J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

In Diana Ladd’s mixed bag of fallen-away Catholic religion, suicides were never accorded full death benefits. She had told Gary’s parents to bury him wherever they liked, but as far as she was concerned, Garrison Ladd still didn’t qualify for a memorial wooden cross and never would.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?”

“You didn’t ask.”

Diana Lee Cooper and Garrison Ladd cuddled together on Diana’s narrow three-quarter bed nestled like a pair of stacked teaspoons. With his back pressed against the wall and his head propped up on one elbow, Gary’s other hand glided up and down Diana’s slender back. He liked the feel of smooth skin stretched taut over backbone and rib and the gentle curve of waist that melted into the small of her back. He liked fingering the matching indentations of dimples that marked the top of her buttocks. Most of all, he liked the fact that she didn’t warn his hand away from places most other girls wouldn’t let him touch.

Diana Lee Cooper lay on her side, head on a pillow, with one arm dangling loosely off the edge of the bed. Unsure of herself, Diana worried that perhaps it hadn’t been all Gary had expected. “Was I all right?” she asked.

Garrison Ladd laughed out loud. “It was more than all right.” He kissed the back of her neck. “The boys in Joseph must not have been paying attention.”

“The boys in Joseph called me names,” Diana replied grimly.

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head. The boys had called her names, but they were pikers compared to her father. Max Cooper was the champion name-caller of all time.

She turned so she could look Gary Ladd full in the face. Maybe this man who, like her, also hated his father, could help her decode her own, help her understand that looming darker presence who even now reached out across the state and attacked her with bruising words far worse than his punishing fists.

“My father was the worst,” she said, carefully controlling her voice. “‘Cunt’ happened to be his personal favorite.”

Gary Ladd shook his head in disbelief. “Your father called you that to your face?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

She suspected it was because calling her that robbed her of her books and dignity and cut her down to size. While she still mulled the question, Gary Ladd lost interest in the conversation. He rolled Diana over on her back so he could caress her full breasts and run his hands up and down the ladder of ribs above her smoothly flat abdomen. He twisted the curly auburn pubic hairs around the tips of his fingers and touched what lay concealed beyond those curiously inviting hairs.

He waited to see if she would object and move his probing fingers away. Some girls did, even after screwing their brains out, but Diana didn’t. She lay with her eyes closed, her body quiet and complacent beneath his touch. Diana Ladd was the girl of his dreams. How could he have been so lucky?

“What brought you to Eugene?” he asked, wanting to delay a little before taking her again. “How’d you get here?”

“By horse,” she answered.

He checked her expression to see if she was joking, but her face was unsmiling, impassive.

“Come on. You’re kidding. You rode all the way across Oregon from Joseph to here on a horse?”

“My mother got me the horse, a beautiful sorrel quarter horse,” she said. “His name was Waldo. Waldo was my ticket out of town.”

Diana came home from school carrying an armload of books, half of them textbooks and the others from the library. She found old Mr. Deeson’s pickup, with horse trailer attached, parked in front of their house. The presence of a neighbor’s pickup wasn’t particularly unusual. Chances were, Mr. Deeson had stopped off to unload some garbage, and her mother had invited him in for a cup of coffee or freshly baked cookies. She often encouraged customers to stop by for half an hour or so in order to stave off her ever-present loneliness.

Diana hurried past the trailer with its stamping load of horseflesh. In the kitchen, she found George Deeson and her mother chatting over coffee, just as she’d expected. What she hadn’t expected was the sudden silence occasioned by her arrival.

“There you are,” Iona said eagerly. “We’ve been waiting for you to come home. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“What kind of surprise?”

“Out front. I thought you’d want to unload him yourself.”

For a moment, Diana wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “Unload him?” she repeated. “You mean the horse? That’s the surprise?”

“Your Granddaddy Dale did me a favor once way back when,” George Deeson drawled. “I never did quite get around to paying him back once I got on my feet. My brother gave me this here horse out yonder, and Waldo-that’s his name by the way-was just standing around in my pasture, taking up room and eating my hay.

“The girl who had him before, my niece, I’m sorry to say, didn’t do justice by him a’tall. All she ever did was race barrels. Take him out, run him around those barrels hell-bent-for-election, and then lock him right back up in his stall. A good horse needs more than that, needs some companionship, needs some time off. Know what I mean?”

Diana nodded, but she didn’t understand, not really. George Deeson continued on as though she did.

“It occurred to me that maybe you folks could make good use of him. What do you think, girl? Would you like a horse?”

Diana staggered to the table and put down her load of books. She had long ago shed the childish dream of ever having a horse of her own. The Coopers simply didn’t have the money. Not only was there the initial purchase price, there was also the ongoing expense of feed and upkeep and tack. In addition, Max Cooper had told his daughter over and over again that he didn’t like horses and wouldn’t ever have one on his place.

“We can’t afford it, can we, Mother?”

“I already told you, girl, that there horse is free,” George put in. “You don’t have to pay a dime for him. I’ve got the papers right here in my pocket, all ready to sign over to you.”

“We’ll manage,” Iona told her daughter firmly. “You just sign the papers and don’t worry about it.”

“But what’ll Daddy do? He always said. .”

“Never mind what your father said,” Iona countered. “I’ll handle him. You go ahead and sign the papers.”

Within minutes, the bill of sale was signed, and Waldo, a registered quarter-horse gelding, belonged to Diana Lee Cooper.

“I reckon we’d otta go unload him now,” George Deeson said. “He’ll ride in a trailer all right as long as it’s movin’, but he don’t much like standin’ around being cooped up in ’em for very long afterward. Me neither, if you know what I mean, missus.”

George Deeson picked up his battered straw hat from the floor next to his chair and led the way out to the pickup and trailer. Waldo came complete with a whole set of tack-horse blankets, two saddles, and several bridles, all of which George Deeson unloaded in a heap on the Coopers’ front porch.

“Are you sure all this comes with the horse?” Diana asked.

“Sure, I’m sure,” he told her. “Now your mama said we should take Waldo and all his stuff out to the old barn. She says she’s fixed him up a stall.”

George eased the horse out of the trailer and handed the reins over to Diana. “You’d better try leadin’ him. He’ll need to be gettin’ used to you, and you’d better plan on spendin’ plenty of time with him, too.”

Diana led the way around to the old barn where a newly cleaned stall was waiting. When had her mother had time to do so much extra work along with all the other things that demanded her attention?