Hour of the Hunter

“What did you say?”

“He’s not my uncle. Granny said so.”

Any mention of her former mother-in-law threw Myrna Louise into unreasoning rage. “He most certainly is, too,” she insisted, “and that’s what you’re going to call him.”

“No,” Andrew said.

“Yes,” she returned.

“Say ‘Uncle.’”

“Uncle,” Andrew replied sullenly.

“Say ‘Roger.’”

“Roger.”

“Now say ‘Uncle Roger.’”

“I can say ‘Uncle,’” her son responded, “and I can say ‘Roger,’ but I can’t say ‘Uncle Roger.’”

And he never did. Not once.

Without humidity to hold it back, the heat peeled away from the desert floor like skin from a sun-ripened peach. Brandon and Diana tried driving with the Ford’s windows wide open, but it was too chilly on Davy, who had stretched out lengthwise in the backseat and fallen sound asleep, so they rode with the front windows barely cracked, making conversation possible.

“Davy’s a cute kid,” Brandon offered tentatively. Riding with this strangely silent woman still made him uncomfortable.

Diana nodded. “He takes after his dad.”

Walker had noticed Davy’s physical resemblance to his father, but he hadn’t wanted to mention it. The boy’s wide-set blue-gray eyes and blond good looks were a long way from his mother’s brown-eyed, dark-haired features. Brandon hoped, for Davy’s sake, that looks were all he’d inherited from his father. If genetics were destiny, then David Ladd was doomed.

“Sometimes he does funny things, bizarre things,” Diana mused, “and I wonder if it’s anything like the way his father was when he was a child, but I don’t have any way of knowing.”

“You don’t see your in-laws?”

Diana shook her head. “They wanted me to come back to Chicago and live with them, but I wouldn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Rita,” Diana answered simply. “They didn’t understand about Rita. Since I couldn’t bring her along, we didn’t go.”

Diana’s in-laws weren’t the only ones who didn’t understand about Rita, Brandon Walker thought, about the strange bond that existed between the young Anglo woman and the much older Indian. It didn’t make sense to him, either.

“Davy’s grandparents don’t stay in touch?”

“They send Christmas presents. That’s about all.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It’s their loss,” Diana added.

Garrison Ladd told Diana Cooper about his parents that very first November afternoon during their three-hour coffee marathon at the I-Hop. “I don’t like them much,” he said. “Especially my dad.”

This was something about Garrison Ladd that Diana Lee Cooper could relate to. She knew all there was to know about hating your own father. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.

“He’s brilliant for one thing, and expects everyone else to be the same. He’s worked his way up to being a big-cheese executive with Admiral back in Chicago. He started out in electrical engineering between the wars after graduating from the Armour Institute of Technology, with honors and two degrees. He was determined that I follow in his illustrious footsteps.”

Diana Cooper would have loved to have a father who was undeniably brilliant, someone who would encourage her to go on to school of any kind rather than being, like Max Cooper, a solid wall of resistance.

“Your father doesn’t sound so bad,” she ventured.

“Oh yeah? This man doesn’t understand the word vacation. All he does is work, work, work, and make money. He’s probably richer than Midas by now. He and my mother live in this fantastic house on the shores of Lake Michigan. They have all these smart friends, but they’re boring as hell, and they don’t have any fun. They don’t know how.”

“That still doesn’t sound so bad,” Diana ventured.

“Why? What does your father do?” Gary Ladd asked, leveling that disconcerting blue-eyed gaze of his on her.

Diana flushed, both because he was looking at her and because of the question. She knew that particular question would come eventually, and she dreaded it. When she told him about Max, would Gary Ladd stalk out of the restaurant and leave her to pay for her own coffee? Sick at heart but incapable of doing anything else, Diana felt obliged to answer straight from the hip. If, after she told him, Garrison Walther Ladd, III, walked out and left her sitting there alone at the table, then all she’d be out was a single cup of I-Hop coffee.

“He’s a garbageman,” Diana replied.

Garrison slammed his cup into the heavy china saucer, slopping coffee. “You’re kidding!”

“No.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“It’s no joke. My dad runs the garbage dump in Joseph, Oregon.”

“Joseph? Where’s that?”

“In the Willowa Mountains. On the other side of the state, a town at the end of a road. You might say I’m a dead-end kid.”

It was easier for Diana to make fun of herself and Joseph first, rather than waiting for other people to do it. From his initial reaction, she couldn’t tell if Garrison was making fun of her or not. He seemed intrigued.

“Fascinating. How many people live in Joseph?”

“Eight hundred, give or take.”

“My God! That’s amazing.”

“What’s amazing about it?”

“Look, I’m from Chicago. When I came here, I thought Eugene was small, but eight hundred people? Jeez, that’s wonderful.”

“It doesn’t seen particularly wonderful to me.”

“Just think about it,” Garrison Ladd continued, his face alight with enthusiasm. “It’s hard to believe that there are still places like that in this country, wide-open spaces.”

“It’s wide open, all right,” Diana returned dryly. “It’s so open there’s nobody there.”

“So what do people do?”

“For a living? Farming, ranching, logging.”

“No mining?” he asked.

“No mining.”

Garrison Ladd folded his arms across his chest, shook his head, and grinned at her. He had a very engaging grin. “Too bad,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you ever listen to Stella Dallas, or are you too young?”

“Who’s Stella Dallas?”

“That’s what I get for messing around with younger women. Stella Dallas used to be on the radio back in Chicago when I was growing up. They said she was a girl from ‘a small mining town in the West.’ I always told my mother that Stella Dallas was the kind of girl I was going to marry. Right up until you told me there was no mining in Joseph, I thought maybe I’d marry you.”

At that preposterous statement, Diana Lee Cooper burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. The few other patrons in the restaurant that afternoon, the ones who weren’t at home glued to their television sets, regarded her