J Jance - Queen of the Night

Today the Anglo man had driven off into the desert and then had come back out again, but so had another vehicle, one whose tracks Dan didn’t recognize. That one, too, had turned off the road and then come back. So it might be worthwhile to check into that later, but right now he wanted to head on south.

After the Gadsden Purchase divided the Tohono O’odham’s ancestral lands, the Desert People had pretty much ignored the international border, crossing back and forth at will, especially at a place on the reservation known as The Gate. All that had changed in the aftermath of 9-11. As border security tightened in other places, immigration and smuggling activities had multiplied on the reservation, bringing with it far more official scrutiny from Homeland Security, most especially from the Border Patrol.

Now, as Dan Pardee did every other time he was on night shift, he drove to The Gate first. Then, during the course of the night and the remainder of his shift, he would work his way back north.

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

79º Fahrenheit

Donald Rios had told Delphina that he’d come by the house in Sells at seven to pick them up and go to the dance. By six, Delphina was showered and dressed. By six-thirty, she had bathed Angie, dressed her, and carefully braided her daughter’s straight black hair. Then Delphina sat back to worry while Angie settled in to watch Dora the Explorer on the TV set in the living room.

Maybe he won’t come, Delphina worried as she sat at the kitchen window and stared out at the empty yard. Maybe he’ll stand us up.

That belief, of course, was a holdover from her days with Joaquin Enos, who had never been a man of his word. With Joaquin, even the smallest promise was made to be broken. He had been handsome enough to appeal to a fifteen-year-old and had thought nothing of knocking her up, but he hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with her or Angie once the baby was born.

So now all of Delphina’s old insecurities kicked in: What if Donald didn’t come after all? She had already told Angie that they were going to the dance. Would they have to go alone? Was there enough gas in the pickup to make it all the way to Vamori and back? When the clock turned over seven o’clock and Donald still wasn’t there, Delphina plunged into a fit of disappointment. He wasn’t coming. All men were just alike, and Donald Rios was as bad as the rest of them.

Then, at a quarter to eight, almost an hour after he was supposed to be there and after Delphina had already given Donald Rios up for lost, he drove into her yard. She had the porch light on and she could see that his Chevy Blazer was shiny and freshly washed. With all the dust in the air, people on the reservation considered the act of washing a car either as an exercise in futility or as a deliberate rain dance.

When he knocked, Angie abandoned her pal Dora and went racing to the door to let him in. Donald Rios was a large man. Standing on the shaky wooden step outside Delphina’s door, he looked more than a little silly in his dress-up boots and shirt, holding a child’s pink-and-yellow pinwheel in one hand and a wilted handful of grocery-store flowers in the other.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he said with an apologetic smile, handing the pinwheel to Angie and the flowers to Delphina. Angie took her present and raced back to the TV set with barely a thank-you while Delphina opened the door and ushered him inside.

“Indian time?” she asked, accepting the proffered flowers. She didn’t have a proper vase, so she put the flowers in a water glass and set them on the kitchen counter.

Donald laughed sheepishly. “I had to do something for my mother,” he said. “If it had been real Indian time I would have been a lot later. Are you ready to go?”

Delphina nodded.

“Oi g hihm,” Donald called to Angie. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t need to say so twice. Pinwheel in hand, Angie came on the run, ready to do just that-clamber into his Blazer and go.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 p.m.

81º Fahrenheit

Jack Tennant was relieved when Abby emerged from the bedroom wearing a turquoise-colored pantsuit and a pair of sandals. He wouldn’t have objected if she’d turned up in a dress and heels, but he knew the slacks would make for an easier wardrobe change when it came time to slip on the jumpsuit. Abby still had a fair amount of midwestern modesty about her. Stripping down and getting naked or nearly naked in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t come easily.

That wasn’t to say it wouldn’t ever happen. With women you never could tell. Jack had the air mattress along just in case his powers of persuasion outstripped Abby’s objections. After their sweet afternoon nap interlude, what they did later on that evening to celebrate their anniversary was no longer such a pressing issue, at least not as far as Jack was concerned.

When they got in the car, Jack insisted that Abby put on the blindfold, and she was a good sport about it. Hoping to keep their destination secret for as long as possible, he headed west on I-10 toward Marana rather than going south through town. In Marana he turned off on Sandario Road. That was as much as Abby could take.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” she said, whipping off the blindfold. “Where in the world are you taking me?”

The jig was up.

“To the reservation,” he said. “Out beyond Sells.”

“But there aren’t any restaurants-” She stopped abruptly because she got it. “You found one, didn’t you,” she said accusingly, but beaming as she spoke. “You found a night-blooming cereus out in the desert somewhere. That’s where we’re going!”

Jack nodded, because Abby was right, up to a point. After months of using his phantom foursome to cover his activities, after asking and gaining permission to explore various people’s lands both on the reservation and off it, Jack hadn’t found just “a night-blooming cereus.” He believed he had found what might be the granddaddy of them all!

The deer-horn cacti on display at Tohono Chul sometimes had as many as seven or eight blooms on them. This one, an old giant that had wound its way up into an ironwood tree, had at least a hundred buds on it. Jack had been afraid something would go wrong. Maybe the plants growing in the wild would be on a different schedule from the ones in captivity, as it were. So he had come out and checked on the buds on his plant and then had made secret visits to Tohono Chul to make sure the buds there seemed to be progressing along the same schedule. And they had. They were.

He was sure that tonight when the flowers bloomed in the garden, the ones in the desert would be blooming as well. There, hundreds of people would be in attendance. Here, there would be only Jack and Abby and maybe Thomas Rios’s son, Donald, who was about to become engaged himself. When Thomas had told him about that and asked if Jack would mind if Donald and Delphina stopped by for a little while to see the flowers, Jack hadn’t had the heart to object. After all, this was Thomas Rios’s land to begin with.

“Absolutely,” he had said heartily. “The more the merrier.”

And he had meant it, too. He had made sure there was enough food for everyone and extra dishes and silverware just in case. He worried a little about the wine. He knew you weren’t supposed to have liquor on the reservation, so he might wait to pour that until after Donald and his girlfriend left to go to a dance. There would be a full moon tonight. There would be plenty of time for him and Abby to savor the flowers, the night, and the claret.

Abby reached over and gently lifted Jack’s hand off the steering wheel. She held the back of it to her lips, kissed it, and then returned it to the steering wheel.