She stared at me a long moment then, and was gone.
"
S
he didn't want to tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"She's wearing diapers."
"Ah."
"She's afraid all the excitement will get to her so she asked me if she could have one of mine."
"That was nice of you."
"You be safe now."
"I will. I promise."
"That little gal is my whole life. Always has been. I took care of her all through the Depression — she was always a sick little girl — but ever since, she's been taking care of me."
The kind of love he was expressing was something we don't see enough of on this weary old planet — pure, gracious, selfless. He'd given me a glimpse of them as children — I could see them in their Indian attire — and then as adults surviving one marriage each (neither had had any children) and then having a kind of pseudo-marriage together as sister and brother.
She sat in the rear cockpit of the plane now in her Snoopy helmet and goggles, all ready to go.
"We'll be fine, Iron Crow."
"Can I go say goodbye to her one more time?"
I made a face. "I'm sorry. No more visits permitted."
He looked horrified.
"I'm kidding, Iron Crow. Of course you can say goodbye to her."
He raised a beautiful Red Indian blanket he had laid across his right arm.
We walked through the buffalo grass. You could smell
autumn again on the late-morning air. The sky was almost cloudless and in the hills to the west an ancient red Ford tractor was plying the cornfields.
"How're you doing, Sis?" Iron Crow said.
"I'm not as scared as I was all night." She turned her Snoopy helmet and dusky goggles in my direction. "I couldn't sleep at all. I kept thinking that I was going to fall out of the plane."
"Silver Moon, you really don't have to go, you know," Iron Crow said. "Payne here won't mind."
"I sure won't, Silver Moon. You just do what makes you comfortable."
"I want to be able to talk about it at dinner tonight," she said. And then grinned with her gleaming store-boughts.
"And at a lot of dinners the rest of my life."
I smiled. "That seems reasonable."
"You eat dinner with the same people night after night," Iron Crow said, "it's nice to have something new to talk about once in a while."
"But if I start screaming," Silver Moon said.
"Yes?" I said.
"Will you take me down right away?"
"That's a deal. You start screaming, we come down right away."
"Maybe I'll enjoy myself," she said, utter terror narrowing her eyes and freezing her lips.
"I sure enjoyed myself," Iron Crow said, "and I didn't wet myself until after we came down."
She shot him a warning glance that I was sure had to do with the diapers I wasn't supposed to know about.
"Well, you ready?"
She glanced, horrified, at her brother.
He took the blanket and spread it over her legs and knees and then he leaned in and kissed her.
"You'll like it, Sis."
"I hope so."
"Just think of how jealous Running Deer will be when you tell her."
"That's true."
"So just relax."
"I'll try."
"And just keep your eyes squinched closed till you're up there. Going up and coming down are the scary parts, Sis. The rest is a lot of fun."
"I'm squinching my eyes shut right now," she said. But you couldn't see anything behind her smoky goggles.
"She's all yours, Payne," Iron Crow said. I wasn't sure if he meant his sister or the plane. Or both.
The gods of the air decided to give Silver Moon a little scare. They do stuff like that sometimes, like mischievous children who want to remind you of their existence.
We bucked some rough headwinds before we found some nice smooth going up over the piney hills.
I noted that she hadn't screamed yet, not even when we'd been fighting the headwinds.
"How're you doing?" I shouted back to her.
"This is the most wonderful experience of my life!"
This happens sometimes. People who hate to fly actually get up there and they don't want to come down. Of course, just as often, it happens the other way, too. People who hate to fly start begging you to take them down after only a few minutes.
We looked over the Grant Wood colors, red of barn, green of cornfield, fast dark blue of river, black-and-white of dairy cows, mahogany of horses in the hills, cool and deep shadow of forest, burnished gold of limestone cliffs.
Every few minutes, she'd shout, "I love this, Mr. Payne! I love this!"
She was sure going to have a lot of good new material for her friends.
We were just swooping down near the old dam, where a woman in red shorts and a white halter and summer-blonde hair was fishing from a battered green rowboat, when I saw, to the east along a mile stretch of gravel road running parallel to the river, Cindy Rhodes' personal car, a brown Dodge station wagon, traveling at a high rate of speed.
The Dodge wagon came to a T-intersection and then turned west. I had a terrible feeling that I knew what she was doing. Silver Moon leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. "You know how I said I didn't want you to try any fancy tricks?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, how about if you tried just one, just a real little one."
The sweetness she shared with her brother should be bottled and each of us, every man, woman and child on the planet, should partake of the fabulous elixir at least once a day.
"I'll do a real little one."
A sort of half-roll is what I did, the nice gentle tailwinds helping a lot, nothing spooky, just one more thing for Silver Moon to talk about.
"Would you do that one more time?" she said when I was done.
I laughed and did it again.
At the same time, I noticed the brown Dodge had pulled off the gravel road into some deep woods.
Cindy, in her khaki uniform, got out of the wagon and started into the trees. She was soon lost in shadow.
She was, I suspected, about to throw her life away, the life she'd built so carefully, so proudly for herself.
"Mr. Payne?" Silver Moon said when I came out of the half-roll.
"Uh-huh?"
"Just one more time. Please? Just one more time?"
I
n 1773, a man named Peter Pond came all the way from Connecticut to Ioway Territory to try his luck at making a fortune in the fur trade. Pond left a journal and it's quite a good one, filled with images of bark canoes laden with blankets, cloth, guns and powder that he and his companions hoped to trade with the Indians for buffalo hides, beaver, fox, and otter skins.
