language, they were forced to call upon Dancing Quail to translate in her own inadequate English. She giggled as she did so.
Father John trotted out all his best arguments, including the one he thought would make the most difference. “If you work at the mission,” he said, “the sisters will pay you money so you can buy nice things for yourself and for your grandmother.”
“Where?” she asked. “Where will I buy these things? The trading post is far from here. I have no horse and no car.”
“I could give you a ride sometimes,” he offered.
“No,” Dancing Quail said decisively. “I will stay here.”
“What did he say?” Understanding Woman asked anxiously. There had been several exchanges during which Dancing Quail had translated nothing.
“He wants me to work at the mission. I told him no. My place is here with you.”
“Good,” Understanding Woman said, patting her young granddaughter’s hand. “It is better that you stay in Ban Thak.”
A Mormon missionary, dressed in a stiffly pressed white shirt and wearing a carefully knotted tie, brought word to Rebecca Tashquinth that her son, S-abamk, the Lucky One, was being held in the Pinal County jail in Florence and that he would most likely be charged with the brutal murder of Margaret Danielson. It was thought, the missionary reported dutifully, that the woman had been raped as well, but no one knew that for sure. Not yet.
Rebecca was well aware of the kinds of lawyers local judges appointed for Indian defendants, particularly those accused of serious crimes against Anglos. She didn’t waste time on a useless trip to Florence. The guards at the jail wouldn’t have let her see her son anyway. Instead, she got in the car and drove to Ahngam, Desert Broom Village, to speak to her father.
Eduardo Jose was a man of some standing in the community, a man with both livestock and a thriving bootleg-liquor business. Eduardo knew how to deal with Anglos. He had even hired himself an Anglo lawyer once to help him when the cops had caught him transporting illegal tequila across nonreservation land to the annual
If anyone could help her son in all this, Rebecca’s father was the man who could do it.
Diana was still angry with Rita when she got to the hospital. She resented Davy’s questions about his father, questions he had never asked before. She blamed Rita for bringing all that ancient history back to the foreground, but when she saw the old woman, seemingly shriveled in the bed and swathed in bandages, she forgot her anger.
Rita’s sister, Juanita, was sitting by the bed when Diana entered the room, but she rose at once and went out into the hallway. Diana knew Juanita didn’t like her, and she had long since ceased worrying about it. If Gary’s parents didn’t understand why she and Rita were inseparable, why should Rita’s relatives do any better?
Rita opened her eyes when Diana stepped to the head of the bed and touched her good hand.
“How’s Davy?” Rita asked.
“He’s fine. He has a few stitches in his head, that’s all.”
“Is he here? Can I see him?”
“The doctor won’t let him come into the room. He’s too young. You have to be sixteen.”
Rita reached for her water glass and took a tentative sip through the straw. “Yesterday was the anniversary,” she said quietly. “Davy went with me. He may ask questions.”
Diana laughed uneasily. “He already has, Rita. It’s all right. I’m getting a lot closer to being able to answer them.”
“He’ll want you to put up a cross. For his father, I mean. A cross with a wreath and some candles.”
“I can’t do that.”
In Diana Ladd’s mixed bag of fallen-away Catholic religion, suicides were never accorded full death benefits. She had told Gary’s parents to bury him wherever they liked, but as far as she was concerned, Garrison Ladd still didn’t qualify for a memorial wooden cross and never would.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?”
“You didn’t ask.”
Diana Lee Cooper and Garrison Ladd cuddled together on Diana’s narrow three-quarter bed nestled like a pair of stacked teaspoons. With his back pressed against the wall and his head propped up on one elbow, Gary’s other hand glided up and down Diana’s slender back. He liked the feel of smooth skin stretched taut over backbone and rib and the gentle curve of waist that melted into the small of her back. He liked fingering the matching indentations of dimples that marked the top of her buttocks. Most of all, he liked the fact that she didn’t warn his hand away from places most other girls wouldn’t let him touch.
Diana Lee Cooper lay on her side, head on a pillow, with one arm dangling loosely off the edge of the bed. Unsure of herself, Diana worried that perhaps it hadn’t been all Gary had expected. “Was I all right?” she asked.
Garrison Ladd laughed out loud. “It was more than all right.” He kissed the back of her neck. “The boys in Joseph must not have been paying attention.”
“The boys in Joseph called me names,” Diana replied grimly.
“You’re kidding.”
She shook her head. The boys had called her names, but they were pikers compared to her father. Max Cooper was the champion name-caller of all time.
She turned so she could look Gary Ladd full in the face. Maybe this man who, like her, also hated his father, could help her decode her own, help her understand that looming darker presence who even now reached out across the state and attacked her with bruising words far worse than his punishing fists.
“My father was the worst,” she said, carefully controlling her voice. “‘Cunt’ happened to be his personal favorite.”
Gary Ladd shook his head in disbelief. “Your father called you that to your face?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
She suspected it was because calling her that robbed her of her books and dignity and cut her down to size. While she still mulled the question, Gary Ladd lost interest in the conversation. He rolled Diana over on her back so he could caress her full breasts and run his hands up and down the ladder of ribs above her smoothly flat abdomen. He twisted the curly auburn pubic hairs around the tips of his fingers and touched what lay concealed beyond those curiously inviting hairs.
He waited to see if she would object and move his probing fingers away. Some girls did, even after screwing their brains out, but Diana didn’t. She lay with her eyes closed, her body quiet and complacent beneath his touch. Diana Ladd was the girl of his dreams. How could he have been so lucky?
“What brought you to Eugene?” he asked, wanting to delay a little before taking her again. “How’d you get here?”
“By horse,” she answered.
He checked her expression to see if she was joking, but her face was unsmiling, impassive.
“Come on. You’re kidding. You rode all the way across Oregon from Joseph to here on a horse?”
“My mother got me the horse, a beautiful sorrel quarter horse,” she said. “His name was Waldo. Waldo was my ticket out of town.”
Diana came home from school carrying an armload of books, half of them textbooks and the others from the library. She found old Mr. Deeson’s pickup, with horse trailer attached, parked in front of their house. The presence of a neighbor’s pickup wasn’t particularly unusual. Chances were, Mr. Deeson had stopped off to unload some garbage, and her mother had invited him in for a cup of coffee or freshly baked cookies. She often encouraged customers to stop by for half an hour or so in order to stave off her ever-present loneliness.
