The Thunder Keeper (6 page)

She stared at him. Had he heard anything she'd said? It had been six years, a lifetime ago, since they'd meant anything to each other.

“I'm sorry,” she said. In the look that he bestowed on
her, she saw that he understood that she was sorry things had not turned out the way he'd hoped all those years ago.

“Can we talk about Vince Lewis?” she hurried on. “Is he going to make it?”

Steve gave a little shrug. “Let's hope so,” he said. “They just wheeled him into surgery. No sense in you hanging around. Could be several hours.”

She repeated what she'd told the officer earlier, then found a business card in her bag, scribbled her home number on the back, and handed it to him. “Call me as soon as you know anything,” she said.

T
he cab crawled through the rain along Speer Boulevard, wipers slashing at the windshield, water from other cars running over the hood. The driver let Vicky out at the downtown garage where she kept the Bronco. Within ten minutes she was heading west on Speer again. Lights from the skyscrapers winked in the rearview mirror. Ahead, the mountains were lost in banks of descending gray clouds.

She crossed the viaduct into north Denver, swung onto Twenty-ninth Avenue, and continued west, finally stopping in front of the 1890s farmhouse she'd rented. The white stucco house occupied a little bluff surrounded by the Victorians and cubelike bungalows of later decades that lined both sides of the block. A remnant of another time, the farmhouse, like her people.

She ducked out into rain-blurred headlights from the taxi drawing in behind. Her pumps sank into the soggy grass while she waited for Lucas to pay the driver and emerge from the backseat. He was as tall and as handsome as his father. More so, she thought: the black hair glistening in the rain, the still-innocent look in the narrow, sculptured face. He shrugged into the straps of a bulky red backpack and came toward her.

“Hey, Mom,” he said.

She threw her arms around him, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him. His cheeks felt warm beneath the cool slick of rain. She could hardly believe he'd taken a job in Denver. For the first time in years she would be in the same town as one of her kids.

“Come inside. You're drenched.” She took his hand and led him up the concrete steps to the porch, her other hand fumbling for the key in the bag dangling from her shoulder. She let him in first and reached around to flip on the light in the entry. “Let me put your jacket on the coattree,” she said. “I can set your backpack in the living room.”

“Mom, what's next?” He was smiling. “Some hot cocoa?”

“Would you like some?”

He threw back his head and laughed, a low, relaxed sound that rebounded off the stucco walls. Pinpricks of light danced in his dark eyes.

She followed him through the archway into the living room on the left and turned on a table lamp. The light lapped over the gray sofa and chair, the tiled coffee table, and the TV cabinet that she'd brought from Lander.

“Looks like home.” Lucas stood in the center of the room, glancing about.

She felt a sharp stab of pain. By the time she'd moved back to Lander, after undergrad and law school and three years at Howard and Fergus, Lucas and Susan were grown, on their own in Los Angeles. They'd never lived in the rented bungalow in Lander. In her mind, their childhood was forever compressed into the image of two small faces distorted behind the screen door of her mother's house as she'd driven away fifteen years ago, telling
herself that she'd be back, and knowing, just as Susan and Lucas had known, that it wasn't true.

The memory always left her weak-kneed. Lucas was twenty-four years old now. She'd been nineteen when he was born. He was at least six feet tall, at least six inches taller than she was, with a lanky, muscular build, the dark complexion and neatly trimmed black hair, still shiny wet, and the handsome face with the little crook in the long nose—the mark of her people.

“You look like your father,” she blurted.

He gave a nonchalant shrug, walked over to the window, and pushed back the edge of the lace curtain. Lights from the passing cars elongated into red-and-white smears across the glass.

“Sorry about the airport,” she said. She was thinking: the lost years.

“No problem, Mom.” He threw a little smile over one shoulder, then turned back to the window. “Something must've come up.”

Vicky sat down in the middle of the sofa. She stopped herself from blurting out that Ben's drinking and beatings had come up. She said, “A man I was supposed to meet was hit by a car this afternoon.”

“Jeez, Mom. I'm sorry,” Lucas said. Then, a hint of impatience in his tone: “How do you get involved in this stuff, Mom?”

“What?”

“Dad worries about you, you know. Susan and I worry, too. You're always putting yourself in danger. We thought you'd change after you had to shoot that guy.”

Vicky drew in her breath at the sting of the reminder. Less than six months before—a world ago—she had shot a man. Justifiable homicide in defense of another was the official ruling, but the legal explanations, the
justifications, could never diminish the horror of it. It was one of the reasons she had left Lander.

“The man this afternoon was a potential client.” She stopped herself from saying that Vince Lewis had wanted to tell her something about the reservation. “It was a hit-and-run,” she went on. “I saw it happen.”

Lucas crossed the room and sat down beside her, his eyes clouded in concern. He put a hand on her arm and squeezed it lightly. “Promise me you won't get involved.”

“I'm a witness, Lucas. The police expect me to give a formal statement tomorrow.”

“So tell them what you saw and let them find the driver. Promise you'll leave it at that, Mom.”

