Paradise Lost (5 page)

motor home would provide both rest-room and cooking facilities in addition to the luxury of running water.

Cassie Parks, seated in the middle row of the second minivan, turned around and looked questioningly at Jenny through thick red-framed glasses. “Who’s your partner?” Cassie asked.

Cassie was a quiet girl with long dark hair in two thick braids. Her home, out near Double Adobe, was even farther from town than the Bradys’ place on High Lonesome Ranch. Cassie’s parents, relative newcomers who hailed from Kansas, had bought what had once been a nationally owned campground that had been allowed to drift into a state of ruin. After a year’s worth of back-breaking labor, Cassie’s parents had completely refurbished the place, turn-ing it into an independent, moderately priced RV park.

When school had started the previous fall, Cassie had been the new girl in Jenny’s sixth-grade class at Lowell School. Now, with school just out, the two girls had a history that included nine months of riding the school bus together. Much of that time they had been on the bus by themselves as they traveled to and from their outlying Sulphur Springs Valley homes. They also belonged to the same Scout troop. In the course of that year, the two girls had become good friends.

If Jenny had been able to choose her own pup-tent partner for the Memorial Day Weekend camp-out, Cassie would have been it. But Mrs. Lambert, who didn’t like cliques or pairing off, had decided to mix things up. She had shown up in the church parking lot with a sock filled with six pairs of buttons in six different colors. While the twelve girls had been loading their gear into the mini-vans, Mrs. Lambert had instructed each one to pull out a single button. To prevent trading around, as soon as a button was drawn, Mrs. Lambert wrote the color down on a clipboard next to each girl’s name. Jenny had already drawn her yellow button when she saw Cassie draw a blue one.

The last girl to arrive in the parking lot and the last to draw her button was Dora Matthews.

Glimpsing the yellow button in Dora’s fingers, Jenny’s heart sank. Of all the girls in the troop, Dora Matthews was the one Jenny liked least.

For one thing, Dora’s hair was dirty, and she smelled bad. She was also loud, rude, and obnoxious. She couldn’t have been very smart because she was thirteen years old and was still in a sixth-grade classroom where everybody else was twelve. Mrs. Lambert usually brought Dora to troop meetings and was always nice to her, even though Dora wasn’t nice back. Two months before school was out, Dora and her mother had returned to Bisbee and moved into the house that had once belonged to Dora’s deceased maternal grandmother, Dolly Pommer. All their lives, the elder Pommers had been movers and shakers in the Presbyterian Church. Out of respect for them, Faye Lambert had done what she could for their newly arrived daughter and granddaughter. That also explained why Dora Matthews was now the newest member in Jenny’s Girl Scout troop.

Not that Dora was even remotely interested in Girl Scouts—she was far too mature for that.

She was into cigarettes. And boys. She bragged that before she and her mother had moved back to Bisbee, she’d had a boyfriend who had “done it” with her andwho had wanted to marry her.

Dora claimed that was why her mother had left Tucson—to get her daughter away from the boyfriend, but Jenny didn’t think that was the truth. What boy in his right mind would ever want to marry someone like Dora?

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“Guess,” Jenny muttered dolefully in answer to Cassie’s question.

Behind her thick glasses, Cassie Parks’s brown eyes widened in horror. “Not Dora,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“You’ve got it,” Jenny replied and then lapsed into miserable silence. She hadn’t wanted to come on the camping trip to begin with. It was bad enough that Grandma Brady had insisted she bring her stupid sit-upon, but having to spend the weekend with Dora Matthews was far worse than anything Jenny could have imagined. After three whole nights in a pup tent with stinky Dora Matthews, Jenny would be lucky if she didn’t stink, too.

Slowly the four vehicles wound up the dusty road that was little more than a rutted track. On either side of the road, the parched desert was spiked with spindly foot-high blades of stiff yellowed grass. Heat shimmered ahead and behind them, covering the road with visible rivers of mirage-fed water. At last the Tracker pulled off the narrow roadway and into a shallow, scrub-oak-dotted basin. Kelly Martindale and Amber Summers leaped out of the Tracker and motioned the other vehicles to pull in behind them. By the time the motor home had maneuvered into place, all the girls had piled out of the minivans and were busy unloading.

