days there was little feeling. Life on ice. Now a sense of loss has eaten a giant hole out of his middle. All that stands between him and the incomprehensible abyss is Grandfather's hand.
A fish hawk rises on the wind. Kier watches his namesake, and something about the bird stirs him. There isn't a way to say what he is experiencing except that it is a longing. So he lets the sense of this go through him without trying to understand it. There is a gentle squeeze on his shoulder and once again he is aware of the hand. It is as if it is guiding him to the bird.
'A man might know the currents on which he glides and then he would be free,' Grandfather says.
As Kier waits and remembers, he wonders about the currents. In his mind is a puzzle, the pieces of which are strewn about- very few of them put together. There is his mother and her iron will. That is part of the puzzle. His dead father. That is a bigger piece.
Immediately after his father's funeral, his mother had moved them another ten miles from the Tilok reservation. Before this precipitous relocation, they had been a good two miles outside the reservation and on the outskirts of Johnson City. Their new house was in the forest to the far side of town and surrounded by white people. His mother said only that the world was mostly white and not red and mat he better 'get used to it.' She worked for a local groceryman and was said to be very good at keeping his books.
Kier went to a public school and worked by the lamplight every night under his mother's tutelage. Grandfather moved off the reservation in order to be with them, and with him, Kier escaped to the forest to learn Indian ways. Tracking became a passion. His mother tolerated that part of his life, maybe even in her own way encouraged it, but it was always subserviant to his studies, always trivialized.
Nathaniel Wintripp, Kier's father, was a half-blooded Tilok Indian whose own father had been of Spanish descent. By trade Nate was a stonemason. He had been the most prolific and artistic craftsman in the rural areas nearest mountainous Wintoon County. But Nate Wintripp had a certain reserved aloofness about him. He'd grown up with his grandparents and struck out to live on his own at age seventeen. Although he ably supported himself through two years of Chico State University, he quit after the second year to work full-time in his growing business.
Kier had struggled to know his father. He wanted to get beyond the pats on the head to something undefinable, to something he didn't understand. On October 12, 1969, his father flew into a rage, banged Kier's wrists on a washbasin, stalked out the door, and never came back. A month later, Nate Wintripp was dead, never having let his son, Kier, find the bond that he so fervently pursued.
After his father walked out, a quiet desperation seemed to grip Kier's mother. It ran so deep that for years he couldn't bear the thought of stepping from the groove that she was charting for him. Although she was pure Tilok, he could not determine what she wanted to be-except for one incontrovertible opinion that she held with utter conviction. Even though he must be a success in the white man's world, even though he must have the best university education, even though he must bear no trace of his lineage in his speech, he would marry an Indian woman or certain calamity would befall him. After all, Nate, her own husband, being half white, could never really accept an Indian. How would a white woman ever accept Kier?
In the secret places of his soul, Kier wondered if his father could ever have accepted him. Or if his father accepted no one. Or if Kier wanted something from his father that was not to be found on this earth. It seemed to Kier that just before his father's death, they had been somehow reaching for each other. There was, he had imagined, a peaceful joy that lay just beyond his reaching fingers, that was forever snatched away at the very moment of his most profound awareness. He could not reconcile the shame he felt when he thought of his father.
He did not try to create this missing bond of communion with his mother. Theirs was a union fashioned from the mutuality of their struggle to survive on little income in a mountain town and from their shared tragedy.
Kier did not sort out the cauldron of emotions that he buried in a place in his mind and covered over with layers of keen intellectual musings. When he met his first wife-a white woman-the uneasy feeling was passed off by the simple observation that he had never made a genuine friend nor found a genuine love. He knew only male comrades in adventure and female partners in sex. This he supposed was a good and sufficient reason for the temporary loss in equilibrium. When he reached to grasp and share his new bride's love, he floundered as if drowning, with no concept at all of swimming. It frightened him.
Now he relived the feeling. His breaths grew deeper and there was tightness inside him. He felt the shame. His mother's raw determination still felt like a dead weight crushing his soul. This stew of old emotions had brought him to a place where he could not taste certain of life's flavors. He could not, it seemed, taste the flavor of love or savor it with another. What he didn't know was why.
Jessie had heard nothing during the several minutes since Kier had left. Then she heard a single shot. As Kier had suggested, she put Miller in the lead, with his hands cuffed behind, and backtracked on Miller's trail. Shortly they heard more shooting.
'Tonto's a bullet-ridden carcass,' Miller said.
'Shut up,' she said, wondering if he was right and feeling a lot more than she expected. They traveled easterly, then angled to the north, heading away from Claudie's and the Volvo, until they came to the creek. Finally, leaving Miller's track, they turned south down the creek. Jessie understood Kier's logic. New tracks that took a different direction heading off toward the Donahues' would need explaining.
Walking in the water, she discovered a torture more exquisite than any she had known-save one. The pain was bluer than the dead blue of a particular glacial lake that would forever stand in her memory. The sensation spreading in her feet was like the lifeless cold of that pristine water: A horrible, bone-deep ache that would, she knew, eventually cut her feet from her body. She had thought they would simply go numb; well, they did, but only after pain like a twisted gut. Kier's strategies and this wilderness seemed to demand suffering.
At first, as she and Miller walked, Jessie thought of survival, of spotting the next paramilitary trooper before he spotted her.
After a time, though, as the sounds of the battle receded and the frothy air and dense forest closed in around them, her mind departed the macabre of Wintoon Mountain for the ordinary macabre of her office, of her nightmare with Frank. Tears came to her eyes and she cursed herself. How, when she was barely alive, when she had come here to this godforsaken brush patch at the other end of the United States to escape-with this place turning into a war zone, people maybe dying-could she think about Frank and his sick friends?
She wasn't going to do it. The one thing that had to remain hers was her mind.
As she began to wonder whether Kier were dead or alive, something crashed in the distance, the woods resounding with numerous explosions and the staccato of automatic weapons. More firepower than she would have thought possible was unleashed in the next minute. She felt unusually alone.
Using a small stick between fingers that still clenched a grenade, Kier cleared a hole at the far edge of the log. It seemed from the conversation that at least two men had remained with Crawford. They had walked a little way up the hill now, by the sound of their receding voices. Kier listened as best he could. After a time, he heard nothing. Still, they could be watching. It would be more dangerous to come out slowly.
With a quick thrust of his elbows, Kier cleared away the snow, rising in silence, and bursting from the hollow. Go ahead, think about the guys who just tried to kill you. His mind prepared itself for slaughter. Hands ready to rise from his sides, biceps straining, and pectorals tight with anticipation, his breath rushing from his throat-at the last instant he held the grenade handles tight. He didn't throw. There was no one within sight, though Kier could now hear someone talking nearby.
They had taken the bait. The leader hadn't arrived. The men were assuming Crawford was a safely dead enemy and Miller was one of his victims.
Kier slithered away on his belly.
Chapter 6
The fire that succors a family will burn the enemy.
