Kiss of the Bees (17 page)

Quentin took the bills out of his pocket and placed them between the two slices of bread, folding them small enough so no pieces of paper showed on the outside of the bread. Then he put his freshly assembled money sandwich back inside the plastic bread bag. Convinced that his hiding place was absolutely brilliant, he shoved the plastic bag into the small frost-filled freezer compartment of his refrigerator and shut the door.

Enormously pleased with himself, Quentin left the apartment, locked the door, and then walked as far as the McDonald’s on the other side of the freeway. There, he splurged on breakfast. He treated himself to coffee, orange juice, and two Egg McMuffins.

Over breakfast, Quentin’s worries about taking Mitch Johnson to the cave surfaced once again with a vengeance. If he had still owned his truck, it wouldn’t have been a problem. He could simply have driven out to the cave well in advance and checked things out for himself. If there was a problem, he could take care of it . . .

The answer came to him like a bolt out of the blue. He could buy a car. One of the major roadblocks to buying a car had always been a chronic lack of money. In order to buy a car on time—in order to get a loan—it was necessary to show proof of insurance. Without it, no bank in the universe would even let him drive an uninsured car off the lot. With his driving record, car insurance was something else Quentin Walker didn’t have and wasn’t likely to get.

But now he had the money—as much or even more than he would need—to buy a car. And if he was paying cash for something like that, the people at the dealership probably wouldn’t even blink at the thousand-dollar bills, as long as the total amount was less than the ten-thousand-dollar limit that would cause all kinds of scrutiny.

With growing excitement Quentin paged through the automotive section of an abandoned
Arizona Sun
he grabbed off a neighboring table. He wanted to find something that would be rugged enough to suit his needs and cheap enough to fit his budget. He circled three that seemed like possibilities—an ’87 Suzuki Samurai soft-top, a rebuilt 1980 Ford Bronco, and a ’77 GMC Suburban—all of them in the thirty-five-hundred range. That would just about do it—use up his little windfall, leave him some change, and get him some wheels all at the same time.

By the time he headed back to his apartment to shower, the day had taken on a whole new promise. He was finally going to have something to show for all his years of struggle. And if he ever ran into either of his so-called brothers again—Davy Ladd or Brian Fellows—he would tell them both to go piss up a rope.

Diana was lying awake in bed when she heard the side gate open and close as Lani mounted her bike and left for work. Glancing at the bedside clock, Diana was surprised by how early it was—just barely five-thirty. Why was Lani leaving for work so early when her volunteer shift didn’t start until seven?

Next to her, Brandon seemed to be sleeping peacefully for a change, so Diana was careful not to wake him as she crept out of bed herself. Wrapping a robe around her, she padded silently down the tiled hallway, through the living room, and into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. She found Lani’s note on the kitchen table.

Diana read it and tossed it back on the table. She didn’t remember any discussion about Lani’s going to a concert. That meant Lani had asked her father for permission rather than her mother. But then why wouldn’t she? Despite Brandon’s tough-guy act and protestations to the contrary, the girl had had him buffaloed from the very beginning.

“Being foster parents is one thing,” he had told his wife the night before Clemencia Escalante was due to arrive at their house after being released from Tucson Medical Center. “Obviously the poor little kid needs help, and I don’t mind pitching in. But just because Rita managed to bend the rules enough to have Clemencia placed with us on a foster child basis doesn’t mean it’s going to lead to a permanent adoption. It won’t, you know. It’ll never fly.”

“But Rita wants her,” Diana said.

“Regardless of what Rita wants, she’s seventy years old right this minute,” Brandon pointed out, taking refuge in what seemed to him to be obvious logic. “And considering it was neglect from an elderly grandparent that sent the poor little tyke to the hospital in the first place, nobody in the child welfare system is going to approve of Rita as an adoptive parent.”

“I wasn’t talking about Rita adopting her,” Diana said quietly. “I was talking about us.”

Brandon dropped his newspaper. “Us?” he echoed.

Diana nodded. “It’s the only way Rita will ever be able to have her.”