Vicky set her hand over his. “I promise that I won't be in any danger.” She hurried on, before he could object: “Tell me about your new job.”

He shrugged and gave her the same mischievous grin he used to give her when he was a kid. “Information specialist, keep all the systems up and running. How much do you really want to know?” He took his hand from hers and waved away the question. “I've been thinking about leaving L.A. for some time. Now that you're here, well, Denver looked pretty good. I can look after you. Dad thinks it's a great idea.” He seemed to be studying her for a reaction. “Dad's not drinking anymore,” he said.

Vicky nodded. She'd gotten the news on the moccasin telegraph: Ben out of rehab, back at his old job as foreman on the Arapaho Ranch. She smiled at the irony. Ben always landed on his feet, while the ground beneath her was always slipping away.

She tried to focus on what Lucas was saying, something about an Arapaho from Oklahoma jumping off a cliff, about Ben making the arrangements to send the body back to Oklahoma for burial.

“Dad says everybody on the res is pretty upset the sheriff called it suicide. The sheriff jumped to conclusions, Dad says, so they could close the case. The guy was on a vision quest at Bear Lake.”

“Bear Lake!” It was preposterous. The spirits were in the cliffs at Bear Lake, their images carved into the sandstone. It was a sacred place. A man on a vision quest would have been waiting for the spirits to speak to him. He wouldn't kill himself! He wouldn't defile a holy place like Bear Lake.

Vicky stood up, walked over to the window, and pushed back the lace curtain, the way Lucas had done. Rain washed down the other side of the black glass. A wavy stream of headlights moved along the street below. Ben was probably right. The sheriff was eager to close the case. White authorities didn't want to hear about holy places and vision quests. Again she felt an old sense of failure moving over her skin like a fever. She should be with her people. She could talk to the sheriff, explain the Arapaho Way.

“You okay, Mom?” Lucas's voice broke through her thoughts.

“Come on,” she said, walking back to him. “I'll show you to your room.” She waited while he grabbed his backpack, then led him through the dining room, up the narrow steps, and into the rear sleeping porch with a twin bed and the dresser she'd cleaned out for him. The warm air from the floor vents rustled the white curtains she'd had cleaned and rehung on the windows.

A few moments later, when Lucas had returned to the living room, she said, “What sounds good for dinner? Mexican; Italian?”

“Flat bread,” he said, “and Indian stew and maybe a buffalo burger.”

She was about to tell him that she knew just the restaurant when the phone rang. She hurried through the shadows of the dining room to the phone on the small table beneath the window. Even before she picked up the receiver, before she heard the familiar voice—“Vicky?”—she felt her muscles tense.

“Vince Lewis is dead,” Steve told her.

The truth hit her like a clap of thunder. Vince Lewis had worked for a diamond mining company. There were no diamond deposits on Arapaho lands, as far as she knew, but he'd had information about the reservation, she was certain.
A matter of life and death,
he'd said.
His
death. Somebody had killed him to prevent him from talking to her, and she was going to have to find out why.

I
t was almost noon before Father John got away from the ringing phones, the parishioners stopping by to visit, the correspondence he'd been trying to catch up on, and started for Gus Iron Bear's place. He'd been driving for most of an hour—
Tosca
playing beside him—when he turned north on Maverick Springs Road. North again through the open spaces cut with arroyos and filled with scrub brush and wild grasses. Crowheart Butte lifted into the sky ahead. The butte was sacred, a place of the spirits. This was an area of sacred places.

Another ten miles and he saw the clump of buildings on a rise ahead: white house, storage shed, pitched-roof barn. He took a right, bouncing across the rutted, muddy yard, and stopped in front of the house a couple of feet from the stoop. Slowly he unfolded his long legs and let himself out. He stood by the pickup, waiting. If Gus was ready to see him, someone would come out.

The door opened. Theresa Iron Bear, a small woman with white hair in thick braids that hung down the front of a red blouse, stood in the opening. “Come on in, Father,” she called.

“How are you, Grandmother?” he said, using the polite term. Removing his cowboy hat, he stepped into the
rectangular living room. A table lamp cast a dim circle of light over the upholstered chairs, sofa, and television arranged around the Indian rug in the center of the linoleum floor. The odor of burned sage permeated the air.

“Have a seat, Father.” The old woman gestured toward the sofa. Then, disappearing down a hallway that led to the bedrooms, she called out, “I'll get Gus.”

Father John sat down and waited, turning his hat between his knees a few minutes before tossing it on the cushion beside him. Beyond the window on the other side of the room, the plains, tinged with green, rolled like waves into the sky. The clouds had turned black, filled with rain.

A couple of minutes passed before the stooped figure of the medicine man emerged from the hallway. He looked older than Father John remembered—drawn and frail, dark eyes sunken beneath the curve of his brow. Father John got to his feet. “It's good to see you, Grandfather.”

He waited until Gus had settled into the worn-looking chair by the lamp before resuming his own seat. For one crazy moment—the way the light washed over the old man's forehead and cheekbones—Gus resembled a spirit. An untrue person, the Arapahos would say.

