love between them that had, in the end, been at least partially responsible for her death. For Alice, despite the love they had shared, had never been able to make a place for herself in Borrego. Part of her always longed to be back in Kokatí with the people she’d grown up with. She hadn’t talked about it often, but there had been times, particularly during the last months, when she’d curled in his arms late at night. “Nobody here likes me,” she’d whispered, her arms tightening around him. “I can tell by the way they look at me. They think I’m stupid, and they don’t think I hear the things they say about the Indians.”

“But they don’t mean to hurt you,” Frank had told her. “It’s because they don’t even think of you as being an Indian anymore that you even hear those things.”

But Alice hadn’t been convinced. In the last weeks she’d spent more and more time by herself, walking in the desert.

That last day, she’d been gone before dawn, and Frank had nearly taken the day off to go look for her. But in the end he’d decided to leave her alone.

And at half-past three that afternoon Jed had called
him, sobbing and hysterical. The boy had come home from school as usual, and opened the garage door to put his bicycle away.

And found his mother’s body, hanging from the rafters, a thick rope tightly knotted around her neck.

Until this moment, though, he’d never known that Jed blamed him for what had happened to Alice. Now, keeping his voice as steady as he could, he tried to explain to his son what had really happened. Jed listened in silence, not interrupting until he was finished. Then, after several more minutes had passed, he nodded his head slowly.

“So Mom felt just like I do,” he said. “Like she didn’t fit in anywhere, like nobody really liked her.”

“But it wasn’t true,” Frank insisted. “Everyone in town loved your mother.”

Jed stared at him bleakly. “Did they?” he said. “I wonder. After all, she was an Indian, wasn’t she? And don’t give me any bullshit that everyone in town loves the Indians.”

“But your mother was different—” Frank began, then realized the words had been a mistake.

“Was she?” Jed demanded. “She was never part of anything, not really. She wasn’t part of this place, and up in Kokatí no one ever trusted her after she married you.”

“That’s not true,” Frank replied. “She never said anything—”

“She didn’t say anything to
you,”
Jed broke in, his voice filled with anguish. “But she told me.”

Frank wished he could shut out what he was certain was coming, but knew he had to hear it. “All right,” he said, his voice choking. “What did she tell you?”

Jed’s jaw tightened and his eyes reflected the pain
deep within his soul. “That sometimes she wished she’d never had me,” he whispered. “She said that sometimes she thought it would be easier for me not to exist at all than to spend my whole life never fitting in anywhere, never feeling like I’m really part of anything.”

“But you are part of something,” Frank protested. “You’re my son.”

“I’m your
half-breed
son,” Jed said bitterly. “And that’s all I’ll ever be.”

“Now that is bullshit,” Frank replied. “If that’s the way your mother really felt, I’m sorry. Because she was wrong. You’re still you, and you can be anything you want to be. If you don’t like it here, you can leave. And after you graduate from high school, you will leave. At college you’ll find out that no one cares where you came from or what your background is. The only things that will count are your brains, and your talent. And you’ve got a lot of both.”

“Yeah,” Jed growled. “Except that I’m not going to college.”

Frank stared at his son. “What the hell are you talking about? Of course you’re going to college. Your mother and I—”

“The hell with Mom,” Jed shouted, rising to his feet. “Can’t you understand that she’s dead? She killed herself, Dad. She didn’t love you, and she didn’t love me. So who the hell cares what she wanted? She didn’t even care enough to stick around and help me! So all I want is to get a job and earn some money so I can get the hell out of here. Okay?”

Before Frank could say anything, Jed wheeled and stormed out of the kitchen. Frank sat staring at the beer bottle for a few moments, then silently drained it, tossed it into the trash, turned out the lights and headed
for his bedroom. He paused outside Jed’s door, his hand on the knob, then changed his mind.

Right now, in the hours before dawn, he suddenly felt as if he hadn’t the slightest idea who his son was, nor did he have any idea what to say to him.

As he lay in bed a few minutes later, trying to go to sleep, he felt more lonely than he had in all the years since Alice had died. Until tonight, he’d always felt that he at least had Jed.