“But Diana,” Brandon argued. “How long do you think Rita will be around? She already has health problems. In the long run, that little girl will end up being our sole responsibility.”

“So?” Diana answered with a shrug. “Is that such an awful prospect?”

Brandon frowned. “That depends. With your work and my work, and with the three kids we already have, it seems to me that our lives are complicated enough. Why add another child into the mix?”

“We have yours, and we have mine,” Diana returned quietly. “We don’t have any that are ours—yours and mine together.”

“A toddler?” Brandon said. He shook his head, but Diana could see he was weakening. “Are you sure you could stand having one of those underfoot again?”

Diana smiled. “I think I could stand it. I can tell you that I much prefer toddlers to teenagers.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, most toddlers turn into teenagers eventually.”

“But there are a few good years before that happens.”

“A few,” Brandon conceded.

“And Rita says she’ll handle most of the child-care duties. She really wants this little girl, Brandon. It’s all she’s talked about for days—about how much she could teach her. It’s as though she wants to pour everything into Clemencia that she was never able to share with her own granddaughter.”

“Diana, replacing one child with another doesn’t work. It isn’t healthy.”

For the space of several minutes, Diana was silent. “Living your life with a hole in it isn’t healthy, either,” she said finally. “Garrison Ladd and Andrew Carlisle put that hole in Rita’s life, Brandon. Maybe you don’t feel any responsibility for Gina Antone’s death, but I do. And now I have an opportunity to do something about it.”

“And it’s something you really want to do? Something you want us to do?”

“Yes.”

Again there was a long period of silence. “I guess we’ll have to see,” he said finally. “I’ll bet it doesn’t matter one way or the other what we decide because I still don’t think the tribal court will go for it.”

“But we can try?”

“Diana,” he said, “you do whatever you want. I’ll back you either way.”

Brandon made a point to come home from work early the next afternoon when Wanda Ortiz arrived with Clemencia. Diana went to answer the door, leaving Brandon and Rita in the living room. Brandon was sitting on the couch and Rita was in her wheelchair when Wanda carried the screaming child into the room.

“She’s been crying ever since we left the hospital,” Wanda said apologetically, setting the weeping child down in the middle of the room. “Too many strangers, I guess.”

Clemencia Escalante looked awful. Most of her woefully thin body was covered with scabs from hundreds of ant bites. A few of those had become infected and were still bandaged. She stood in the middle of the room, sobbing, with fat tears dripping off her chin and falling onto the floor. She turned in a circle, looking from one unfamiliar face to another. When her eyes finally settled on Rita, she stopped.

“
Ihab
—here,” Rita crooned softly, crooking her finger. “Come here, little one.”

Still crying but with her attention now riveted on Rita’s kind but wrinkled face, Clemencia took a tentative step forward.

“Come here,” Rita said again.

Suddenly the room was deathly quiet. For a moment Diana thought that the child was simply pausing long enough to catch her breath and that another ear-splitting shriek would soon follow. Instead, Clemencia suddenly darted across the room, throwing herself toward Rita with so much force that the wheelchair rocked back and forth on its braked wheels. Without another sound, Clemencia clambered into Rita’s lap, burying her face in the swell of the old woman’s ample breasts. There the child settled in, clinging desperately to the folds of Rita’s dress with two tiny knotted fists.

Shaking his head in wonder, Brandon Walker looked from the now silent child to his wife. “Well,” he said with a shrug, squinting so the tears in his eyes didn’t show too much. “It looks as though I don’t stand a chance, do I?”

And he didn’t. From that moment on, the child named Clemencia Escalante who would one day be known as Dolores Lanita Walker owned Brandon Walker’s heart and soul.

6

After traveling a long way, Coyote reached a village where there was a little water. While Ban was hunting for a drink, an old Indian saw him. Old Limping Man—this Gohhim O’othham—still talked the speech all I’itoi’s people understood. So Coyote told him what Buzzard had seen in that part of the desert which was so badly burned.

Old Limping Man told the people of the village. That night the people held a council to decide what they should do. They feared that someone had been left behind in the burning desert.