Dora, who had been accorded the honor of riding along with Mrs. Lambert in the motor home, was the last to arrive. She hung back, letting the other girls do the work of unpacking.

“All right, ladies,” Mrs. Lambert announced as soon as the minivans drove away. “You all know who your partner is. Take tents from the luggage compartment under the motor home.

Then choose your spots. We want all the tents up and organized well before dark. Let’s get going.”

Each pair of girls was required to erect its own tent. Of all the girls in the troop, Jenny had the most experience in that regard. While Mrs. Lambert and the two interns supervised the other girls, Jenny set about instructing Dora Matthews on how to help set up theirs.

When it came time to choose a place for the tent, Dora selected a spot that was some distance from the others. Rather than argue about it, Jenny simply shrugged in agreement. “Fine,” she mut-tered. Without much help from Dora, Jenny managed to lay the tent out properly, but when she asked Dora to hold the center support pole in place, Dora proved totally inept.

“Don’t you know how to do anything right?” Jenny demanded impatiently. “Here, hold it likethis !”

Instead of holding the pole, Dora grabbed it away from Jenny and threw it as far as she could heave it. The pole landed in the dirt and stuck up at an angle like a spear.

“If you’re so smart, Jennifer Brady, you can do it yourself.” With that, Dora stalked away.

“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Lambert said, picking up the pole and walking toward the still unraised tent. “What seems to be the prob-lem, girls?”

“Miss Know--It-All here thinks I’m stupid,” Dora complained. “And she keeps telling me what to do. That’s all right. If she’s so smart, she call have the stupid tent all to herself. I’ll sleep outside.”

“Calm down, Dora,” Mrs. Lambert said reasonably. “These aren’t called two -man tents just
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because they hold two people. It also takes two people working together to put them up. Now come over here and help.”

Dora crossed her arms and shook her head. “No,” she said.

“Look here, Dora,” Mrs. Lambert cajoled. “The only reason Jenny knows so much more about this than you do is that she and her dad used to go camping together sometimes. Isn’t that right, Jenny?”

Jenny thought about her father often, but hearing other people talk about him always brought the hurt of his death back with an intensity that made her throat ache. Jenny bit her lower lip. She nodded but said nothing.

“So come over here and help, Dora,” Mrs. Lambert continued. “That way, the next time, you’ll know what to do.”

“I don’t want to know how to pitch a tent,” Dora stormed. “Why should I? Who needs to learn how to pitch tents anyway? ‘These days people live in houses, not tents.”

Rather than waste any more time in useless discussion, Mrs. Lambert turned to Jenny. “Never mind. Here, Jenny. Let me help. We’ll have this up in no time. Besides, we’re due at the evening campfire in twenty minutes.”

“Campfire!” Jenny exclaimed. “It’s too hot for a campfire. And it isn’t even dark.”

“In this case, campfire is only a figure of speech. With the desert so dry, it’s far too dangerous to have one even if there aren’t any official restrictions here. We won’t be having a fire at all. I brought along a battery-powered lantern to use instead. When it comes tome for after-dinner storytelling, we can sit around that.”

“Storytelling is for little kids,” Dora grumbled. “Who needs it?”

Mrs. Lambert didn’t respond, but Jenny heard her sigh. For the first time it occurred to her that maybe her troop leader didn’t like Dora Matthews any more than the girls did.

It was almost dark before all the tents were up and bedrolls and packs had been properly distributed. As the girls reassembled around their makeshift “campfire,” Jenny welcomed the deepening twilight. Not only was it noticeably cooler, but also, in the dim evening light, no one noticed the mess she had made of’ her sit-upon.

Once all the girls were gathered, Mrs. Lambert distributed the sack lunches followed by bags of freshly popped microwave popcorn and a selection of ice-cold sodas, plucked from the motor home’s generator-powered refrigerator. Taking a refreshing swig of her chilled soft drink and munching on hot popcorn, Jenny decided that maybe bringing a motor home along on a camping trip wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

“First some announcements,” Mrs. Lambert told them. “As you can probably guess, Mr.

Foxworth’s motor home has a limited water-storage capacity for both fresh water and waste water. For that rea-son, we’ll be using the rest room as a number-two facility only. For number one, you can go in the bushes. Is that understood?”

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Around the circle of lantern light, the girls nodded in unison.

