What was the matter with him? What was he thinking or Brandon felt sorry for both his parents. His father's erratic behavior seemed to bother his mother far more than it did Toby himself. Louella Walker was someone who prided herself on keeping things "under control." In this case, it wasn't working. She vacillated between rage and despair.
Sometimes she made excuses, saying that there' was nothing at all wrong with Toby, that he just needed a little extra help. If Brandon were any kind of a decent son, he wouldn't begrudge his father that much.
At other times, she raged and railed that Toby was deliberately trying to drive her crazy.
If there was a middle ground in all this, Brandon wasn't able to find it. The role of parental peacemaker and crisis manager at home was a painful one. He didn't want to call home and hear either his mother's panicked tattling or her self-pitying whine. It was no surprise that Detective Walker hid out in his work. He wanted to be left alone, to go about living his life in a reasonable semblance of peace and quiet, to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.
The cubicle was far homier than home was. He would stay late at the office again tonight, doing whatever mundane tasks he could dredge up to do, coming home long after dinner and hopefully long after his parents had gone to bed as well. That way he wouldn't have to listen either to his mother, who talked more and more, or watch his father, who spoke less and less.
With a sigh, Brandon dropped the six messages into his trash can.
Telling the clerk to hold all his calls, he pulled out the half-completed form he had started filling out earlier that morning, the one that recounted the unexpected death of Aaron Monford. Once, not so long ago, these very same reporting forms would have been anathema to him, something to be avoided entirely or put Off as long as possible.
Now, they were a refuge.
There were blanks on the paper-finite, measurable, boxed blanks on sturdy white paper-where clear-cut answers to simple questions were all that was required. He took more care with his penmanship these days, as though neatness and legibility were somehow next to godliness, as though his third-grade teacher might rise up from her grave and look over his shoulder again, checking the slant of each individual letter and measuring the crosses on each t.
Even as he was doing it, Brandon Walker was smart enough to step back and know why.
In a world where fathers become children again, writing a report is sometimes the only thing that makes sense.
Chapter Two
WITH A JOLT, the pickup lumbered over the rough cattle guard that marked the reservation boundary. Davy sat up straight, eager to see one of his favorite landmarks-a faded billboard advertising the tribal rodeo.
Rita had taken him twice.
"Can we go again this year, Nana DahP" he asked, pointing at the sign.
"It's fun."
"We'll see," she answered, shifting down while the pickup lurched drunkenly to one side.
"How come my mom stopped liking rodeos?" Davy asked. "She used to like them, didn't she?"
Nana Dahd looked at him shrewdly. "Why do you ask that?"
The boy shrugged and bit his lip, thinking about the picture that hung in the hallway. Smiling and surprisingly beautiful, his much younger mother was dressed up like a cowgirl with a jeweled tiara overlaying the feathered hatband of her Stetson. Looking at the picture, it was easy for Davy to imagine that long ago his mother had been a princess-a rich, happy princess. Of course, they weren't rich now, and his mother didn't seem to be very happy, either. He wondered sometimes if her unhappiness was all his fault.
"I saw her boots once," he added after a pause. "Pretty ones with diamonds on them. Bone and I found them in the back of her closet.
They're gone now."
The last was said matter-of-factly, but Rita heard the hurt beneath the words. Rhinestones, she thought to herself, not diamonds, but rhinestones. And yes, the boots were gone now, put away in one of the stacked boxes in the root cellar off the kitchen where Davy wouldn't see them again and be tempted to ask more questions. Only Olhoni's impassioned pleading had spared the picture of his mother as a seventeen year-old rodeo queen from disappearing into the same box.
Davy lapsed into uncharacteristic silence, his endless stream of questions quieted for the moment. Rita understood that many of the boy's questions were still too painful for his mother to face or answer, but it was time they were asked.
"You'll have to talk to your mother about that," Rita said.
Davy sighed. If Nana Dahd wouldn't tell him, he might never know. "I did ask her," he said. "She was too busy."
The truck's turn signals hadn't worked for years. Rita stuck her arm out the open window, signaling for a left-hand turn. Davy sat up straight and peered out the window.
"Where are we going now?" he asked.
"Up this road," Rita replied, turning onto a rutted, hardpacked dirt track that led off through the underbrush. Barely one car-width wide, the narrow trail wound through thick stands of newly leafed mesquite and brilliantly yellow palo Verde, up a slight rise, and then down through a dry, sandy wash. As the tires caught in the hubcap-deep sand, the steering wheel jerked sharply to the left. Rita clung to it with both hands and floorboarded the gas pedal, barely managing to maintain the truck's forward momentum.
Engine rumbling, the pickup emerged from the wash.
Ahead of them, the road gave little evidence of day-today use.
Whatever faint tire tracks may have preceded theirs had long since been obliterated by the hoofprints of wandering herds of cattle. A second dip in the road took them through a second dry wash. Beyond that, the long beside an empty streambed through clumps of brittle, sun-dried grass and weeds.
They drove past a place where the remnants of several adobe houses were gradually melting back into the desert floor. "Did this used to be a village?" Davy asked.
Rita nodded. "It was called Ko'oi Koshwa."
"Rattlesnake Skull?" Davy asked.
The old woman smiled and nodded. The Anglo child's quick grasp of Rita's native language always pleased her.
"Where did the people go?" he asked.
"Long ago, the Apaches came here. They surprised the village and destroyed it. They took most of the women and children away, although two--a boy and a girl--escaped. They hid in a cave up there in those hills."
Rita pointed to where the base of the mountain loligam, Kitt Peak, abruptly thrust itself out of the flat desert floor.
"After that, people said this was a bad place, a haunted place. No one wanted to live here anymore. When they made the reservation, they left the charco which once belonged to the village outside the boundary."
Davy immediately began looking for the charco, a man-made catchbasin used by the Papagos to catch the nutrient-rich summer-rain flash floods.
For centuries, water captured in these isolated charcos irrigated Indian fields and watered livestock.
"But why are we going to a charco, Nana Dahd? I thought we were going to a dance."
Rita stopped the truck where a barbed-wire gate barred their way. "To the charco first. Go open the gate," she said.
Proud to be assigned such an important task, Davy did as he was told.
He stood to one side, holding the gate until Rita had driven through.
Once the gate was closed and he was back in the truck, they continued to follow the faint track, stopping at last just outside a shady grove of towering cottonwoods clustered around the man-made banks of an earthen water hole.
Hard-caked mud, baked shiny by an unrelenting sun and shot through with jagged cracks and the hoofprints of thirsty cattle, was all that remained from the previous summer's life-sustaining rainstorms. It was June and hot.