Louisa's eyes grew large. 'You would go there? By yourself?'
'I can't stay here,' Rita answered stubbornly.
Louisa wrote her brother's address on a scrap of paper, which Dancing Quail tucked inside the leather case. 'What about Mrs. Clark?'
Louisa asked. 'What will she say?'
'She won't know until after I am gone.'
Dancing Quail surprised herself when she talked so bravely, but a river of courage flowed into her from Understanding Woman's medicine basket.
She was determined that once more she would have that basket as her own.
She waited impatiently for the next occasion when she would be scheduled to dust the basket room. At the appointed time, she took the other medicine basket with her, concealed under her apron. When she finished dusting, the new basket, now empty, had been exchanged for the other.
That very night important guests came to visit the Clarks and were shown through the basket room. Breathlessly, Dancing Quail waited to see if the switch would be discovered, but it was not. No one opened the glass case. The Mil-gahn woman either couldn't tell or didn't notice the difference in quality between the two medicine baskets.
Two days later on Thursday, girls' day, the domestic workers' traditional afternoon off, Rita declined Louisa's invitation to visit the park. Instead, she stayed behind. First she cut off her long braids, hiding the clipped hair in her leather case. Then, with her hair cut short and taking only the precious medicine basket with her, she made her way downtown. Going to one of the few stores that catered to Indians, she bought a set of men's clothing, telling the clerk she was buying it for her younger brother who was coming from the reservation to visit.
Dancing Quail took her purchases and slipped away into an alley where she donned the new clothing. At first it felt strange to be wearing stiff pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and heavy shoes, but she soon got used to it. That night, with the help of two young men, Papagos she met in the train yard, Dancing Quail headed west on a slow-moving, California-bound freight train.
It was hot on the train, and noisy, but not nearly as frightening as it had been long ago as she headed to Phoenix from Chuk Shon for the very first time. Dancing Quail told the two Indian boys she was traveling with that she was going to join her brother in California. A job waited for her there in a place called Redlands.
Each time the train slowed for a station, the Indians would jump off and hide so that when the railroad police- the boys called them bulls--checked, no one would be there. Then, as the train started up again, they would run and jump on it.
Sometimes the three were alone in the car. Sometimes other travelers-mostly Mexicans but also a few other Indians joined them.
For a long time, they rode and talked, but late that night, when the towns and stops got farther apart, Dancing Quail found herself growing sleepy. She was dozing when she felt something pressing against her.
Opening her eyes she found another Papago, smelling of alcohol and very drunk, tying to unfasten her pants.
'Stop,' she hissed. 'Stop now.'
'Mawshch,' he whispered back. 'You are promiscuous.
You want it. If you did not, you would not be here.'
But she didn't want it. What she had done with Father John was one thing. That she had wanted to do, but this was different. Struggling away from him in the swaying, noisy boxcar, she groped inside her shirt and frond the medicine basket. She pried off the tight-fitting lid as he came after her again.
In addition to the items that had been there originally and the ones she had added from the other basket, there was now one other item-4he owij, the awl, which Dancing Quail used to make her baskets. Her trembling fingers sought the awl, found it, and clutched it in the palm of her hand.
Her attacker reached for her again, grabbing her pants, fumbling them down over her hips, but as he leaned over her, thinking her helpless, he felt something hard and sharp press painfully into the soft flesh at the base of his throat.
He grunted in surprise.
'Pia'a,' she whispered fiercely. 'No!'
When he didn't back off, she increased the pressure on the awl. Any moment, she would cut him, and then what would he do? Cry out? kill her?
She should have been terrified, but Understanding Woman's spirit was still strong inside her.
For a long time, they stayed frozen that way in the darkened boxcar, with him above Dancing Quail pinning her down, and with the awl pricking his neck. Finally, he pulled away.
'Ho'ok,' he said, backing off. 'Monster.'
But it didn't matter to Dancing Quail what he called her, as long as he left her alone. Once he was gone, she pulled her pants back up and refastened them. She lay there then, wide awake, waiting for morning, afraid to close her eyes for fear he would come after her again.
Finally, as the orange sun rolled up over the rocky, far horizon, she did drift off for a little while. She woke up with a start a few minutes later. The awl was still clutched firmly in her hand. Only later did she realize that the arrowhead had disappeared from the opened basket.
Andrew Carlisle waited until he was sure his mother was asleep before he crept out of the house. He drove until he found a pay phone at an all-night Circle K. His hand shook as he dialed the old, familiar number and then waited to see if it would ring. It had been so many years, perhaps the phone had been disconnected by now, perhaps the system no longer worked.
The telephone was answered on the third ring. 'J.S. and Associates,' a woman's voice said.
