Hour of the Hunter

Dahd,” he objected. “It isn’t even dark yet. Why do we need a candle?”

“The light is for the spirits, Olhoni,” she told him. “It’s not for us.”

Davy had used matches a few other times, but always in the house, never outside. It took three sputtering attempts before his small fingers managed to strike a match and keep it burning long enough to touch the flame to the wick of the candle. Nana Dahd watched patiently and without criticism, allowing the child to learn for himself of the need to shelter the match’s faltering flame from unexpected breezes.

At last the wick caught fire. Davy glanced at Nana Dahd to see what he should do next. When she bowed her head, closed her eyes, and crossed herself, Davy did the same, listening in rapt silence while the old woman prayed.

To most Anglos that prayer, murmured softly in guttural Papago, would have been incomprehensible, but not to Davy, not to a child whose first spoken word, uttered almost five years earlier, had been a gleeful shout of “gogs”-Papago for dog-on the day Nana Dahd brought home an ungainly, scrawny puppy. She called the pup “Oh’o,” Papago for “Bone.”

From that small beginning, Davy had learned other Indian words at the same time he learned the English ones. He spoke his godmother’s native language with almost the same ease as his mother’s English.

Listening now, he heard Nana Dahd’s prayer, a fervent one, for the immortal soul of someone Davy didn’t know, someone named Gina. The child listened quietly, attentively. When the prayer was finished, the old woman discovered that her legs and feet were painfully swollen. She had to ask Davy to untie her shoes and help her to her feet.

Once standing, Rita reached over and picked up the rake and hoe. “I’ll take these. Get the old wreath, Olhoni. If we leave it here, hungry cattle may try to eat it.”

He gathered the wreath and the empty candle glass, then followed the limping woman to the truck, straggling a few thoughtful paces behind her.

Only then, as they walked, did he ask the question. “Who’s Gina, Nana Dahd?”

“My granddaughter, Olhoni. She died around here.”

Surprised, Davy paused and looked back at the grove of trees. “Here?”

Rita nodded. “Seven years ago today. Each year, on the anniversary, I decorate her cross to let her know she’s not forgotten.”

“Is that why you lit the candle? Because it’s the opposite of a birthday?”

It was a precocious question from a child whose mother gave him plenty of words to use but little of herself.

“Yes, Olhoni.”

For a moment, Davy frowned, trying to assimilate this new and unexpected piece of information. He thought himself as much Rita’s child as his own mother’s. The idea that Nana Dahd had another child or a grandchild of her own came as an unwelcome surprise.

“What’s the matter?” Rita asked.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” he said accusingly.

“Not a daughter, Olhoni, a son. Gina was my grandchild, my son’s only daughter.”

“She’s just like my father, isn’t she?” he said.

Nana Dahd frowned. Had Diana told Davy about the connection between the two deaths? That didn’t seem likely. “What do you mean?” Rita asked.

“Gina died before I was born,” he answered. “So did my father. Why did everybody have to die before I was born so I couldn’t meet them?”

The question was far less complicated than Rita had feared, and so was her answer. “If you had a father, little one,” Nana Dahd said gently, “then you wouldn’t be my Olhoni. Come. We still have to go up the mountain.”

When she reached the truck, Rita turned and looked back at the disconsolate child shambling behind her, kicking up clouds of dust with the scuffed toes of his shoes.

“Now what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Where’s my father’s cross?” he demanded. “Does my mother put flowers and candles on it?”

Nana Dahd shook her head. She doubted it. “I don’t know,” she said.

It was high time the boy knew the truth about his father, but telling him wasn’t Rita’s place. She wouldn’t tell Olhoni about that any more than she would have told him about his mother’s rhinestone-studded cowboy boots.

“That’s another question you’ll have to ask your mother, Olhoni. Now, climb into the truck. It’s getting late.”

Andrew Carlisle didn’t have to wait long for a ride. The fourth car to whiz past him on the entrance ramp, a green Toyota Corolla, slowed and pulled over the side to wait for him. The set of yellow lights trapped to the top told him the car was an oversized-load pilot car. The driver, a woman, leaned over and rolled down the passenger window just as he reached the car.

“Where to?” she asked.

The woman, a faded, frowsy blonde in her late thirties or early forties, was moderately attractive. She wore shorts and a halter top and held a glistening beer can in one hand while a lipstick-stained cigarette smoldered in the ashtray.

“Prescott,” he said.

Over the years, lying had become such a deeply ingrained habit that he never considered telling the truth.

She tossed her purse into the backseat, clearing a place for him. “I’m only going as far as Casa Grande,” she said, “but it’s a start. Get in. Care for a beer? Cooler’s in the back.”

Andrew Carlisle hadn’t tasted a beer in more than six years. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, reaching around behind him to grab a Bud from the cooler. Personally, he would have preferred Coors, but beggars can’t be choosers. He took a long swig, then held the beer in his mouth, savoring the sharp bite of flavor on his tongue. Beer wasn’t all he hadn’t tasted in six years, he thought. Not by a long shot.

He stole a surreptitious glance at the woman. He’d heard stories about these pilot-car women, about how much they made on the job itself and how much they made moonlighting on their backs. Andrew Carlisle had spent so many years fantasizing about Diana Ladd and her swollen belly and what he’d do to her when he finally got the chance that he had almost missed this golden opportunity when it all but fell in his lap.

“Why Prescott?” the woman was saying.

“My dad’s in the hospital up there,” he said. “He isn’t expected to make it.”

The woman clucked her tongue in sympathy. “That’s too bad.”

“My car broke down in Lordsburg,” he continued. “The mechanic said it would take at least two days to get parts and another day to put it back together. According to my mom, Dad doesn’t have three days. So I decided to hitchhike there and go back for the car later.”

Carlisle let his index finger stroke around and around the smooth lip of the can, sensuously wiping the beads of moisture off it and wondering how many places besides the door handle, the cooler, and the beer can he had touched. Where else would he have left prints? He would have to remember all those places later so as not to miss any when he wiped the vehicle clean.

The woman set the beer can between her legs and reached for the still-burning cigarette. A few stray ashes rained down on the seat as she took a long drag, but Andrew Carlisle was conscious only of the cool beer can resting unselfconsciously between her deeply tanned legs. Looking at it caused a sudden, insistent stiffening between his own.

“Do you do it for money?” he asked.

She looked at him and laughed. “Drive pilot cars? Of course I do it for money. Even with air-conditioning, working for mobile home-toters is a lousy job, but it’s better than no job at all, which is where I was after they laid me off at Hecla.”

Andrew Carlisle hadn’t been talking about driving pilot cars. He had meant something else entirely. He liked the fact that she was too dumb to pick up on the double entendre. Women were stupid