Being in that room was almost like being invisible. The people around him glanced at him and then looked quickly away. They spoke to one another in Papago, and the things they said made him realize they didn’t know he understood what they were saying. They called Rita by another name, Hejel Wi’ithag, which means Left Alone. They called him by another name, too-Me’akam Mad, or Killer’s Child. He couldn’t understand why they called him by such a strange, mean name, or why they seemed not to like him.
Davy was tired, and his head hurt. He wanted Rita, but the nurses said she was in surgery. They said she was badly hurt. And where was his mother? Why wasn’t she here? Just thinking about it made fat tears try to leak out the corners of his eyes. He squinted hard to keep that from happening. He sighed and tried to swallow the huge lump in his throat.
For the first time in more than an hour, the huge man next to him stirred and looked down at the little boy. Then, raising his broad, bare arm, he pulled Davy against him.
At first Davy started to resist, but only when he was resting against the enveloping warmth of the man’s massive chest did the boy realize how cold he was and how tired. He stopped struggling and let his eyes close.
Pillowed against Fat Crack Ortiz’s massive bulk, Davy Ladd fell fast asleep.
Chapter 5
The car windows were open, allowing in the cool night air as well as a noisy, windy roar that made conversation impossible. That was fine with Diana. She had no desire to talk to Brandon Walker, whose very presence unleashed the disturbing flood of memories now surging through her awareness. Blind to the nighttime desert flowing by outside the speeding Ford, Diana was totally preoccupied with pieces of the past that jerked like disjointed figures caught in the brilliant flashes of a strobe of recollection. The spinning figures danced in her mind’s eye without order or definition.
Diana Lee Cooper was hard at work in the ditto room that Friday morning when the news came. Everyone in the English Department was so stunned that they all abandoned ship without anyone thinking to come tell her, and she was far too busy to notice.
In addition to the regular batch of departmental quizzes and outlines, Dr. Hunsington, the diminutive head of the English Department, had a twenty-five-page syllabus to put out-seventy-five copies of each. Once she finished running off Halitosis Hunsington’s syllabus, it had to be collated and stapled.
Well after noon, she finally completed the last of the stapling and emerged into a strangely deserted hallway. Laden with an armload of slippery paper, she was surprised to find the door to the English Department closed and locked. A hastily hand-penciled note tucked in one corner of the darkened window announced, CLOSED UNTIL MONDAY. H. F. HUNSINGTON.
“Closed?” she demanded of the inexplicably darkened window and empty hallway. “What do you mean, closed?”
Diana looked around and found herself absolutely alone. Where had everyone gone? Her first reaction was that maybe her father’s dire predictions of nuclear holocaust had come true, and everyone had disappeared into bomb shelters, but she quickly talked herself out of that one. Had nuclear warfare broken out, surely she would have heard sirens or some other kind of audible warning. There had been nothing.
As a dollar-an-hour, fifteen-hour-a-week work-study student, Diana Cooper had no key to the University of Oregon’s English Department office. What was she supposed to do with all the dittos she had run off, she wondered, take them home with her? On her bike?
That was crazy. The office had been full of people earlier when she left for the ditto room-Dr. Hunsington, his secretary, the receptionist, and a whole collection of professors, instructors, and teaching assistants, all milling around the receptionist’s desk, waiting to collect their daily quota of departmental mail to say nothing of their semimonthly pay checks. So where were they now?
She started to leave the dittoed papers by the locked door while she went to find someone with a key. She quickly discarded that idea. Several exams had been entrusted to her for dittoing purposes that morning. Diana took her charge of exam security very seriously, and she was unwilling to let the tests out of sight for even a moment. Taking the entire stack with her, she started down the hall.
Halfway down the long corridor, she heard the echo of solitary footsteps coming up the stairs at the far end. Diana was immensely relieved when Gary Ladd, one of the teaching assistants, materialized out of the stairwell. He turned immediately and started toward his office in the T. A. bullpen at the far end of an adjacent wing.
“Mr. Ladd,” Diana called. “Yoo-hoo.”
He stopped, turned, and came back toward her, his head cocked questioningly to one side. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought everybody went home.”
Garrison Walther Ladd, III, was by far the best-looking male teaching assistant in the English Department’s stable. With aquiline, tanned good looks and lank blond hair, he wore expensive but rumpled clothing with offhand, upper-class ease. Garrison Ladd knew he was hot stuff. Breathless coeds who came within his sphere of influence found him irresistible. They tended to hie themselves off in search of obliging physicians willing to issue prescriptions for birth-control pills.
This was Diana’s second year as an undergraduate student assistant in the English Department at the U. of O. During that time she, too, had admired Gary Ladd, but only from afar. For one thing, she had convinced herself that someone from Joseph, Oregon, could never be in Gary Ladd’s league. For another, he was a graduate student while she was only a lowly sophomore.
He looked at her now with his tanned brow furrowed into a puzzled frown. “Why didn’t you go home when everybody else did?”
“I’m working,” she said. “At least I’m trying to work. I’ve got this whole stack of papers to deliver, but the door to the office is locked. Do you have a key? Where’d everybody go?”
Gary Ladd reached into a jacket pocket, extracted a key ring, then took two steps down the hallway before stopping and turning on Diana. “Nobody told you, did they?”
“Told me what?” she returned. “I’ve been in the ditto room. When I came out, everything was closed up. Even the classrooms are empty. What’s going on?”
“Somebody shot President Kennedy.”
“No!”
The very idea was incredible, unthinkable. Assassinations happened in other parts of the world-wild, terrible, jungle-filled places like South America or Africa-but not here in the good old U.S. of A. “Where?” she managed to stammer. “When?”
“This morning. In Dallas. They already caught the guy who did it.”
“Is he all right?”
Garrison Ladd looked mystified. “He’s fine. They’ve got him in jail.”
“No, not him. I mean President Kennedy. Is he all right?”
Gary Ladd shook his head, while his gray-blue eyes darkened in sympathy. “He’s dead, Diana. President Kennedy is dead. They just swore in LBJ on the plane headed back to Washington. Come on. Let’s go drop off your papers. They must be heavy.”
An Indian Health Services nurse hovered over Rita’s bed-bound form, but the old woman’s mind was far away in another time and place.
Dancing Quail hid behind her mother’s full skirts as the horse-drawn wagon pulled up beside the low-slung adobe house. It was the end of
Seven-year-old Dancing Quail didn’t want to leave home. She didn’t want to go to school. Some of the other children had told her about it, about how they weren’t allowed to speak to their friends in their own language, about how they had to dress up in stiff, uncomfortable clothing.
