The Dream Stalker (9 page)

The agent scribbled on the yellow pad. “Okay. What else?”

Father John began again, describing the drive through the rainy night. He paused, remembering. After he’d turned off Highway 132, he didn’t meet another vehicle, except . . . “A pickup came toward me heading south on Johnstown Road.”

Gianelli’s pen made scratchy sounds on the paper. “Funny how little details creep back into memory. What kind of pickup?”

Father John tried to visualize the vehicle rushing past. “I didn’t get the make. But it was a dark color. Blue or green. Black, maybe.”

The agent set the pen down and leaned back in his chair, clasping both hands behind his head. “So, let’s assume it was the victim that called, since you seem certain it was. In forty-five, fifty minutes, somebody picked him up, drove to the log cabin, robbed him, and shot him. Then got out of there just before you showed up. Pretty close timing, wouldn’t you agree? Either the victim
called you from a phone close by or somebody else called and sent you to the cabin. Since there aren’t any phones close by, my bet is on the latter.”

“It took me twenty minutes to get to the phone at Betty’s Place in Ethete,” Father John said. “He could’ve called from there. The phone’s outside, close to the road.”

“I’ll check it out.” Gianelli got to his feet. “You got that? I’ll check everything out. You’re a damn good priest, John. You run that Indian mission on thin air and a lot of good intentions. Far as I can tell, the Arapahos think you’re great. But that doesn’t make you a great investigator. So you stick to your mission work, and soon as I learn anything, I’ll let you know.” The agent’s tone had begun to soften. “I know you feel, well, involved, since you’re the one who found the body.”

“Let me know if he has any family,” Father John said, lifting himself off the hard wood chair and setting his cowboy hat on his head. “I’d like to see that the poor guy has a proper funeral.”

Gianelli hauled himself around the desk and placed one hand firmly on Father John’s shoulder as they stepped out into the hall. “Come to dinner Sunday night,” he said. “Maria’ll fix spaghetti with that homemade sausage of hers. You can play with the kids.”

Father John said he would have to let him know. The men’s Al-Anon group and the Social Concerns Committee met on Sunday night, and his assistant might balk at taking both. He was down the stairs and in the front entry when Gianelli called out: “You spend too much time alone out there on that reservation. And don’t tell me that old housekeeper and that robotlike assistant of yours are family. You’re alone, buddy.”

He turned and waved at the FBI agent, who was leaning over the bannister. Then he let himself out the door.

8

F
ather John guided the Toyota down Main Street a few blocks, then turned left and headed toward the outskirts. Traffic was light, typical midday traffic in a small town. The sun poked through drifting clouds. Shadows spiraled across the stores and restaurants, the supermarket and parking lot, the pickups at the curbs. He thought about what Gianelli had said. To a man with a wife and four kids, a priest must look like the loneliest guy in the world. But the Jesuits had been sending men out alone to faraway places for four hundred years. He was part of a long tradition: the tradition of the shepherd. And the shepherd was always alone.

He wheeled the Toyota into the graveled parking lot in front of a gray metal building with black block letters superimposed against the flat edge of the roof:
ROOFS AND GUTTERS
. The end of the building looked like a large garage, its overhang door flung open. Two trucks blocked the opening. Several men were loading buckets of tar, long-handled brushes, and shovels into the truck beds.

Father John parked on the far side and got out just as a short, heavyset man in jeans and white T-shirt emerged from the garage carrying a tar-smeared canvas. “Help you?” he asked as he punched the canvas down around the tools and buckets in the bed of one truck. Blue snakes and dragons crawled up the knotted muscles of his arms.

“Where can I find the boss?”

Metal hinges screeched into the air as the man lifted the tailgate and nodded. “Office that way.”

Father John walked alongside the building, gravel crackling under his boots. The sun bounced off the metal wall and created a corridor of warmth, a hint of summer to come. A few feet from the corner was an unpainted wood door. He let himself inside.

A woman with short, honey-colored hair and large shoulders glanced up from the stack of papers on her desk. She looked older than she probably was, her face mapped in lines, like furrows in a miniature field. Father John introduced himself, said he was the priest from St. Francis Mission, and asked for Ralph Fox.

