J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

Dancing Quail considered the offer for several long moments. Without men to look after their fields and livestock, she and Understanding Woman had struggled desperately just to survive. White man’s money was the key, and the girl knew it.

“How would I get her there?” she asked. “My grandmother is old. It’s a long way from Coyote Sitting to Burnt Dog Village.”

“Don’t worry,” Father John told her. “Pack your things. In two days, I’ll come back and take both of you in my car.”

Dancing Quail was dubious. “What if she won’t go?”

But the old woman surprised everyone and voiced no objection. It was time her granddaughter married. Burnt Dog Village offered far more potential suitors than Coyote Sitting.

With Dancing Quail’s help, Understanding Woman began to pack. One by one, she gathered her possessions and placed them in two old-fashioned crossed-stick burden baskets. The most treasured item was Understanding Woman’s only remaining medicine basket, the last one she had made before her eyesight failed.

“Ni-ka’ amad,” Understanding Woman said. “Granddaughter, do you still have the medicine basket I gave you that time?”

Dancing Quail hung her head in shame, grateful for once for her grandmother’s blindness. She had never admitted to anyone how she had lost Understanding Woman’s beautifully colored spirit rock or how the school attendants had taken the medicine basket away from her as soon as they found it rolled up in her blanket. They had confiscated it, and she never saw it again.

“No, ni-kahk, ” Dancing Quail said softly. “No, Grandmother. I lost it long ago.”

She was afraid her grandmother would think she hadn’t appreciated the gifts, hadn’t treated them with proper respect.

“The rock, too?” Understanding Woman asked.

“The rock, too.”

For a time, the old woman sat fingering that final medicine basket. It wasn’t nearly as well made as earlier ones had been. The seams were crooked. Some of the weaves were as rough-edged as if the work had been done by a rank beginner. Rough or not, though, this had been her own special basket, the one she had kept entirely to herself. Instead of packing it along with her other household goods, she placed it on the ground beside her.

“It does not matter, ni-ka’ amad, ” Understanding Woman said. “I will teach you to make another.”

The next day, when Father John drove up in his spindle-wheeled touring car, the two women waited outside their adobe house with two fully loaded burden baskets standing between them.

“Ready?” he said.

In the two years since first coming to the reservation, Father John had learned to speak some Papago. He sensed that the old woman had never ridden in an automobile before and that she was anxious about it.

Dancing Quail went to load the burden baskets while Father John eased Understanding Woman to her feet and helped her to the car. “Are you afraid, Grandmother?” he asked.

The old woman shook her head. “No,” she answered, although her voice quivered. “I am not afraid.”

Just then something slipped from her hand. She gasped and bent to retrieve it, but the small basket rolled out of the car onto the ground, spilling as it fell.

Father John quickly gathered the fallen basket and its scattered contents, scooping things back into it almost without looking-a tiny straw doll with a strange clay face, a small fragment of broken geode, and something that looked like a hank of human hair, a chipped arrowhead. The old woman’s hands were still desperately searching the floorboard of the car when Father John placed the restored basket safely under them.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” he asked.

Understanding Woman nodded gratefully and clutched the basket to her shriveled breast as though it were a precious newborn baby.

“Yes,” she murmured, settling back. “Thank you.”

Rita had no idea Juanita had gone home. When she opened her eyes, she saw a brown-robed figure sitting there in her sister’s place, head bowed in the afternoon sun. She knew at once who it was, although she hadn’t seen him for twenty years. In the mid-fifties, she had gone to San Xavier for a Saint Francis feast and run into him by accident not realizing that after years in California, he had transferred back to the Papago.

Unaware she was awake, Father John’s beads clicked quietly in liver-spotted hands as he intoned a whispered rosary in her behalf. Silently, she examined every minute detail of him-parchment-like skin stretched across bony knuckles, sparse hair white now rather than the color of dried grass. Like his hands, the bald place on his head was dotted with large brown spots. Underneath the brown cassock, he was precariously thin.

He’s old now, too, Rita thought. We’re both old. She said, “Are you still trying to save my soul?”

Father John’s head jerked up at the sound of her voice. “And mine,” he answered quietly. “Yours and mine.”

She turned her face to the wall, surprised that after all this time unbidden tears still sprang to her eyes at the mere sound of his voice. What was he doing here in the hospital room with her? How had he found her? She had never asked for his help. Who had called him?

“Your sister called me,” he said, answering the unspoken question. “After what happened to Gina years ago, I asked Juanita to let me know if anything. .”

“Go away,” Rita said, refusing to turn and face him again.

“But. .”

“Go away,” she insisted.

She heard the heavy swish of his robe as he rose to his feet. Beads rattled when he dropped them into a pocket.

“If there’s ever anything I can do. .”

Still she didn’t look at him.

“Ni-gm hu wabsh oan,” he began. “Forgive me. Dancing Quail, please forgive me.”

Rita didn’t answer. Father John left, closing the door gently behind him. Afterward, Rita tried to blot him from her mind, but he wouldn’t leave. He was there, walking around in her soul, not as he was now, old and liver-spotted, but young again, tall and straight, with a headful of palomino-colored hair.

Before he visited the storage locker, Andrew Carlisle stopped at Woolworth’s and bought himself a long blond wig, a selection of makeup, and some suitable women’s clothing, including a frilly blouse, an obscenely padded bra, and a pair of thongs. He had concluded it would probably be best if a woman showed up at the locker, and the clothing would come in handy for his private fund-raising program later on in the day.

The wig served a dual purpose. It concealed his newly achieved baldness, and it also protected the tender, underexposed skin from the glaring June sun. The few minutes he’d spent outside at Picacho Peak had given him a good start on a painful sunburn.

He used a discreet stop at a gas station to change clothes. He went into the men’s room as a man and came out as a woman. Fortunately, no one was watching, but when he arrived at U-Stor-It-Here off Fort Lowell and Alvernon, Andrew Carlisle almost laughed aloud at his having taken such elaborate precautions. The woman in the RV-turned-office waved him through the open gate without a second glance, no questions asked.

Carlisle enjoyed the anonymity of being a nameless, faceless woman as he sorted through the locker and inventoried his own equipment. It was almost as if he were someone else checking through a stranger’s possessions.

The survival gear was all there. He opened the hasp-held lid on the metal fifty-five-gallon drum and looked through the freeze-dried food he kept there as well as the water-purification equipment and tablets. He had no intention of allowing the adventure of a lifetime to be short-circuited by a raging case of diarrhea brought on by drinking giardia-contaminated water.