Well after noon, she finally completed the last of the stapling and emerged into a strangely deserted hallway. Laden with an armload of slippery paper, she was surprised to find the door to the English Department closed and locked. A hastily hand-penciled note tucked in one corner of the darkened window announced, CLOSED UNTIL MONDAY. H. F. HUNSINGTON.
“Closed?” she demanded of the inexplicably darkened window and empty hallway. “What do you mean, closed?”
Diana looked around and found herself absolutely alone. Where had everyone gone? Her first reaction was that maybe her father’s dire predictions of nuclear holocaust had come true, and everyone had disappeared into bomb shelters, but she quickly talked herself out of that one. Had nuclear warfare broken out, surely she would have heard sirens or some other kind of audible warning. There had been nothing.
As a dollar-an-hour, fifteen-hour-a-week work-study student, Diana Cooper had no key to the University of Oregon’s English Department office. What was she supposed to do with all the dittos she had run off, she wondered, take them home with her? On her bike?
That was crazy. The office had been full of people earlier when she left for the ditto room-Dr. Hunsington, his secretary, the receptionist, and a whole collection of professors, instructors, and teaching assistants, all milling around the receptionist’s desk, waiting to collect their daily quota of departmental mail to say nothing of their semimonthly pay checks. So where were they now?
She started to leave the dittoed papers by the locked door while she went to find someone with a key. She quickly discarded that idea. Several exams had been entrusted to her for dittoing purposes that morning. Diana took her charge of exam security very seriously, and she was unwilling to let the tests out of sight for even a moment. Taking the entire stack with her, she started down the hall.
Halfway down the long corridor, she heard the echo of solitary footsteps coming up the stairs at the far end. Diana was immensely relieved when Gary Ladd, one of the teaching assistants, materialized out of the stairwell. He turned immediately and started toward his office in the T. A. bullpen at the far end of an adjacent wing.
“Mr. Ladd,” Diana called. “Yoo-hoo.”
He stopped, turned, and came back toward her, his head cocked questioningly to one side. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought everybody went home.”
Garrison Walther Ladd, III, was by far the best-looking male teaching assistant in the English Department’s stable. With aquiline, tanned good looks and lank blond hair, he wore expensive but rumpled clothing with offhand, upper-class ease. Garrison Ladd knew he was hot stuff. Breathless coeds who came within his sphere of influence found him irresistible. They tended to hie themselves off in search of obliging physicians willing to issue prescriptions for birth-control pills.
This was Diana’s second year as an undergraduate student assistant in the English Department at the U. of O. During that time she, too, had admired Gary Ladd, but only from afar. For one thing, she had convinced herself that someone from Joseph, Oregon, could never be in Gary Ladd’s league. For another, he was a graduate student while she was only a lowly sophomore.
He looked at her now with his tanned brow furrowed into a puzzled frown. “Why didn’t you go home when everybody else did?”
“I’m working,” she said. “At least I’m trying to work. I’ve got this whole stack of papers to deliver, but the door to the office is locked. Do you have a key? Where’d everybody go?”
Gary Ladd reached into a jacket pocket, extracted a key ring, then took two steps down the hallway before stopping and turning on Diana. “Nobody told you, did they?”
“Told me what?” she returned. “I’ve been in the ditto room. When I came out, everything was closed up. Even the classrooms are empty. What’s going on?”
“Somebody shot President Kennedy.”
“No!”
The very idea was incredible, unthinkable. Assassinations happened in other parts of the world-wild, terrible, jungle-filled places like South America or Africa-but not here in the good old U.S. of A. “Where?” she managed to stammer. “When?”
“This morning. In Dallas. They already caught the guy who did it.”
“Is he all right?”
Garrison Ladd looked mystified. “He’s fine. They’ve got him in jail.”
“No, not him. I mean President Kennedy. Is he all right?”
Gary Ladd shook his head, while his gray-blue eyes darkened in sympathy. “He’s dead, Diana. President Kennedy is dead. They just swore in LBJ on the plane headed back to Washington. Come on. Let’s go drop off your papers. They must be heavy.”
An Indian Health Services nurse hovered over Rita’s bed-bound form, but the old woman’s mind was far away in another time and place.
Dancing Quail hid behind her mother’s full skirts as the horse-drawn wagon pulled up beside the low-slung adobe house. It was the end of Shopol Eshabig Mashad, the short planting month. For days the children of Ban Thak had worried that soon Big Eddie Lopez, the tribal policeman, would come to take many of them away to boarding school.
Seven-year-old Dancing Quail didn’t want to leave home. She didn’t want to go to school. Some of the other children had told her about it, about how they weren’t allowed to speak to their friends in their own language, about how they had to dress up in stiff, uncomfortable clothing.
Her parents had argued about school. Alice Antone, who sometimes worked for the sisters at Topawa, maintained that education was important. Joseph Antone disagreed, taking the more traditional view that all his daughter really needed to know was how to cook beans and make tortillas, how to carry water and make baskets-skills she would learn at home with her mother and grandmother and not at the boarding school in Phoenix.
But when Big Eddie’s horse plodded into Ban Thak, Joseph Antone was miles away working in the floodplain fields. Big Eddie came over to the open fire where Alice stirred beans in a handmade pottery crock.
He wiped the sweat from his face. “It sure is hot,” he said. “Where is your husband?”
“Gan,” Alice said, nodding toward the fields. “Over there.”
“Will he be home soon?” Big Eddie asked.
“No,” she answered. “Not soon.”
“I have come for the children,” Big Eddie announced. “To take them to Chuk Shon to catch the train.”
Dancing Quail had been to Tucson once with her mother and had found the town noisy and frightening. They had gone to sell her grandmother’s ollas-heavy, narrow-necked pottery crocks that kept water sweet and cool even through the heat of the summer. Alice had walked the dusty streets carrying a burden basket piled high with ollas, while Dancing Quail had trailed along behind. Once home in Ban Thak, the child had not asked to go again.
Quietly now, Dancing Quail attempted to slip away, but Alice stopped her. “Ni-mad. Daughter, come back. Go quickly and get your other dress. You are to go with this man. Hurry. Do not make him wait.”
The huge policeman looked down at Dancing Quail with considerable empathy. He, too, had been frightened the first time he left home for school. Dancing Quail was one of those children who would have to be watched closely for fear she might run away before they could put her on the train. It would be better if Dancing Quail weren’t the first child he loaded into the wagon.
“Give her something to eat,” Big Eddie said. “I will go get the others. It won’t be so bad if she’s not the only one.”
He climbed back into the wagon and urged the waiting horse forward. Alice turned to her daughter, who still hadn’t moved. “Go now,” she said. “Roll your other dress in your blanket.”
“Ni-je’e,” Dancing Quail began. “Mother, please. .”
Alice stopped her with a stubborn shake of her head. “The sisters say you should go. You will go.”