Hour of the Hunter (7 page)

He would come to the bottom of the stairs, and his voice would boom through the house like a clap of thunder announcing a sudden storm Over Oregon's Blue Mountains.

"Diana Lee, you get your ass down here. Now!" Knowing better than to argue Or fight back, Diana would hurry downstairs. Inevitably, he would be waiting for her at the landing, swaying dangerously, hiking up his pants, n tugging at his suspenders. She'd try to slip past him, but he would catch her by the braids, snapping her head back, pulling her hair until her eyes watered. She must have been twelve then, because her mother had cut off the braids right after her thirteenth birthday.

"What were you doing up there?" he demanded.

"Reading a book. For my book report. At twelve Diana Lee Cooper hadn't known that her father was illiterate. Diana didn't find that out until much later, when her mother was dying. Max Cooper's inability to read was part and parcel of the helplessness that bound Iona Cooper to him.

Aside from the fact that Diana wasn't a son, her love of reading was another reason for Max to despise their only child.

Diana's love of books and schooling both mystified and infuriated him.

Diana tried to slip away, but he yanked her braids again, shaking her, lifting her off her feet. The skin all over her head smarted, but she didn't cry out. Wouldn't cry out.

"How come you've always got that snooty nose of yours stuck in a book, young lady? You get your butt out into the kitchen, girl, and learn something useful for a change."

Twenty years later, Diana Ladd could still smell his stale, beer-saturated breath and see the spikes of stiff nose hairs in his flaring nostrils.

"Once you learn how to cook and clean and please a man, then's time enough for you to sit on your ass and read books."

He had shoved her away from him then, propelling her toward the kitchen.

Somehow she managed to keep her legs under her. In the kitchen, Iona Cooper, lips clenched, bent over the stove, concentrating on stirring the gravy or mashing the potatoes, refusing to meet Diana's gaze.

She never said anything aloud, never said anything her husband might overhear and use against them both, but a conspiracy of silence existed between the woman and her daughter.

Afterward, Diana Lee Ladd remembered that battle in particular and counted it as a watershed, A spark of rebellion caught fire that evening, one that Max Cooper was never able to stifle or beat out of his daughter no matter how hard he tried.

And twenty years later, Diana Lee Cooper hadd pushed aside her typewriter, put her head down in her arms, and cried because it wasn't worth it.

What good had it done to escape her ignorant father, to flee the brutal prison that had been her home in Joseph, Oregon? There was still no joy in her life. No joy at all.

Rita carefully maneuvered the truck down the winding road. It was a thirty-minute, twelve-mile drive, most of it with the road perched precariously on the steep flank of the mountain. She kept the truck in low gear to save the brakes. While Rita drove, Davy, more quiet than usual, hunkered down in his corner of the seat.

"What is it, Olhoni?" Rita asked.

"Will I be an Indian when I grow up?" His question mirrored her own concern, but she tried to laugh it off. "You already are," she told him.

"Really?" He brightened at once. "What kind? Papago, like you?"

Rita shook her head. "Big Toe," she said, smiling to herself because she knew the old joke would be new to Davy.

"I never heard of Big Toe Indians," he countered. "Where are they from?" "All over," she answered.

"Are you sure?- "They're People with so little Indian blood that the only thing Indian about them is their big toe."

"You're teasing me," he said, pouting.

She nodded. "That's one of the reasons l'itoi chose us for his People.

We tease and laugh and make jokes. So does he."

"But I still want to be an Indian," Davy insisted.

At the bottom of the mountain, the road straightened abruptly, dropping through the foothills on a stretch of reservation-owned open range.

Rita had driven on open range all her life, and she wasn't driving fast.

They were nearing the junction with Highway 86 when a started cow came crashing up onto the roadway out of a dry wash. With no warning, there was barely enough time to react. Rita jammed on the brakes.

The pickup swerved to one side, avoiding the animal by inches, but the right rear tire caught in the soft sand of the shoulder.

The GMC rolled over onto its side and then rolled again, end over end, coming to rest lying on its roof in the other lane, its hood facing in the wrong direction.

