Kiss of the Bees (20 page)

The gateposts at the end of a long curving drive glowed a holiday welcome with hundreds of white Christmas lights. The house itself was outlined with thousands more. Handing his Jeep off to a valet-parking attendant, David rang the doorbell. One glimpse of the tux-clad butler who opened the door and relieved arriving guests of their coats made David more than happy that he’d gone to the trouble of renting a tuxedo himself.

For fifteen or twenty interminable minutes he was there on his own, trying to make acceptable small talk with people he had never met and most likely would never see again. Just when he was ready to bolt back the way he had come, Candace appeared in a slick, low-cut red dress with a slit that came halfway up her thigh.

“I see somebody put a drink in your hand,” she said. “Have you tried the buffet?”

“I was waiting for you. Are you hungry?”

Candace made a face. “Not really. Mother uses the same caterer every year, although I’ve never quite figured out why. The food reminds me of those breakfast sausages they serve at hotels in England. They look great but they taste like they’re made of sawdust.”

David couldn’t help laughing at that. Encouraged by an appreciative audience, Candace continued. “My two older sisters and I learned early on to load up a plate and carry it around awhile just to keep peace in the family. I suggest you do the same, but you don’t have to eat it. Later on, we’ll go up to my room and order a pizza.”

“Order a pizza?” David echoed.

“Sure. I have my own entrance. The delivery people know to bring it there instead of to the front door. My sisters and I have been doing it for years.”

“Your parents have never figured it out?”

Candace grinned at him conspiratorially from behind her champagne flute. “Never. Come on. I’ll introduce you to my folks, but don’t breathe a word about the pizza. If you do, I won’t let you have any.”

It turned out there was a whole lot more waiting for David Ladd in Candace Waverly’s upstairs room than a thin-crust pepperoni and cheese. For one thing, it wasn’t a room at all, but a three-room suite, complete with bedroom, sitting room, and Jacuzzi-equipped bath. And Candace Waverly wasn’t particularly interested in staying in the sitting room.

David Ladd had taken his time with school, changing majors several times before finally finishing his BA and deciding on law school. At twenty-seven, he certainly wasn’t a virgin, but he hadn’t encountered anyone like Candace Eugenia Waverly, either. Slipping out of her bright red dress along the way, she led him into her bedroom. Davy was still nervously fumbling with his cuff links when a naked Candace stepped forward to help him and to drag him, unprotesting, into her bed. Two frenetic hours later, she sat up in bed, propped herself upright on a mound of pillows, and matter-of-factly reached out for the phone to order a pizza. By then David Ladd had experienced several exotic sexual activities he had previously only imagined. Or read about.

Candace might look delicate and ladylike, but in bed she was anything but, and in the six months since, David Ladd had found himself deeply in lust if not in love. He and Candace spent a good deal of time together—as much as possible, considering his course load. And because of Astrid Garrison’s prying eyes, most of their fun and games had happened in Candace’s chaste-appearing bedroom.

The sex had been great. The problem was, David Ladd still didn’t feel as though he was remotely in love. During the last few weeks, tension had been building as Candace Waverly dug in her heels over David’s stated plan of returning to Tucson to go to work.

“I don’t see why you’re taking this internship out on an Indian reservation,” she had pouted one day early in May as the two of them sat sipping late-evening lattés in downtown Evanston’s Starbucks.

With an important paper due in two days, this wasn’t exactly the time for Davy to work his way around such a complex issue. Candace already knew that David’s sixteen-year-old sister was adopted and that she was a full-blooded Native American. School-trained as a disciple of cultural diversity, Candace hadn’t batted an eyelash when David had given her that bit of information, but she had cautioned him that he maybe ought not mention it to her folks. Like the secret Christmas-party pizza, as well as some of the other things that went on in Candace’s upstairs bedroom—this was something Candace’s mother might be better off not knowing, and it made David Ladd wonder if the elder Waverlys of Oak Park might be somewhat bigoted when it came to dealing with Indians.

Maybe Candace was, too, for that matter, he thought as he grappled with how to make her understand exactly what the internship meant to him. Should he try to tell her about Nana
Dahd
? By working on the reservation he hoped, in some small way, to repay Rita Antone for all she had done for him, all she had meant to him, but the words to explain that refused to bubble to the surface.

