'You're living in Tucson,' he returned. 'I thought you had free housing with the district as long as you taught out there?'
'I wanted a house of my own,' she said, and turned her face away from him, effectively cutting off all further conversation.
In 1943, long before the era of sanitary landfills, garbage dumps were still called garbage dumps and bums still scrounged through the accumulated trash, living On whatever crumbs they could scavenge. it was then that the moderately progressive town fathers of Joseph, Oregon, bought the old Stevens place down by the creek to use as the town dump.
Through a fluke, the ramshackle old house Came with the deal.
Initially, the intention was to tear the house down, bulldoze it into the ground, but then someone came up with a better idea.
Anne Dade had made Everyone in town knew that Iona made a terrible mistake in marrying Max Cooper--- everyone, that is, except perhaps Iona herself, who by then was already alarmingly pregnant with her daughter, Diana. In those days, when good Catholic girls made matrimonial mistakes, they had no choice but to stand pat and make the best of a bad bargain.
So when Max Cooper-an indifferent, sometime logger-was offered the position of garbage-dump caretaker in Joseph, Oregon, it was more as a humanitarian gesture toward his pregnant young wife than it was a vote of confidence about Max's own dubious job skills or work ethic. And when the Stevens house, such as it was, got thrown into the bargain, it was out of deference to Iona's daddy, the late Wayne Dade, who had spent many years loyally serving on the town council.
The ladies of Joseph in a rare show of true Christian charity, for once put aside their differences in creed, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work on the place. Baptists did most of the scrubbing and cleaning, Methodists painted, and Catholics sewed curtains. Even stand-offish Mormons signed on to braid rag rugs for the bare linoleum floors.
From the time Max and Iona Cooper moved into their newly refurbished quarters, Max was known in the town of Joseph as the Garbage Man. In the winter when it was too cold to work in the woods and in the summer when it was too hot, or when he wasn't down at the tavern too drunk to walk, Max Cooper minded the gate, collected the dump fees, and kept the riffraff out. The rest of the time his wife handled it.
Iona Cooper did her housework or garderung, all the while listening for the bell over her kitchen sink that announced someone's arrival at the garbage dump's locked gate. Rain or shine, summer heat or bitter winter's cold, she would drop what she was doing and hurry across the field.
People knew that she was the person who usually opened the gate, who collected the fees, and who returned the change, but no one ever thought of Iona Cooper as the Garbage Woman. She was always Iona Dade Cooper, Wayne's daughter, the lady who sold milk and eggs, who pickled tomatoes and canned peaches, and who always could find some little something in her pantry for the hungry bums who invariably turned up on her doorstep.
She baked wedding cakes for hire and sewed matching bridesmaid dresses.
And everybody respected her for what she did, because if you were married to a worthless oaf like Max Cooper, that's what it took to keep a roof over your head.
Nobody ever once mentioned the Word divorce, least of all Iona Dade Cooper.
When they came onto the Brandon Walker slowed the car w open-range part of Highway 86. He knew that in the cool of the evening, livestock would be making its nightly Way to water and forage. He didn't want to take any chances.
What was she thinking about, huddled over there against the far door?
Was she just worried about her son, or was she thinking about something else-about that time seven years ago when their lives had collided once before, about how he had told her back then that she should trust the System? Diana Ladd had been naive back then- So had he.
Driving along, Brandon himself rehashed the entire case in his head, how Gina Antone-he remembered her name now-was found floating facedown in a retention pond after an all-night rain dance at San Pedro Village. Initial presumption was death by drowning, but subsequent investigation indicated murder. Not only murder, but mutilation and torture as well.
She was found at the water hole. Since it was on the reservation boundaries, the Pima County Department was called in on the case. Dead Indians didn't count for much around Jack DuShane's Sheriff's Department. As a result, the case was delegated to the newest kid on the block-Brandon Walker, recently returned from Southeast Asia.
Even a novice Re Walker found it simple to follow the trail that led to Garrison Ladd, who had been seen at both the dead woman and a man dance in the company of professor of creative writing from i named Andrew Carlisle, a pro g arm of the the University of Arizona. As soon as the law threatened to close in on them, Gary Ladd took himself out to the desert and put a bullet through his head, leaving his buddy Carlisle to take the rap for both of them.
Under questioning, Carlisle maintained that the two men were just out to have a little harmless fun. 'You know how things get out of hand at rain dances,' he told the investigators. He maintained the girl was already drinking when they picked her up at Three Points. The three of them went to the dance, sat in the circle, and drank the cactus wine.
Afterward, at the girl's insistence, they left the village and stopped off at the water hole to polish off a few beers.
Carlisle claimed that he passed out only to waken later and be unable to find Ladd or the girl anywhere. He made his way back to the pickup and started it up, planning on driving home. He was still so smashed that he didn't realize Gary Ladd had, for some unaccountable reason, tied a rope around the girl's neck and fastened the rope to the bumper of the truck.
After driving only a few feet, he was startled to find Ladd, who had passed out in the bed of the truck, pounding frantically on the window, motioning for Carlisle to stop.
Too late they hurried back to check on the girl; Gina Antone was already dead.
Still drunk, the men took her back to the water hole and sat there, drinking warm beer and talking about what