Jenny raised her hand. “What about showers?” she asked.

“No showers,” Mrs. Lambert said with a smile. “When the Apaches lived here years ago, they didn’t get to take showers every day. In fact, they hardly took showers at all, and you won’t either. Unless it rains, and that doesn’t appear to be very likely. The rea-son, of course, is that since we don’t have enough water along for showers for everybody, no one will shower. That way, when we go home, we’ll all be equally grubby.

“As for meal preparation and cleanup, we’re going to split into six teams of two girls each.

Because of limited work space in the motor home, two girls are all that will fit in the kitchen area at any given time. Tomorrow and Sunday, each tent will do preparation for one meal and cleanup for another. On Monday, for our last breakfast together, Kelly, Amber, and I will do the cooking and cleanup honors. Does that sound fair?”

“What if’ we don’t know how to cook?” Dora objected. She had positioned herself outside the circle. Off by herself, she sat with her back against the trunk of a scrub oak tree.

“That’s one of the reasons you’re here,” Mrs. Lambert told her, “To learn how to do things you may not already know how to do. Now,” she continued, “it’s time for us to hear from one of out interns. We’re really lucky to have Kelly and Amber along. Not only are they both former Girl Scouts themselves, they also are well-versed in the history of this particular area.

“When I first came to town two years ago, one of the things I offered to do was serve on the textbook advisory committee for the school board in Bisbee. In my opinion, the classroom materials give short shrift to the indigenous peoples in this country, including the ones who lived here before the Anglos came, the Chiricahua Apache. It occurred to me that there had to be a better way to make those people come alive for us, and that’s why I’ve invited Kelly and Amber to join us on this trip. Kelly, I believe we should start with you.”

Kelly Martindale stood up. She had changed out of her shorts into a pair of tight-fitting jeans and a plaid long-sleeved shirt. Her dark hair was pulled back into a long ponytail.

“First off,” she said, “I want you to close your eyes and think about where you live. I want you to think about your house, your room, your yard, the neighbors who live on your street. Would you do that for me?”

Jenny Brady closed her eyes and imagined the fenced yard of High Lonesome Ranch. In her mind’s eye, she saw a frame house surrounded by a patch of yellowing grass and tall shady cotton-woods and shorter fruit-bearing trees. This was the place Jenny had called home for as long as she could remember. Penned inside the yard were Jenny’s two dogs, Sadie, a long-legged bluetick hound, and Tigger, a comical-looking mutt who was half golden retriever and half pit bull. Tied to the outside of the fence next to the gate, equipped with Jenny’s new saddle and bridle and ready to go for a ride, was Kiddo, Jenny’s sorrel gelding quarter horse.

Kelly Martindale’s voice imposed itself oil penny’s mental images of hone. “Now, just suppose,” she said, “that one morning someone showed up at your house and said that what you had always thought of as yours wasn’t yours at all. Supposing they said you couldn’t live there anymore because someone else wanted to live there instead. Supposing they said you’d have to pack up and go live somewhere else. What would you think then?”

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In times past, Jenny would have been the first to raise her hand, the first to answer. But she had found that being the sheriff’s daughter came with a downside. Other kids had begun to tease her, telling her she thought she was smart and a show-off, all because her mother was sheriff. Now, in hopes of fitting in and going unnoticed, she tended to wait to be called on rather than volunteering. Cassie Parks suffered no such qualms.

“It sounds like what the Germans did to the Jews,” she said with a shudder.

Kelly nodded. “It does, doesn’t it? But it’s also what the United States government did to Indian tribes all over this country. And the reason I know about it is that very thing happened to my great-great-grandmother when she was just a little girl—about your age. Her people—the Apaches—had lived here for genera-tions right here in the Chiricahuas, the Dos Cabezas Moun-tains, and In the surrounding valleys. When the whites came and the Apaches tried to defend their lands, there was a war. The Apaches lost that war and they were shipped off to a place called Fort Sill, Oklahoma. My great-great-grandmother was sent there, too. Although she and her family were prisoners, she somehow fell in love with one of the soldiers guarding the camp. They got mar-ried, and she went to live with him in Arkansas. But that’s why I’m here in Arizona. It’s also why I’m a history major. I’m trying to find out more about my people—about who they were, where they carte from, and what happened to them.