Authors: John Saul
Brown Eagle was sitting alone on the bench, facing eastward, his eyes closed, his body held perfectly still Jed approached him almost warily, half expecting the old man’s eyes to open and fix accusingly on him. But Brown Eagle seemed not to be aware of his presence at all. When Jed sat down on the bench next to him, the old man never so much as moved a muscle.
Jed sat nervously at first, feeling the hardness of the stone beneath his buttocks, gazing around curiously. He studied the construction of the dome carefully, examining the peeled tree trunks that extended from the walls of the kiva inward to the heavy beams that had long ago been laid on the tops of the posts, and the smaller logs that lay crosswise above the main stringers. There was a geometric orderliness to the dome, and a sense of timelessness that came from the blackened patina of the old wood. Except for the patch of sunlight that shone through the hatch, moving slowly across the floor as the sun moved across the sky above, there was little clue to what was happening beyond the confines of the kiva, and as he sat next to his grandfather, Jed found his own mind begin to drift in strange directions.
His eyes fixed on the fire and he began to imagine he saw shapes dancing in the flames.
A drowsiness came over him, and he began to feel his eyelids grow heavy. When at last he opened his eyes again, the patch of sunlight had moved far across the floor.
“How do you like it?” he heard his grandfather ask.
“I—I don’t know,” Jed murmured. “I guess I must have fallen asleep.”
Brown Eagle regarded Jed with deep and impenetrable eyes. “You didn’t go to sleep. It’s something else that happens here. Something you won’t understand for years. Some people never understand it.” He stood up, stretched, then glanced down at Jed. “What do you say we go outside? Whatever happened to you is over now.”
A moment later, as they emerged into brilliant daylight, Jed blinked, then glanced at the sun. “Jesus,” he said. “I must have been in there almost three hours.”
Brown Eagle shrugged. “It happens.” Then he eyed Jed appraisingly. “You’ve grown. Not as big as your dad, but a lot bigger than any of the kids around here. Still, I see your mother in you.”
Jed’s voice took on a note of belligerence. “How come people can’t just look like themselves?”
Brown Eagle’s brows rose slightly. “What’s wrong with looking like your mother?” he asked mildly. “She was a beautiful woman, my little girl.” Then a flicker in Jed’s eyes made the Indian frown. “Is that why you came up here? To ask me about your mother?”
Jed felt nonplussed, as if his grandfather had looked right inside him. “I—I don’t know, really You remember Judy Sheffield?” Brown Eagle nodded. “I rode up with her this morning. We got to talking about the pueblo, and the tribe, and …” His voice trailed off as he began to flounder over his own words.
Brown Eagle ignored Jed’s discomfort. “I remember her I remember the first day she came up here. She started playing with some of the kids, and before you knew it, she was acting as if she’d been born here. She’s the kind who will always fit herself in anywhere she
happens to be.” His voice changed slightly, taking on a wistful tone. “There’s other kinds of people too,” he said. “Just the opposite of Judy Sheffield.”
“She likes to be called Judith now,” Jed broke in.
Brown Eagle’s head tipped slightly in acknowledgment of the boy’s words, but his penetrating eyes fixed on Jed’s own. “It’s your mother you want to talk about, isn’t it? Not Judith Sheffield.”
Jed’s breath caught—how had his grandfather known what was on his mind? But then his grandfather had always seemed to know things without being told. He nodded.
“Your mother was one of those other people—people who can never be happy,” Brown Eagle said. “No matter where they go, or who they’re with. She always had the feeling that everyone else was part of something, but that she was an outsider.” He stopped, placing a hand on Jed’s shoulder. “I think that’s why she did what she did, Jed. I think she finally figured out she wasn’t ever going to be happy—whatever that means—and just gave up.”
Jed glared angrily at the old man, shaking off his gnarled hand. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “It was a lot more than that. It was because of Dad, and everyone else down there.”
Brown Eagle shook his head, but refused to respond to Jed’s anger. “I’m not saying it was her fault. It was just the way things were. She was never happy here, and she was never happy in Borrego. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not me, and not your father. It was her nature. She wasn’t of the world, so she left it.”