Without knowing precisely what had happened or how he got there, Davy found himself standing upright in the middle of the road.

He couldn't see anything. There was a terrible shrieking noise ringing in his ears, and another noise as well-a car's horn, honking one long, terrible wail.

Davy gasped for breath and realized that the first sound came from him-his own voice screaming. He put his hands to his face and brought them away bloody, but he could see again, could see the dust still flying, the tires still spinning uselessly in the air. The engine was still running, and the horn wouldn't quit. The blaring noise seemed to be all around him, coming up out of the desert floor, raining down on him from the very sky itself.

"Nana Dahd," he shouted. "Where are you? Are you all right?" There was no answer, only the horn-the terrible horn.

He scrambled over to the pickup and peered inside. Nana Dahd lay with her body crushed against the steering wheel, which jutted far into the cab. Blood gushed from a gaping wound on her left hand.

"Nana Dahd!" Davy shouted again, but she didn't hear him, didn't stir.

Just then a pair of strong hands gripped his shoulders and dragged him away from the truck. Davy looked up to see that an Anglo man, a stranger, was holding him. He fought the hands with all his might, kicking and screaming, "Let me go! Let me go!" But the man held him fast.

A second man was there now, crawling on his hands and knees, peering into the truck. He reached inside across Nana Dahd's still body and switched off the engine, then he tugged at some wires under the dash.

The waiting horn was instantly stilled, and the sudden silence was deafening.

"Can we get her out, Joe?"

The man by the truck shook his head. "I don't think SO.

She's pinned. We've got to get a tourniquet on this hand, then find some help. How far back to that little trading post?"

"Three Points? A long way. What about the other direction, toward Sells?"

"Up there!" Davy told them, pointing back up the mountain, but the men didn't hear him. After all, he was only a little kid. What did he know?

"You stay with her," one man was saying to the other, letting Davy go and heading back toward his car, a shiny red Grand Prix. The two men had been traveling past the turnoff on the highway just in time to see the GMC perform its spectacular series of acrobatics.

One of the two men started toward the car, but Davy ran after him, attaching himself to the man's knee like a stubborn cocklebur. The force of his tackle almost brought both of them down.

"Up there!" Davy insisted desperately. "We've got to, go up there!"

"Let go, kid. Don't waste time."

"But there's an ambulance up there. I know. I saw it!"

Finally, the boy's words penetrated. "An ambulance?

On the mountain?"

"Yes. Please."

"No shit! I'm going, but you stay here. You're hurt, too."

Beating him off with a club was all that would have kept Davy Ladd from clambering into the Grand Prix.

He sat in the front seat, not crying but shaking silently, his bloody face pressed to the inside of the windshield as the car raced up the steep mountain road, straightening the curves, clinging to the pavement on the outside edges.

At one point, the man tossed him a white handkerchief.

"Christ, kid, use this, will you? You're getting blood all over my car."

When they reached the top of the mountain, the car screeched to a stop in the parking lot.

"which way?" Davy pointed toward the garage. The door was closed.

Davy scrambled out of the car and ran toward the gift shop. It was after four and the place was closed, but Davy pounded on the side door, the one Nana Dahd had used earlier. when Edwina Galvan finally opened it, he flung himself at her.

"It's Nana Dahd! You've got to help her. She's hurt bad."

"What happened?"

The dam broke. Suddenly, Davy Ladd Was sobbing SO badly he could barely talk. "A cow," he mumbled. "A cow in the road."

,where?" Edwina demanded, but he didn't answer. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "Where did it happen?"

"Down on the flat. Almost to the highway."

Just then a piercing alarm sounded all over the complex at the top of the mountain. The man from the Grand prix dashed out of the garage followed by the ambulance. Two other men appeared from nowhere and ran for the ambulance.

It's at the bottom of the mountain," one of them shouted back at Edwina.

"Radio Sells for another ambulance."

Edwina nodded and turned to go back inside. Holding Davy's hand, she intended to take him with her, but he pulled free and darted away, climbing back into the front seat of the Grand Prix just as it started out of the Parking lot behind the Speeding ambulance.

