J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

The boy and dog trotted off to the kitchen, while Brandon Walker stumbled into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. He was happy not encountering Diana anywhere along the way. He was puzzled by what had happened between them during the night, and he wasn’t sure what to say to her when next they met.

Davy was back in the living room sitting on the couch with the dog at his feet when Brandon returned from the bathroom. A rolled tortilla on a paper towel lay on the coffee table.

“Hope you like peanut butter,” Davy said. “That’s what I like for breakfast. Tortillas with peanut butter.”

Brandon tried a bite. The tortilla-delicious, delicate, and thin-was as transparent in spots as a piece of tissue paper.

“Will Rita be okay?” Davy asked.

Brandon tried to answer, but the very first bite of peanut butter had glued itself to the roof of his mouth. At the same time, a stony-eyed Diana Ladd entered the room on her way to the kitchen. “Coffee?” she asked on her way past.

Much to his dismay, all Brandon Walker could do was nod helplessly and point to his mouth. There’s nothing like making an awkward moment impossible, he thought miserably. Nothing like it at all.

When Hunter returned, once more looking like a human being, the people were afraid of him. For a time, Hunter and his sister lived together in peace, but then the people went to Wind Man, a powerful medicine man, and asked him to do something to Hunter. Wind Man blew and blew until he made a mighty dust devil.

Hunter’s sister was out gathering firewood when Wind Man’s dust devil caught her and took her far away. Hunter waited for his sister for a long time. Finally, he went looking for her, but he couldn’t find her anywhere.

Hunter called to his uncle Buzzard for help. Buzzard looked for her for four days. He couldn’t find her either, but he told Hunter that he had heard something strange up on Cloud-Stopper Peak, which the Mil-gahn call Picacho.

The next day Hunter and Buzzard together went to the mountain. The woman was up there, but she was crying. The mountain was very steep, and she didn’t know how to get back down. When he heard that, Buzzard remembered that there was a medicine man in the east who was good at getting women. He flew off and returned with Ceremonial Clown.

Clown called to the woman. He looked so funny and said such funny things that the woman stopped crying and started laughing. Then Clown got some seeds out of his medicine bag, planted them, and he began to sing. While he sang, the seeds began to grow into a gourd plant, which grew up the side of the mountain. After four days, when it was tall enough, Clown climbed up it and carried the woman down.

So Hunter had his sister back, and the people who hated them stayed away. But one day Hunter said, “Let’s go far away from this place. I will become Falling Star. When people see me, the earth will shake, and people will know something terrible is going to happen.”

His sister agreed. “I will be Morning Star, and come up over there in the east. If people are alert and industrious, they will be up early enough to see me and say to each other, ‘It is morning. Look, there is the morning star.’”

And that, my Friend, is the story of Falling Star and Morning Star.

Like Margaret Danielson, Ernesto Tashquinth had been laid off six months earlier from the Hecla mining operation on the Papago Reservation southwest of Casa Grande. The bottom had dropped out of the copper market. Mines all over Arizona were closing for good.

From the time he was a baby, Ernesto’s mother, a Papago married to a Gila River Pima from Sacaton, had called her son S-abamk or Lucky One. Stories about Ernesto Tashquinth’s continuing good fortune followed him everywhere-through his sojourn at the Phoenix Indian School and during his stint in the army. That luck was once again holding true back home on the reservation.

Ernesto had been laid off from the mine along with many others at a time when job opportunities were scarce, but he had somehow managed to finagle his way into a position with the Arizona Highway Department. It wasn’t a particularly wonderful job by some standards, but it paid reasonably well, and the work was steady. With truck and tools provided for him, Ernesto’s job was to clean rest rooms, tidy up the grounds, and empty trash cans at rest areas along I-10 between Tucson and Cottonwood.

Ernesto much preferred this kind of solitary work to the dusty hubbub of the open pit mine. He enjoyed being by himself and setting his own pace. Of all the rest areas on his route, he liked the one at Picacho Peak best. For one thing, it was off the road by a few hundred yards. Without such easy access, it was usually less crowded than the others. Occasionally, the parking lot stayed empty the whole time Ernesto was working there. When that happened, he was free to let his mind wander back through the old stories his great-grandfather used to tell him, especially tales about Cloud-Stopper Mountain.

During those hot early summer days, while cleaning up other people’s garbage and wiping down the shit they sometimes smeared on rest-room floors and walls, Ernesto Tashquinth was dealing with some pretty heavy shit of his own. Straight out of high school, he had been drafted into the army and shipped off to Vietnam as an infantryman. The fact that he had returned home without so much as a scratch on his body had also been attributed to his incredibly good luck.

Unlike some of his buddies, Ernesto hadn’t been physically hurt, but he had seen plenty. His scars, none of which were visible, came in part from luck-from being one vital step away from the land mine that had blown away his best pal’s limbs and life. They came from seeing a tiny dying child, enemy or not, burned to a crisp by napalm. They came from the sounds and smells of a faraway war that still haunted his dreams and disturbed his sleep.

As the year’s summer sun warmed the Arizona desert, it warmed Ernesto as well-cleansing him somehow, driving the horrors he had experienced out of his heart and mind, gradually singing his spirit back to life. There was much to be said for the old ways his great-grandfather had told him about, and much to be learned from them as well.

By midmorning that June Saturday, Ernesto finished cleaning the two rest rooms and was coming outside to empty the trash when he saw a pair of buzzards circling high over one of the springs near the base of the mountain. As his desert forbears would have done, Ernesto wrinkled his nose and sniffed the air. If something was dead or dying up there on the mountain, the odor had not yet reached the picnic area. That was good. It would be better for him to go investigate now, to find whatever it was and get rid of it right away, rather than waiting until someone told his supervisor about it.

Assuming the carrion to be from a dead animal, Ernesto armed himself with a shovel and a large plastic trash bag. He had played on this mountain as a child, and knew the series of hidden springs that dotted Picacho Peak’s forbidding and seemingly barren flanks. He hurried to the concealing grove of trees with no trouble. Reaching them, he was surprised to find there was still no identifiable odor.

That told him the kill was relatively fresh. If the putrid odor of dead flesh had permeated the hot desert air, those buzzards would no longer be circling.

The first thing Ernesto saw through the sheltering curtain of mesquite trees was a glimpse of bare, sunburned leg. Thinking he’d stumbled upon a devoted sunbather, Ernesto’s first instinct was to turn quickly and go back the way he’d come, but something about the leaden stillness of that bright pink leg told him otherwise.