Jed kicked at the dust beneath his feet, suddenly feeling frightened. His thoughts tumbled over one another as he recognized himself in his grandfather’s
words about his mother. Was the same thing going to happen to him too? Was he going to wake up some morning and just decide, to hell with it?
And then the specter of Heather Fredericks rose up in his mind once more, and with it a thought—one he voiced without even meaning to. “Maybe that’s what happened to Heather too.”
Brown Eagle’s eyes narrowed. “The girl who died in the canyon a few days ago?”
Jed nodded. “She killed herself.”
“Is that what they’re saying down in Borrego?” Brown Eagle asked. He shook his head. “It isn’t true. She didn’t jump because she wanted to.”
Jed eyed his grandfather suspiciously.
“No,” Brown Eagle went on, speaking almost to himself now. “She didn’t want to jump at all Someone made her do it.”
Jed’s brows drew together angrily. “That’s not what the cops said,” he challenged.
Brown Eagle shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what they said I was in the kiva when it happened. I saw it.”
Now Jed stared at his grandfather with open incredulity. “Come on,” he said. “If you were in the kiva, you couldn’t have seen it.”
Brown Eagle gazed at his grandson impassively. “Is that what you think?” he asked. “Well, perhaps if you came up here more often, and found out just who you are, you might think otherwise.”
Half an hour later, as they made their way back down the mesa, Judith finally decided the silence had lasted long enough.
“Well? What did you find out?”
Jed glanced at her. “From my
grandfather?”
he asked, his voice harsh, almost mocking. “Oh, I found out a lot. But not about my mom—about him! You know what? He’s nuts. Stark, raving nuts.”
Judith stared at him. Something, obviously, had happened. But what? Before she could ask him, Jed told her.
“You know what he said? He said Heather didn’t kill herself at all. He said someone killed her, and that he saw it. He was in the kiva, and he saw it. Don’t you just love it? Shit, the old man’s a complete whacko!”
Spurring his horse, he shot ahead, leaving Judith staring after him.
Jed glared angrily at his father. It was the morning after he’d been up to Kokatí with Jude. By the time he’d returned the day before, his father had already gone to work, and when Frank finally got home a little before midnight, Jed had already gone to bed. So it hadn’t been until a few minutes ago that he finally told his father what had happened in the pueblo. And now his father was angry at him again, as he had been nearly every other day lately. “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Jed muttered, staring into his coffee. “All I said was that Grandpa’s nuts. So what?”
Frank’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know your grandfather, and you don’t know a damned thing about the Kokatí.”
Jed looked up now, his scornful eyes meeting his father’s. “Jeez, Dad, it doesn’t take any brains to figure it out. How the hell could Grandpa have seen what happened to Heather if he was in the kiva? What have they got? Some kind of TV monitor down there?”
Frank shook his head. He remembered the day Alice
had died, and something that had happened, something he’d never told his son before. “You remember when your mom died?” he asked. The look in Jed’s eyes, a sudden opaqueness that came into them, spoke more than any words Jed could have said. “Brown Eagle came down here that day,” Frank went on. “He told me what had happened. He said he’d felt funny when he woke up that morning and had gone into the kiva.” His voice dropped, turning husky. “And while he was down there, he saw Alice kill herself.” He fell silent for a moment, then went on, his voice trembling now. “That’s why he came down here that day, Jed. He was hoping he was wrong. But he wasn’t.”
Now it was Jed who was silent, his eyes narrowed to no more than angry slits as he stared at his father. “That’s not true,” he whispered. “If he really thought something was wrong, he’d have come down earlier He’d have stopped her. But he didn’t, did he? So then he claims he saw what happened—”
The phone rang, a harsh jangling that cut through Jed’s words. He fell silent as Frank reached over and picked up the receiver. “Arnold,” he said. He listened for a few moments, grunting responses every now and then. “Okay. I’ll be there right away.” Putting the receiver back on the hook, he stood up. “I’ve got to get out to the plant,” he told Jed. “They’ve got a problem, and they’re shorthanded.”
Jed opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again. What the hell good would it do? His father wasn’t going to listen to him anyway. “Great,” he muttered to himself as Frank disappeared out the kitchen door a few minutes later, dressed in the gray overalls that were his work uniform. “Start talking about Mom, then just walk away.” He slammed his fist down on the tabletop, the
coffee in his cup slopping over into the saucer. “Well, who cares?” he shouted into the now empty house. “Who the hell cares?”