No matter what, Davy Ladd's place was with Nana Dahd.

"The pain was bigger than she was and hotter than the sun. It burned through her, seared through her, until she couldn't think, couldn't breathe.

Where's 01honi? she wondered. She had called for him, but he didn't answer. Where was he? Was he dead? No.

That was impossible. That couldn't be, but where was he?

She asked the man, a man who was there trying to talk to her through the mangled window of the truck, but she could no longer translate the funny white words. The only words that made sense to her now were those of her childhood, the Papago ones. The man shook his head helplessly. He didn't understand, either.

"Where is Olhoni?" she murmured again and again.

"Where is my bald-headed baby?"

There were other cars now, other people. Rita could hear them, could see feet where faces ought to be. were they Upside down or was she?

What had happened? And where was Olhoni?

And then the pain. The pain that was bigger than she was grew even larger. It was a pain bigger than the stars and the sky and the universe. The pain was everything.

She heard a noise and realized that someone had cut a hole in the door of the truck. Her body was flowing out through that hole-her body and her blood.

They were moving her now, moving her out onto the ground and strapping her down to a board or a stretcher of some kind. That was when she started to fight them. The heavy white strap locked her to the board just as another strap long ago had once locked her to a bed.

She fought them like a smart cow fights when she knows she's being led to the slaughter. The pain was blinding, but she fought through it, fought beyond it. She might have won, too, but suddenly Olhoni was there, kneeling at her side, pleading with her to be still.

"Let them help you, Nana Dahd," he begged. "Please let them help you."

She looked up then and saw that beyond Olhoni some of the other faces swarming above her were Indian faces.

She wondered where they'd come from, or if they had been there all the time.

A few of the men were trying to pick up the stretcher with her on it.

She could tell from the looks on their faces that they thought she was too heavy. For some reason, this seemed funny to her, but when she tried to laugh, another searing pain shot through her.

One of the men tried to pry Davy away from her hand, but he clung to her and refused to budge.

"Let him come," one of the attendants said. "He's hurt, Could that be?

Olhoni hurt? Rita tried to look at him, to see what was wrong, but she blacked out then. The next thing she knew, she was riding in the ambulance, or rather on top of it. Over it somehow. She could see the two attendants huddled over a strangely familiar figure lying flat on a stretcher.

Olhoni was sitting off to one side. Rita called to him, but he didn't look up, didn't hear her. His eyes never left the face of the old woman on the stretcher. There was a bottle with some kind of liquid in it hanging above her.

A plastic tube led from the bottle to a needle pressed into the flesh of the woman's arm.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. "We're losing her! We're losing her!" one of the attendants shouted.

Ruthlessly, the other man shoved Olhoni aside, pushing him roughly up into the front seat. The boy didn't protest.

He went where he was told and sat there, with his hands clutching the dashboard, staring out the window in front of him.

And that was when Rita saw the buzzards, three of them, sitting in a row on three separate telephone poles, their huge wings outstretched to collect the last warming rays of sunshine. Those buzzards, their heads still naked and bloody after I'itoi scalped them in punishment for betraying him, sat there soaking up the sun on their coal-black living wing tips.

The buzzards were alive and wanted to be alive. Suddenly, so did Rita.

Olhoni still needed her. Fitoi did not.

Clawing her way, hand over hand, Rita scrambled down from the roof of the movin vehicle, fought her way back inside the ambulance until she stood peering curiously down at the shrunken form still strapped to the stretcher.

For some time, she gazed dispassionately at the body, amazed by how terribly ancient that old woman seemed, by how worn and wrinkled and used-up she was, but not yet ready to be dead.

With a terrifying jolt, the electrical current passed through her body, hammering her heart awake once more, and she was home.

Andrew Carlisle took his time coming down the trail.

He searched back and forth, combing the Mountainside until he found the two empty beer cans they had dropped on the way up. No sense in leaving a set of identifiable fingerprints. He knew from what he'd learned in Florence that the chances of homicide cops finding a assailant were slim as long as the stranger was reasonably smart and played it cool.