Seventeen days into their journey, Pond wrote down what may have been the new country's first "fish" story, though he got three men to sign his journal and testify to its veracity. Pond claimed that he caught three catfish weighing, respectively, seventy-five pounds, one hundred pounds and one hundred and four pounds. As Pond noted (in his most peculiar spelling), the fish fed twelve very hungry men and "Thay all Declared that they felt the Better for The Meale. Nor did I perseave that Eney of Them were Sick or Complained."
I always remember Pond whenever I'm out in the deeper forest because he felt an affinity for the shifting shadows and sweet scents and myriad life-forms you find in the woods — an affinity that bordered on the religious. "Worlds unto Their Own," as he remarks at one point. "And the Breath of God Hisself Sweet and Cool on yer back."
The woods surrounding the cabin where David Rhodes was holed up were nearly as sweet, shadowy and swarming with life, seen and unseen, as Pond had known them.
What always struck me about forests this deep — wild plum and wild cherry and box-elder and soft maple and Virginia creeper; walnuts and hackberries and cottonwoods and bur oak and steep clay ridges — was that some of it pre-dated even the dinosaurs of sixty-five million years ago. If that doesn't make you think about a cosmic creator of some kind, nothing ever will.
I came up over a grassy ridge on my haunches and down below, in a valley of prairie flowers giving way to prairie grasses now that late summer was upon us, there sat a crude wooden cabin that had been painted turd-brown.
All the shades were drawn. No radio, no TV played. Insects were loud in the stillness and rabbits thumped and thrashed in the long grasses nearby. Afternoon's shadows were deepening, tainted with the purple of coming dusk.
I was on a simple mission.
Or maybe not so simple, otherwise why would I not only have brought my Ruger along but have it in my right hand, ready?
A few scenarios played furtively through my mind: Cindy had come to the cabin door and he'd killed her and fled, hence the drawn shades and silence; Cindy had decided to capture him herself, getting him into her car before any other cops could hassle him; man and wife, they'd taken off together. In a fast car, Mexico was just two days away.
I started down into the valley, Ruger ready, winding my way through a steep stand of cedars and oaks, keeping a constant eye on the side window of the cabin for any sign of movement inside. Maybe they really were gone.
The closer I got to the cabin, the more evidence I found of teenagers using the place as a rendezvous point: rusty beer cans and Trojan packs that looked like red cut flowers, tiny insect-like marijuana roaches and pop bottles broken to saber-like points, and crumpled cigarette packs that dew had stained piss-yellow.
A voice. Female. Inside the cabin.
Not loud. Not anxious. Under control, even soft, but just loud enough to carry on the same breeze that also lofted the red-shouldered hawks I'd seen earlier.
Cindy. Talking. Voice through the screen.
Crouching, I ran across the clearing to the oak tree that stood at an angle to the front door. Only one way in and that was it.
I would have to assume two things. One, that the cabin door would be unlocked and two, that I could get through the door before David Rhodes — or Cindy, depending on her mood — could draw down on me.
I was uncomfortably sweaty and it wasn't from the heat; the temperature was in the low seventies. Mine was the sweat of anxiety. I could get killed, I could alienate Cindy forever. I didn't want to keep on thinking about last night but I couldn't help it. I hadn't tasted such sweet warm breath since the death of my wife, or felt such tender yearning breasts, or dozed and dreamt so comfortably afterward in the darkness. I had this obtrusive crush on her and I felt as awkward and untutored as a fourteen-year-old.
I ran across the clearing between tree and door.
I raised my foot, cop-style, kicked once hard at a spot just below the doorknob.
And charged forward — hoping that the big wooden slab of door would oblige me by popping inward.
The door slapped backward against the wall. A scream. A deeper voice, cursing.
I went through the doorway.
A snapshot: Rhodes in a straight-backed wooden chair at a small wooden table, reaching for his gun. Cindy grabbing a coffee pot to hurl it at me. They froze this way just long enough for me to get inside and impress on them the fact that I held a gun and they didn't.
"You sonofabitch," Rhodes said.
"Just stay where you are."
"Robert . . ." Cindy said.
"I want you out of here," I said.
She looked startled. "What?"
"Out of here. Back in town." I came deeper into the cabin. It appeared as if the Salvation Army had stopped by one day and unloaded some furniture they'd had in the basement for many long and dark years. The frayed plump couch and matching frayed armchair smelled of mildew and rot; the shaggy blue throw rug on the floor stank of animal urine of some kind. In one corner, there was a sink with rusty streaks down its white back, and a hotplate on the counter next to it. Two cans of Campbells tomato soup stood empty.
"What the hell are you talking about, Payne?" he said. "Why take her down with you, Rhodes? You've never done a damned thing for her. Why not let her go back to town so Gibbs won't know she was helping you."
"What I do is my business," Cindy said.
Rhodes said, "He's right."
He surprised me and I sensed he also surprised Cindy. You didn't expect such largesse from a man like Rhodes.
"You go back to town, Cindy," David said.
"Don't listen to him, David. This isn't any of his business." Rhodes shook his head. He looked older today, and tired, his gaunt handsome face strained with worry. He sat in his straight-backed chair, shoulders slouched, a beaten man. "Go on, Cindy. Now," he said.