“I’m smart,” he said at last, knowing it sounded limp and probably stupid as well. “I speak the language, and I think I can make a contribution.”

“You mean make a contribution like people do in the Peace Corps?”

It wasn’t at all like the Peace Corps, but David didn’t know where to begin explaining that, either. Peace Corps volunteers, armed with the very best intentions, went off and spent a few years of their lives ministering to the unfortunate before returning to their real homes, jobs, and lives. As far as David Ladd was concerned, the people on the
Tohono O’othham,
with all their history and tradition, were in his blood. They were a part of him. He had learned about them at Rita’s knee and in the teachings of both Looks At Nothing and Fat Crack. They were his real life far more than the years of exile in Evanston had ever been.

“But what kind of a job would the internship lead to?” Candace had continued. “Is there any kind of career path? And do they pay anything?”

At twenty-five, Candace was two years younger than David. She had a good job in Human Resources at her father’s firm—a job that probably paid far better than anything she could have found on her own with nothing more than a BS in psychology. Out of school for four years herself, she talked about someday returning to school for a graduate degree. In the meantime, she still lived at home and drove the bright red Integra her parents had given her for Christmas to replace the Ford Mustang convertible that had been her college-graduation present. The kind of grinding poverty that existed on the
Tohono O’othham
was so far outside the realm of Candace Waverly’s sheltered Oak Park existence that there was no basis for common ground. Had David Ladd attempted to explain it to her, she probably still wouldn’t have understood.

“The tribe doesn’t pay much,” David allowed with a short laugh. “And I doubt there’s much room for advancement.”

“But would you make enough to start a family?” she asked.

That sobered him instantly. “Probably not,” he said.

“Well then,” Candace continued in a tone that sounded as though there was no further basis for discussion. “Daddy will be glad to give you a job. I know because I already asked him. He’s always looking for smart young men.”

“But, Candace,” David had objected. “I don’t want to work in Chicago. I want to go home—to Tucson.”

“But what’s there?” she had shot back at him. “And what would I do for a job? Nobody knows me there.”

Behind them, the espresso machine had hissed a noisy cloud of steam into the air. The sound reminded David Ladd of quicksand pulling someone under. No doubt he should have made a clean break of it right then, but the paper was due and finals were bearing down on him and he didn’t want to provoke a confrontation.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. “I’ll think it over and let you know.”

“You goddamned gutless wonder,” he berated himself now, lying there on the bed in the darkened room at the Ritz Carlton.

Honesty’s the best policy.

*    *    *

Honesty’s the best policy. Growing up, those were words he’d heard early and often from his stepfather. He had been only seven the first time he had heard them spoken, but he remembered the incident as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.

“That old lady’s not just an Indian,” his stepbrother had shouted. “She’s a witch.”

From the very beginning, Quentin Walker was always able to get Davy’s goat, and there was nothing that drove the younger boy wild faster than someone saying bad things about Rita Antone.

“She is not.”

“Is to. And I can prove it.”

“How?”

“Look.”

Quentin pulled something black out of his pocket. As soon as Davy saw it, he recognized the scrap of black hair. He knew what it was and where it had come from.

In the bottom drawer of the dresser in her room, Nana
Dahd
kept her precious medicine basket. Rita had told Davy the story a hundred times about how her grandmother, Understanding Woman, had given Rita the basket to take with her when the tribal policeman carted her off to boarding school. Back then she had been a little girl named Dancing Quail. Davy had wept at the part of the story where, on the terrifying train trip between Tucson and Phoenix, clinging to the roof of the moving train, Dancing Quail had lost the precious spirit rock, a geode, that Understanding Woman had given her granddaughter to protect her on the journey. Not only was the rock lost, but later, once she arrived in Phoenix, the basket itself had been confiscated by school matrons who had a ready market for such profitable artifacts. Years later, when Rita was sent from the reservation in disgrace,
Oks Amichuda
once again gave Rita a basket to take with her. This one, although far inferior to the first, nonetheless contained yet another spirit rock, a child’s fist-sized chunk from that same geode.

