When the boy was gone, Mister Bone, as Diana often called the dog, lay at her feet. As soon as the typing stopped, he raised his head, hoping Diana might throw the ball for him. When she got up and padded to the kitchen, he followed, stopping by the kitchen sink to take a long, sloppy drink from his water dish while she retrieved a pitcher of warm sun tea from the patio.
Diana Ladd knew that her friends were losing patience. One by one, they had all taken the trouble to tell her that it was high time she got over Gary’s death, time that she dated someone else and found a father figure for poor little Davy. That was what they always called him-“poor little Davy.” Well, she hadn’t chosen very damn well the first time, and she didn’t have any faith she’d do better the next time around. Besides, she had tried it- once.
She had gone out for one miserable evening with a traveling encyclopedia salesman who had made a presentation to the school faculty at Sells. He had taken her to dinner at the Iron Mask in Tucson and then to the Maverick, a country-western place on Twenty-second Street. She had done all right until the band had played “The Snakes Crawl at Night.” When they did that number, she had asked him to take her home, and she’d refused to go out with him again. Months later, he still called her periodically.
Taking the glass of iced tea back to her room, Diana settled down at the desk and read through the five pages she had written since Rita and Davy had left at noon. It was tripe, she knew it, but she resisted the temptation to wad it all up into a ball and throw it in the garbage. Later, after she’d given it a rest, some of it might still be salvageable. If she was going to finish the book this summer-that was her stated goal-she couldn’t afford to throw everything away.
Although she thought of the book as a novel, it was autobiographical, of course. Someone had said that all first novels are autobiographical. It was the story of a woman’s attempt to go on living in the aftermath of her husband’s betrayal and subsequent suicide. The problem was the main character. There was no joy in her heroine, no life.
Diana rolled another clean sheet of paper into the machine, then sat there staring at it. In the stillness of the darkened room, her parents’ voices returned to haunt her. Once they started up, she had no choice but to let them play on to the end of whatever tape had surfaced in her head. All of the arguments and battles were there, preserved indelibly in her memory. The details varied occasionally, but the basic theme was always the same.
It had usually started around dinnertime when her father would come in from working in the woods near Joseph, Oregon.
“Where’s that lazy daughter of yours, Iona? Why the hell isn’t she down here helping you?”
Her mother’s voice would come drifting up the stairs to her then-calming and soothing, as always. “She’s studying, Max. Leave her alone. I don’t need any help. Dinner’s almost ready.”
But Max Cooper was never one to be easily dissuaded. He would come to the bottom of the stairs, and his voice would boom through the house like a clap of thunder announcing a sudden storm over Oregon’s Willowa Mountains.
“Diana Lee, you get your ass down here. Now!”
Knowing better than to argue or fight back, Diana would hurry downstairs. Inevitably, he would be waiting for her at the landing, swaying dangerously, hiking up his pants, tugging at his suspenders. She’d try to slip past him, but he would catch her by the braids, snapping her head back, pulling her hair until her eyes watered. She must have been twelve then, because her mother had cut off the braids right after her thirteenth birthday.
“What were you doing up there?” he demanded.
“Reading a book. For my book report.”
At twelve Diana Lee Cooper hadn’t known that her father was illiterate. Diana didn’t find that out until much later, when her mother was dying. Max Cooper’s inability to read was part and parcel of the helplessness that bound Iona Cooper to him. Aside from the fact that Diana wasn’t a son, her love of reading was another reason for Max to despise their only child. Diana’s love of books and schooling both mystified and infuriated him.
Diana tried to slip away, but he yanked her braids again, shaking her, lifting her off her feet. The skin all over her head smarted, but she didn’t cry out. Wouldn’t cry out.
“How come you’ve always got that snooty nose of yours stuck in a book, young lady? You get your butt out into the kitchen, girl, and learn something useful for a change.”
Twenty years later, Diana Ladd could still smell his stale, beer-saturated breath and see the spikes of stiff nose hairs in his flaring nostrils.
“Once you learn how to cook and clean and please a man, then’s time enough for you to sit on your ass and read books.”
He had shoved her away from him then, propelling her toward the kitchen. Somehow she managed to keep her legs under her. In the kitchen, Iona Cooper, lips clenched, bent over the stove, concentrating on stirring the gravy or mashing the potatoes, refusing to meet Diana’s gaze. She never said anything aloud, never said anything her husband might overhear and use against them both, but a conspiracy of silence existed between the woman and her daughter.
Afterward, Diana Lee Ladd remembered that battle in particular and counted it as a watershed. A spark of rebellion caught fire that evening, one that Max Cooper was never able to stifle or beat out of his daughter no matter how hard he tried.
And twenty years later, Diana Lee Cooper Ladd pushed aside her typewriter, put her head down in her arms, and cried because it wasn’t worth it.
What good had it done to escape her ignorant father, to flee the brutal prison that had been her home in Joseph, Oregon? There was still no joy in her life. No joy at all.
Rita carefully maneuvered the truck down the winding road. It was a thirty-minute, twelve-mile drive, most of it with the road perched precariously on the steep flank of the mountain. She kept the truck in low gear to save the brakes. While Rita drove, Davy, more quiet than usual, hunkered down in his corner of the seat.
“What is it, Olhoni?” Rita asked.
“Will I be an Indian when I grow up?”
His question mirrored her own concern, but she tried to laugh it off. “You already are,” she told him.
“Really?” He brightened at once. “What kind? Papago, like you?”
Rita shook her head. “Big Toe,” she said, smiling to herself because she knew the old joke would be new to Davy.
“I never heard of Big Toe Indians,” he countered. “Where are they from?”
“All over,” she answered.
“Are you sure?”
“They’re people with so little Indian blood that the only thing Indian about them is their big toe.”
“You’re teasing me,” he said, pouting.
She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons I’itoi chose us for his people. We tease and laugh and make jokes. So does he.”
“But I
At the bottom of the mountain, the road straightened abruptly, dropping through the foothills on a stretch of reservation-owned open range.
Rita had driven on open range all her life, and she wasn’t driving fast. They were nearing the junction with Highway 86 when a startled steer came crashing up onto the roadway out of a dry wash. With no warning, there was barely enough time to react. Rita jammed on the brakes. The pickup swerved to one side, avoiding the animal by inches, but the right rear tire caught in the soft sand of the shoulder.
The GMC rolled over onto its side and then rolled again, end over end, coming to rest lying on its roof in the other lane, its hood facing in the wrong direction. Without knowing precisely what had happened or how he got there, Davy found himself standing upright in the middle of the road.
He couldn’t see anything. There was a terrible shrieking noise ringing in his ears, and another noise as well-a car’s horn, honking one long, terrible wail.
Davy gasped for breath and realized that the first sound came from him-his own voice screaming. He put his hands to his face and brought them away bloody, but he could see again, could see the dust still flying, the tires still spinning uselessly in the air. The engine was still running, and the horn wouldn’t quit. The blaring noise seemed to be all around him, coming up out of the desert floor, raining down on him from the very sky itself.