Frank arrived at the refinery five miles out of town and swung into his accustomed parking spot outside the gate. But instead of going directly into the plant, he crossed the street and stepped into the superintendent’s office. As soon as he saw the frown on Bobbie Packard’s normally sunny face, he knew something else had gone wrong. He glanced past the secretary into Otto Kruger’s office, half expecting to see Kruger’s face glowering with unconcealed rage, but the plant superintendent was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Otto?” he asked. “Out in the plant, making more trouble than they already have?”
The secretary shrugged. “They called him into town for a meeting in Mr. Moreland’s office,” she said. “It sounds like Max might finally be getting ready to sell out.”
Frank felt a surge of anger rise up from his gut, but quickly put it down. It couldn’t be true—it had to be just talk. The rumors had been flying for months, ever since the first feelers from UniChem had begun. But so far Max had insisted that he had no intention of selling the place out, and that if he ever did, it wouldn’t be to some huge, impersonal conglomerate. It would be to the employees of Borrego Oil. So Frank put his brief spate of anger aside and shook his head. No use having Bobbie spreading the rumors all over town. “Take my word for it, Bobbie,” he said. “If Max wants to sell, he’ll come to us first.”
“I don’t know,” Bobbie sighed. “From the way Otto was talking, it sounds like Max is almost broke.” She winked conspiratorially at Frank. “And if you ask me, Otto will do his best to get Max to sell out to UniChem rather than us. He thinks you’d fire him if you ever got the chance.”
Frank’s lips twisted into a wry grin. “And just how would I get the chance?” he asked.
Bobbie giggled. “Come on, Frank. You think if the employees bought this place you wouldn’t wind up on the board of directors?”
Frank shrugged noncommittally. “Even if I made the board, I’d only have one vote,” he pointed out.
Now Bobbie was carefully repairing an already perfect fingernail. “And everybody else would vote right along with you, as Otto well knows.”
Frank’s grin broadened across his face. “Does Otto know how much you hate him?”
“Of course,” Bobbie said blithely. “But it doesn’t matter, because anybody else who was his secretary would hate him too.”
Frank nodded absently, but his mind was no longer registering Bobbie’s words. He was already wondering if he should call a union meeting for that evening. If there was, indeed, any truth to the rumor that Max was on the verge of selling out, then there was a lot of work to be done.
Months ago he’d found a lawyer and an accountant in Santa Fe and quietly hired them to begin studying the feasibility of an employee buyout of the company. It hadn’t been a difficult job—Borrego Oil was a small company, and the same kind of transfer of ownership had been happening all over the country. He’d been pleased to note that in most cases, the turnaround of
those companies into profitable organizations had been nearly immediate; when people were working for themselves, they tended to be a lot more efficient.
More efficient, and more careful, he reflected as he left the office and crossed the street once more, this time to deal with the problem that had brought him out here this morning in the first place. He walked into the loader’s shack to check last night’s output, nodding a greeting to Fred Cummings, and picked up the sheet that showed every gallon of gasoline pumped from the tank farm into the trucks.
He shook his head dolefully as he tried to decipher Fred’s chicken scratchings, and wondered, yet again, why the whole system had yet to be computerized. But he knew the answer—the same lack of money that seemed to be strangling Borrego Oil at every turn. Still, oil prices were slowly rising again, and he’d thought the end of the steady losses was in sight. But then as his eye came to the bottom of the shipment list, he frowned.
Fred had stopped loading at four that morning.
“That’s when the pump went out,” Fred explained. “We tried to fix it, but someone screwed up on parts, and we didn’t have any.”
Frank scowled. He’d personally reviewed the inventory a month ago and given a list to Kruger. Apparently, the parts had never been ordered. “Okay,” he said. “Give me the list of what you need, and I’ll call down to Albuquerque. We should be able to get back in operation by this afternoon.”
But Fred Cummings shook his head. “Won’t work,” he said. “I already talked to the supplier, and they say our credit’s run out. We want parts for the pump, we pay cash.”
Frank’s scowl deepened. “Okay, then let’s fix the
parts we have. Can we do that?” he asked, knowing the answer even before he had uttered the words.