Hour of the Hunter

too much to drink.”

“He was drinking?”

“A little.”

Brandon stared meaningfully at the newspaper lying on the floor, its front page crumpled into a wad. He made sure there could be no doubt about where he was looking.

“You’ve seen the paper,” he said. “Did you know the girl?”

In the stricken silence that followed, both became aware of the steady drum of wind and rain on the outside of the trailer. For the longest time, Diana Ladd didn’t answer.

“No,” she said at last. “I didn’t know her.”

“What about her grandmother, Rita Antone? She lives just across the way a few hundred yards.”

Diana nodded. “I know Rita from school, but we’re not necessarily friends.”

“Did your husband know Gina?”

“Maybe. I don’t know everyone my husband knows.”

“Why did he go to the dance?”

“Why does anyone? To eat at the feast, to drink the wine.”

“Is your husband a student of Indian customs?” he asked.

“My husband is a writer,” she answered.

By the time the detective finally left the house, he drove into the teeth of a raging desert storm. Fierce winds shook the car, while sheets of rain washing across the windshield made it difficult to see. Walker had been told that the dance at San Pedro had been a traditional rain dance. It worked with a vengeance, he thought, as he slowed down to pick his way through a dip already filling with fast-moving brown water. Two miles east of Three Points, he was stuck for forty-five minutes at one of the larger dips, waiting for cascading water to recede.

He was still there when a call came over the radio telling him to turn around and go back to the reservation. A pickup truck had been found in a flooded wash off Highway 86 west of Quijotoa. When the highway patrol was finally able to reach the vehicle, they found a body inside-that of a male Caucasian with a single, self-inflicted bullet hole in his head.

That was how Brandon Walker first laid eyes on Garrison Ladd. As he told Davy years later, Garrison Ladd was dead from the bullet wound long before Walker met him.

Rita had hated living with the Clarks.

All that week, no matter what she did, the Mil-gahn woman found fault with Dancing Quail’s work. She didn’t work fast enough, she wasn’t thorough enough, she wasn’t good enough. And all that week, Dancing Quail kept silent in the face of Adele Clark’s angry onslaughts, but she began planning what she would do.

“I’m very unhappy here,” she told Louisa one night as they were getting ready for bed in their stuffy upstairs room. “I must go someplace else to find work.”

“My brother Gordon is in California,” Louisa offered. “I could write and ask him. He might know someplace you could go.”

“How far is California?” Dancing Quail asked.

Louisa shook her head. “A long way.”

“How can I go there?”

“On the train, I think,” Louisa answered.

“Will you write down where your brother is so I can find him?”

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, trying 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 found 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-the 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.