J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

“Ni-sihs,” Juanita said softly. “Elder Sister, how are you?”

“Thirsty, ni-shehpij ,” Rita answered, opening her eyes and speaking formally to her younger sister. “I sure am thirsty.”

The nurse had left a glass newly filled with crushed ice on the nightstand. Juanita ladled a spoonful of ice into Rita’s parched mouth.

“I must see S-ab Neid Pi Has,” Rita whispered as soon as she could speak again after swallowing the ice.

Instantly, Juanita Ortiz’s eyes hardened. S-ab Neid Pi Has, Looks At Nothing, was an aged, blind medicine man who lived as a hermit in Many Dogs, an almost-abandoned village just across the Mexican border from the rest of the reservation. He was a man who lived according to the old ways, who long ago had divorced himself from white man’s liquor, whose lungs smoked only Indian tobacco.

Juanita had converted from Catholic to Presbyterian as a young woman when she married Arturo Ortiz. She heartily disagreed when her son, Fat Crack, went off and joined the Christian Scientists, but at least, she conceded, he was Christian. Juanita staunchly drew the line at the idea of summoning a medicine man.

“Ni-sihs,” Juanita scolded disapprovingly. “Sister, you are in a hospital. Let the doctors and nurses take care of you.”

But Rita still remembered those three huge buzzards sitting with outstretched wings on the row of passing telephone poles. The Anglo doctors with their bandages and thermometers could fix her broken body perhaps, but those three ominous buzzards represented Forebodings, something that required the ministrations of a medicine man. They were symptomatic of a Staying Sickness-a disease that affects only Indians and one that is impervious to Anglo medical treatment with its hospitals, operating rooms, and bottles of pills.

“I must see Looks At Nothing,” Rita insisted stubbornly. “Please ask Fat Crack to go get him and bring him here.”

When Andrew Carlisle told his mother that he was going to Tucson to check on his storage locker, Myrna Louise wondered if he might go away and not come back. She made him a huge jar of sun tea and iced it down in a Thermos. Andrew always liked to do that, she remembered, to travel with lunches and drinks packed from home rather than stopping off someplace to buy meals. It made sense to travel that way, with prices in all the restaurants higher than a cat’s back.

She made him a good breakfast, too-toast and coffee and eggs over easy. He said he’d seen nothing but scrambled for years. Powdered scrambled. Those couldn’t be any too good.

He didn’t talk while he ate, and he didn’t look at her. Myrna Louise didn’t know what to do or say, so she hovered anxiously in the background, pouring more coffee into his cup long before it was empty, offering to make more buttered toast or fry a few more eggs.

“Look,” he said crossly, pushing his cup away before she could fill it again. “Don’t fuss over me, Mama. I can’t stand it when you fuss.”

Myrna Louise’s eyes clouded with tears, and she hung her head. “I was only trying to help,” she said, her voice quavering. “I mean, I don’t know how you expect me to act.”

He turned on the charm at once, a trick he’d been able to perform at will since childhood, forcing his mother to smile through her tears in spite of herself.

“Treat me like I just got back from Istanbul, Mama.”

“But I don’t know anything at all about Istanbul.”

He laughed. “Believe me. They probably don’t have over-easy eggs there, either.”

Diana brought a mug of coffee into the room and slammed it onto the coffee table in front of Brandon Walker. Davy, always attuned to his mother’s moods, looked at her guardedly.

“Are you mad, Mom?” he asked.

“I’m not mad at anybody, Davy,” she said, her tone contradicting the words. “Go get dressed. We’ll drive out to Sells and see how Rita is.”

Davy hurried away with the dog padding behind him.

“I’m sorry about last night, Diana,” Brandon began. “It’s just that, under the circumstances. .”

“Forget it,” she snapped, cutting him off in mid-apology. “It doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter, at least to him. It had been late at night, some time after they came back from getting Davy’s stitches. Davy was asleep in his bedroom, but the grown-ups were wide awake. They were sitting on the couch drinking lemonade and talking when the calm after the storm was suddenly too much. Diana dissolved into an unexpected squall of tears. It was natural for her to fall against Brandon Walker’s shoulder, natural for him to put a comforting arm around her. The electricity had been there for him from the first moment he laid eyes on the woman. Holding her that way brought it all back to him in a rush.

He wanted her. God, how he wanted her, just like he’d wanted her years earlier when he was still married and she was pregnant as hell. The sweet, clean, smell of her hair filled his nostrils. The touch of his fingertips on bare, smooth skin stirred his whole body and aroused a part of Brandon Walker that he kept on a very short leash.

He wasn’t sure when the comforting arm he’d draped around her shoulder evolved into a caress, or when exactly he began to kiss that soft, sweet-smelling hair, but he was painfully aware of her abruptly sitting up straight and pushing him away.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Go now, please. Just go away.”

He was almost glad she’d stopped it when she did, before things got out of hand. He wanted her, but not like this, not when she was at the end of her emotional rope. Brandon Walker wanted her, and he wanted Diana Ladd to want him back.

But in the aftermath of that one unexpected kiss, she was overtaken by a sudden fit of unaccountable fury. She accused him of taking unfair advantage and ordered him out of the house. Walker simply refused to leave. Telling her he wasn’t going to leave her alone with an injured child no matter what, he kicked off his shoes and stretched his long frame out full length on her living-room couch. Short of using a gun, that didn’t leave Diana many options. Still angry, she stalked off to bed.

During the night, they reached a truce of sorts. He insisted on getting up with her every time she went to check on Davy anyway. Finally, at five in the morning, she knuckled under and gave him an alarm clock. Now, though, awake and sipping coffee, she seemed angry again, and Brandon didn’t know what to do about it.

He looked around the room with its freshly stuccoed walls and open-beam ceilings, searching for a reasonable topic of discussion that would keep the conversation out of harm’s way.

Hanging on the wall behind the couch was a basket Brandon recognized as a Papago maze with I’itoi standing in the cleft at the top of the design. He had seen Papago baskets like that before, but this one was unusual in that the design work was done in red rather than the traditional black.

“Great basket,” he said.

Diana nodded. “It was a housewarming present from Rita when we first moved in here.”

“I’ve never seen a red one before.”

“They’re fairly rare,” she told him. “The color isn’t dyed; it comes from a yucca root. Killing live yuccas to make baskets doesn’t go over too well these days.”

“It suits the room,” he said stupidly, groping for something to say. “It goes with the rest of the house.”

Brandon Walker knew he must sound like a complete jackass, but talking about the basket seemed to have blunted the worst of Diana’s anger.

“You should have seen it when we first moved in,” Diana said. “It was awful. Rita was a huge help. Between the two of us, we managed to make the place habitable.”