In the morning,
Gohhim O’othham
and a young man started back over the desert with some water. They traveled only a little way after
Tash
—the sun—came up. Through the heat of the day they rested. When Sun went down in the west, they went on.

The first day there were
kukui u’us
—mesquite trees, but the trees had very few leaves, and those were very dry.

The next day it was hotter. There were no trees of any kind, only
shegoi
—greasewood bushes. The greasewood bushes were almost white from dryness.

The third day they found nothing but a few dry sticks of
melhog
—the ocotillo—and some prickly pears—
nahkag.

The fourth day there seemed to be nothing left at all but rocks. And the rocks were very hot.

The two men did not drink the water which they carried. They mixed only a little of the water with their
hahki
—a parched roasted wheat which the
Mil-gahn,
the Whites, call pinole. This is the food of the Desert People when they are traveling. While they were mixing their pinole on the morning of the fourth day, Old Limping Man looked up and saw Coyote running toward them and calling for help.

The carpenter who had helped refit the Bounder had questioned why Mitch needed a complex trundle-bed/storage unit that would roll in and out of the locker under the regular bed. “It’s for my grandson,” Mitch had explained. “He goes fishing with me sometimes, and he likes to sleep in the same kind of bed he has at home.”

“Oh,” the carpenter had grunted. The man had gone ahead and made the bed to specs, tiny four-posters and all, and now, for the first time, Mitch was going to get to use it. Leaving Lani Walker asleep on the bed above for a moment, he pulled the trundle bed out of the storage space and locked the four casters in place. Then, with the bed ready and waiting, Mitch turned his attention to the girl.

She was limp but pliable under his hands. Undressing her reminded him of undressing Mikey when he’d fall asleep on his way home from shopping or eating dinner in town. One arm at a time, he took off first her shirt and then the delicate white bra. The boots were harder. He had to grip her leg and pull in one direction with one hand and then pry off the boot with the other. On her feet were a pair of white socks. Mitch was glad to see that her toenails weren’t painted. That would have spoiled it somehow in a way he never would have been able to explain. After the socks came the jeans and the chaste white panties. Only when she was completely naked, did he ease her down onto the lower bed.

Just as he had known it would be, that was a critical moment. He wanted her so badly right then that he could almost taste it. His own pants seemed ready to burst, but he knew better. That was the mistake Andy had made. Mitch Johnson was smart enough not to fall into the same trap.

“I’ve spent years wondering about it,” Mitch remembered Andy saying time and again. “I had her under control and then I lost it.”

You lost control because you fucked her, you stupid jerk,
Mitch wanted to shout. How could anyone as smart as Andy be so damned dumb? Why couldn’t he see that what he had done to Diana Ladd had made her mad enough to fight back? In doing that, Andy had lost his own concentration, let down his guard, and allowed his victim to find an opening.

But if Andy wasn’t brainy enough to figure all that out for himself, if he had such a blind spot that he couldn’t see it, who was Mitch to tell him? After all, students—properly subservient students—didn’t tell their teachers which way was up, especially not if their teachers were as potentially dangerous as Andrew Philip Carlisle.

In her dream Lani was little again—four or five years old. Her mother had just dropped Nana
Dahd
, Davy, and Lani off in the parking lot of the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Davy was pushing Rita’s chair while Lani sat perched on Nana
Dahd’
s lap.

It was a chill, blustery afternoon in February, the month the
Tohono O’othham
call
Kohmagi Mashad
—the gray month. Davy, along with other Tucson-area schoolchildren, was out of school for the annual rodeo break, but as they came through the parking lot, they wheeled past several empty school buses.

“You see those buses?” Nana
Dahd
asked. “They’re from Turtle Wedged, the village the
Mil-gahn
call Sells. Most of the children from there are
Tohono O’othham
, just like you.”

Not accustomed to seeing that many “children like her” together in one place, Lani had observed the moving groups of schoolkids with considerable interest and curiosity. They were mostly being herded about by several Anglo teachers as well as by docents from the museum itself.