Years later, working as a domestic in a
Mil-gahn
house in Phoenix, Rita had stumbled across that original medicine basket, complete with all its contents, sitting in a glass display case. On the night she fled the house for faraway California, Rita had exchanged the one basket for the other.

Having heard the stories countless times, David recognized at once that the hank of human hair in Quentin’s hand was one of Rita’s medicine-basket treasures—her great-grandfather’s scalp bundle.

“You shouldn’t have that. Nobody’s supposed to touch it,” Davy said. “Put it back.”

“What’s she going to do to me if I touch it?” Quentin taunted. “Turn me into a toad?”

“I said put it back.”

“Who’s gonna make me?”

Quentin was four years older than Davy and almost twice as big, but Davy flew at him with such ferocity that the older boy was caught off-guard. He fell down, cracking his head on the rock wall behind him while Davy pummeled his unprotected face with flailing fists. Once Quentin recovered from the initial shock, the fight was short but brutal. Davy took the brunt of the physical damage. When the battle was over, his nose was bloody, his shirt had been torn to pieces, and one bottom tooth dangled by a thread.

Brandon had arrived in time to put an end to the hostilities. He lined all four boys up in order of size. His own sons, Quentin and Tommy, were at the head of the line, followed by Davy and then by Brian Fellows, Quentin and Tommy’s half-brother.

Janie, Brandon Walker’s first wife, had been three months pregnant with Brian when she divorced Brandon in order to marry Don Fellows, Brian’s father. Janie’s second marriage didn’t last any longer than her first one had. Don Fellows disappeared into the woodwork when Brian was three. By the time Brian was four, he would come and stand forlornly on the porch, watching whenever Brandon came by to take his own sons for an outing.

Over time, that lost, affection-starved look had worn down Brandon Walker’s resistance. By the time Davy appeared on the scene, Brian came along with Quentin and Tommy as often as not. Brian was a few months younger than Davy. He was small for his age and still prone to wetting the bed. Quentin and Tommy jeeringly called him “the baby.” Brandon Walker often referred to him as “the little guy.”

“All right now,” Brandon Walker growled on the day of the fight over the medicine basket. “Tell me what happened, and remember, honesty’s the best policy. I want the truth.”

“I was trying to help him learn to ride my bike,” Quentin said. “The big one, not the one with training wheels. He fell, and so did I. The bike landed on top of me.”

The lie came so easily to Quentin’s lips that the two younger boys, Brian and Davy, looked at one another in shocked amazement. Meanwhile Brandon moved down the line to his second son. “Is that right, Tommy? Remember, what I want from you is the truth.”

Tommy nodded. “Yup,” he said. “That’s what happened.”

Next Brandon leveled his gaze on Davy. “What do you have to say, young man?”

Davy shrugged his scraped shoulder and hung his head. “Nothing,” he said.

“And you, Brian?”

“Nothing, too,” he said.

Convinced he still didn’t have a straight answer but unable to crack the four boys’ united front, Brandon turned back to Davy. “Do me a favor, Davy. Stick with the training wheels for a while, son. Thank God that’s only a baby tooth. If it were a permanent one, your mother would kill us both. Go see Rita. She’ll help clean you up.”

The last thing Davy wanted to do was see Rita right then. Part of him wanted to tell her what had happened. But he didn’t know what to say. For a week he kept quiet, watching Nana
Dahd’
s broad features for any sign that she had discovered her loss.

The next weekend, when the three boys again came to visit, Brandon took the two older boys to see
Rocky,
a movie that was deemed too old for Brian and Davy.

As soon as the two younger boys were left alone in Davy’s room, Brian Fellows unzipped his knapsack. “Look,” he whispered, emptying the contents of his bag out onto the bottom bunk.

On top of the heap were the extra clothes Brian always had to bring along in case he had an accident. But underneath the clothing, scattered on the bedspread, lay a collection of items most people would have dismissed as little-boy junk—the denuded spine of a feather; a shard of pottery with the faint figure of a turtle etched into the red clay; a chunk of rock, gray on one side and covered with lavender crystals on the other; the hank of long black hair; Rita’s
owij—
her basket-making awl; Rita’s lost son’s Purple Heart. Last of all, Davy spied Father John’s
losalo
—the string of rosary beads—that the old man had given Rita the night he died.