"You say the woman was an Indian and the kid was an Anglo?"
"A regular towhead,,, the man answered. "And cute as a button."
"wonder if there isn't a story in this," his buddy said.
"you know, human interest. I'll talk to my features editor about it when I go back tomorrow. Maybe it's something I can use next week.
Once it gets hot around here, feature stories are tough to come by."
taking a patch of salt The speaker drained his shot glass, he wiped the excess from his hand with a napkin, and took a bite from the lime on the bar in front of him. "Ready for another?"
"You tell me. Is the Pope Catholic?"
Chapter Seven
BRANDON WALKER STRETCHED out full length on Diana Ladd's long but sagging couch, and wasn't sure which of the two woke him-the boy or the -dog which lay by the coffee table.
When the detective Opened his eyes, a pajama clad Davy was munching on a rolled-up flour tortilla and sharing an occasional bite with a grateful, tail-thumping dog. Bone lay with his bristly, sPike-haired head resting comfortably on the child's knee. Both the boy and the dog were staring intently, watching Brandon Walker's every move.
"Did your mom let you sleep over?" Davy asked.
The question brought Brandon Walker fully awake and put a rueful smile on his lips. "Not exactly."
By now, his mother would have discovered her thirty-four-year-old son's overnight absence and would be absolutely ripped. Louella had never come to terms with the idea that her son was a fully grown man.
Brandon had returned to the family home as a temporary measure in the bleak financial aftermath of his divorce.
Because of his father's failing health, that stopgap measure had stretched into a more or less Permanent arrangement.
There was no longer any discussion about Brandon moving into his own place, and most of the time he didn't mind.
After all, his parents needed him-his physical presence as well as his regular financial contributions. The only major drawback was the fact that his mother continued to treat him like an errant teenager.
"If your mom didn't let you, how come you're here then?" Davy asked thoughtfully.
"Because of your Mom," Walker answered. "She was worried about you and asked me to stay.
Just then the tiny travel alarm clock Diana had placed on the coffee table beside him went off with a shrill jangle.
Brandon quickly silenced it, hoping not to waken Diana.
They'd both had very little sleep.
"What's the clock for?" Davy asked.
"To wake me up," Brandon replied. "So I could wake VI you.
The detective sat up and put both feet on the floor. At once Bone raised his head and regarded the man warily. Brandon reminded himself not to make any sudden movements. Remembering the dog's violent attack on the Galaxy.
"Why?" the boy asked. "I'm already awake."
"I noticed," Brandon Walker responded, struck by Davy's precociousness.
The boy had to be around six, but he sounded older. His long, lank hair, so blond it was almost white, flopped down over one eye in sharp contrast to the other side with its round pink patch of bare, skin and ladder of stitches. The combination gave him an almost comic appearance, but the expression on his face was serious.
"How come you did that?"
"Did what?"
"You and Mom, woke me up all night?
"The doctor said not to let you sleep too long, or you might not wake up.
"He was wrong," the boy pointed out. "Are you hungry?
There's tortillas in the kitchen."
"Sure," Walker told him. "A tortilla sounds great.
The boy and dog trotted off to the kitchen, while Brandon Walker Stumbled into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. He was happy not encountering Diana anywhere along the way. He was puzzled by what had happened between them during the night, and he wasn't sure what to Say to her when next they met. Davy was back in the living room sitting On the couch with the dog at his feet when Brandon returned from the bathroom. A rolled tortilla on a paper towel lay on the coffee table.
"Hope You like peanut butter," Davy said. "That's what I like for breakfast- Tortillas with peanut butter."
Brandon tried a bite. The tortilla---delicious, delicate, and thin-was as transparent in spots as a piece of tissue paper.
"Will Rita be okay?" Davy asked.
Brandon tried to answer, but the very first bite of peanut butter had glued itself to the roof of his mouth. At the same time, a stony-eyed Diana Ladd entered the room on her way to the kitchen. “Coffee?" she asked on her way past.
Much to his dismay, all Brandon Walker could do was nod helplessly and point to his mouth. There's nothing like making an awkward moment impossible, he thought miserably. Nothing like it at all.
When Hunter returned, once more looking like a human being, the people were afraid of him.
and his sister lived together in peace, For a time, Hunter went to Wind Man, a powerful medicine man, and asked him to do something to Hunter. Wind Man blew and blew until he made a mighty dust devil.
Hunter's sister was out gathering firewood when Wind Man's dust devil caught her and took her far away. Hunter wailed for his sister for a long time. Finally, he went looking for her, but he couldn't find her anywhere.
Hunter called to his uncle Buzzard for help. Buzzard looked for her forfour days. He couldn't find her either, but he told Hunter that he had heard something strange up on Cloud-Stopper Peak, which the Mil-gahn call Picacho.
The next day Hunter and Buzzard together went to the mountain. The woman was up there, but she was crying.
The mountain was very steep, and she didn't know how to get back down.
When he heard that, Buzzard remembered that there was a medicine man in the east who was good at getting women. He flew off and returned with Ceremonial Clown.
Clown called to the woman. He looked so funny and said such funny things that the woman stopped crying and started laughing. Then Clown got some seeds out of his medicine bag, planted them, and he began to sing. While he sang, the seeds began to grow into a gourd plant, which grew up the side of the mountain. After four days, when it was tall enough, Clown climbed up it and carried the woman down.
So Hunter had his sister back, and the people who hated them stayed away. But one day Hunter said, "Let's go far away from this place. I will become Falling Star. When people see me, the earth will shake, and people will know something terrible is going to happen."
His sister agreed "I will be Morning Star, and come up over there in the east. If people are alert and industrious, they will be up early enough to see me and say to each other, 'It is morning. Look, there is the morning star."' And that, my Friend, is the story of Falling Star and Morning Star.
Like Margaret Danielson, Ernesto Tashquinth had been laid off six months earlier from the Hecla mining operation on the Papago Reservation southwest of Casa Grande. The bottom had dropped out of the copper market. Mines all over Arizona were closing for good.
From the time he was a baby, Ernesto's mother, a Papago married to a Gila River Pima from Sacaton, had called her son S-abamk or Lu&y One.
Stories about Ernesto Tashquinth's continuing good fortune followed him everywhere--through his sojourn at the Phoenix Indian School and during his stint in the army. That luck was once again holding true back home on the reservation.
Ernesto had been laid off from the mine along with many Others at a time when job opportunities were scarce, but he had somehow managed to finagle his way into a Position with the Arizona Highway Department.
it wasn't a particularly wonderful job by some standards, but it paid reasonably well, and the work was steady. With truck and tools provided for him, Ernesto's job was to clean rest rooms, tidy up the grounds, and empty trash cans at rest areas along 1-10 between Tucson and Cottonwood.