After the usual exchange of pleasantries—the rain, the crafts fair; it was never polite to come to the point right away—Gus said, “You come about Duncan, didn't you?”

Father John shifted forward on the sofa and clasped his hands between his knees. “What can you tell me about him, Grandfather?”

The old man cleared his throat and rearranged his slight frame in the chair. “The kid drove into the yard. Stumbled out of the truck, crying like a woman. I says to myself, he's drunk, but he was sober as the day the Creator give
him breath. He was like a wild horse that finally give up and let himself be led into the corral. A wild one that got sick of his wildness.”

Gus took a gulp of air, his eyes turned away, remembering. “Kid says to me, ‘Help me, Grandfather.' Says, ‘I wanna get off the white road and on the Indian road.' Says, ‘I need the spiritual power to keep on livin'.' My heart went out to him. I said, you take instructions, learn the right ways, then you can go on a vision quest to the rock carvings where the spirits are. I told him the spirits would give him the power he needed. So he started taking instructions. Moved out here and bunked in the barn.”

“When was that, Grandfather?” It had started to rain. Drops of water speckled the windowpane.

“Three weeks to the day before he was killed.” The old man's lips worked around the words. “It wasn't long enough, but he was in a big hurry to go on the quest. Summer isn't come yet, I told him. That's the best time for a vision quest. But he'd been with white folks that want everything right now. Don't have patience to wait for the right time. He had soul sickness.”

The quiet lengthened between them, like the gray daylight creeping through the window and mingling with the lamplight. After a long moment Gus started talking again. “Go to Bear Lake, I told him. Take your pipe and some sage. Cleanse yourself in the lake and climb up the path to the ledge below the spirit rock. You won't have nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Just smoke the pipe and pray to the spirit in the rock. You must make yourself ready, I say, in case the spirits decide to come and give you power.”

Gus lifted his head and stared at the ceiling. The rain beat hard on the roof. “After he went to Bear Lake, I heard the first thunder, before the rains started. Means a long
life, when you hear the first thunder. I figured it was a good sign. Duncan would've heard it, too. But the thunder got louder, crashing around the sky, real angry. I knew the spirits was angry 'cause the boy wasn't ready yet. I let him go too soon. I knew they was gonna test him. He was supposed to be patient. Be accepting. Keep praying. But he wasn't strong enough. He got scared and tried to get away.”

Suddenly the old man dropped his head into his hands and began sobbing quietly. The thin shoulders twitched against the back of the chair. After a moment he looked up. “The spirits could've come like eagles, swooping down on him, or badgers or deer running after him, or rattlers. They was testing him.” His voice was so soft, Father John could barely hear the words. “Or maybe the thunder keeper came. Thunder is strong when it gets angry. It can kill.”

Father John looked away. This was not the information he'd hoped for. He could imagine the white detective's expression when Gus explained that Duncan Grover couldn't have committed suicide. He was killed by the spirits. Ironically both the medicine man and the detective had come to the same conclusion: the kid had hurled himself off the cliff.

The old man was watching him, waiting for his reaction. “Grandfather,” he began, taking a different tack, “Ben thinks Duncan was running from something. Did he mention any trouble in Denver? Say that somebody was following him?”

The old man blinked into the lamplight and shook his head. “Maybe Duncan was the one following somebody.”

Father John could hear the sound of his own breathing. It would explain why Grover had run to the reservation,
instead of to Oklahoma, where he had family.
He
was following somebody.

“What makes you think so, Grandfather?” he said.

“Three days ago the phone rang.” The old man shifted his gaze sideways to the phone on top of the TV stand. “A girl. Says she has to talk to Duncan. I told her Duncan wasn't back from Bear Lake.” The old man's eyes clouded over. “Didn't know he wasn't ever coming back,” he said. Then, his voice stronger: “The girl says have him call me at the convenience store.”

Convenience store.
There must be a half-dozen convenience stores in the area. He could visit them all, but who would he ask for? A girl who had wanted to talk to a murdered man? She didn't come forward when Duncan's body was found, or Banner would have mentioned her. Whoever she was, Father John decided, she didn't want to get involved.

He said, “Duncan ever mention her?”

“Not in words.” Gus shook his head. “But I been doin' some thinking. I think that's why he wanted to get on the straight road, 'cause there was a woman that didn't want him otherwise.” The old man held his gaze a long moment. “Duncan said he'd been stayin' in Lander before he moved his bedroll into the barn. I been thinking. Maybe he was staying with her.”

“Did you tell this to Detective Slinger?” Father John suspected the answer.

“Told the detective about the spirits and Duncan's vision quest. He didn't wanna hear any of it.” A kind of hopelessness came into the old man's eyes. “I'm afraid it's my fault the boy's dead.”

Father John got to his feet and set his arm on the old man's shoulder. “Listen to me, Grandfather. It is not your fault.”

Gus tilted his head back and looked at him with a mixture of grief and trust. He nodded.

Father John thanked the old man and let himself out. He checked his Timex. One-thirty. Another hour and he could be at Bear Lake. Before he paid a visit to Detective Slinger, he wanted to see the sacred place where Duncan Grover had been murdered.