The woman’s forehead wrinkled into deeper lines; her whole body seemed to stiffen. “He don’t work here no more, Father.” She stopped a moment, then hurried on, as if she felt compelled to explain—he was, after all, the Indian priest. “It’s not like he didn’t do a good job, or nothin’ like that. But this is a small business me and my husband, Ed, run. This winter . . .” She shrugged and looked away. Remembering. “All that snow, there just wasn’t much call for roofers, so we had to let a couple crews go. Only started hirin’ back last week.” She nodded in the direction of the men loading the trucks outside.

“Do you know if Ralph’s working somewhere else?”

The woman hesitated. “Well, me and Ed run the only roofing business in town.” What might have passed for embarrassment flickered in her eyes, and she blinked it away. “Anything we can do for you?”

Father John turned the knob and pulled the door open, considering. He could ask her to send someone to give him an estimate on fixing the roof, but he decided against it. As he stepped outside, he touched one finger to the brim of his cowboy hat—a gesture he’d picked up living in the West, a shortcut for whatever needed to be
said: “Thanks, but no thanks” or “Much obliged.” Everyone understood its meaning at the moment.

He retraced his steps along the building, the sun warm on his shoulders and back. One truck had pulled out, but a couple of men were still piling supplies into the other truck. That’s the way it was, he thought. An Arapaho like Ralph Fox was the last to land a job, the first to lose it, the last to be called back. No wonder the business council wanted to build the nuclear waste storage facility. It would mean jobs the people could depend upon.

He drove the Toyota back toward Main Street, then south to Seventeen-Mile Road. The demonstrators had disappeared; traffic moved as usual. Turning right, he headed toward the wall of mountains in the distance, peaks bathed in white clouds, slopes etched in snow. His stomach rumbled. He hadn’t had anything to eat since the toast and coffee he’d wolfed down earlier. Elena would have sandwiches waiting, but he wasn’t ready to face Father Geoff yet. They seemed destined to be at loggerheads, he and this new assistant. What was the Provincial thinking of? An Irishman and a German at the same mission? He drove on.

He caught up to the protesters, white signs bobbing in the air as they marched along the road near the senior citizens’ center. He could see the rows of cars and trucks parked in the lot behind the red brick building. The number of outsiders surprised him—more than he’d ever seen on the reservation at one time. Vicky’s articles in the
Gazette
must have been picked up by newspapers around the West, and somebody had made sure a large opposition would be on hand for the public hearing. The sound of chanting filtered into the cab and mixed with the music of
Carmen.

At Given’s Road, he swung right. All around, the land dipped into arroyos and rose into bluffs. The breeze ruffled the wild grasses; the sagebrush and cactus
shivered as if the earth itself were moving.
The earth is alive,
the elders had told him many times. A creature, like other creatures, growing and changing and becoming: never showing the same face. On days like today, he understood.

He slowed around the curve as the road jogged west. Another mile, and he pulled up in the soft dirt next to a pink house hunched down in the middle of the open plains. Toward the back stood a green pickup, the hood propped up on a metal pole, a man curled over the engine. Ralph at home in the middle of the day meant he didn’t have anyplace else to go. Father John slid out of the cab, giving the door a hard slam.

The Indian straightened upright, a startled look in his dark eyes. Then his face relaxed and broke into a grin as he stepped around the truck, wiping his hands on the grease-smeared towel he’d pulled from the back pocket of his jeans. “Howdy, Father,” he said.

Father John reached out and shook the other man’s hand. The smell of motor oil floated on the breeze. There was the usual exchange of pleasantries: It wasn’t polite to get right to the purpose of the visit. He asked Ralph how things were going, how LuAnn and the kids were doing. Fine, everything was just fine. Neither was it polite to burden other people with your problems.

“LuAnn,” Ralph called, “come on out here. We got us a visitor.” As if he knew it would be a few moments before his wife prepared herself and the kids for company, he asked how things were going at the mission.

“Good,” Father John said. A bit of a lie that, but they were still in the dance of pleasantries. The sun slid wholly behind a cloud, throwing the house and trucks into shadow. A coolness spiked the breeze.

Ralph said, “Figured you might be comin’ round.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. Soon’s I heard about the leakin’ roof, I says to LuAnn, Father John’s gonna be payin’ a visit.”

Father John laughed. “What else did you hear on the moccasin telegraph?”

“You gonna want me to fix it.”

“You hear how I’m going to pay for it?”

“Oh, yeah. You been praying for some kind of miracle.”

“I’m expecting one at any moment.”

Ralph threw a light punch to Father John’s arm. “Tell you what. I’ll come by and fix the roof. You pay me soon’s that miracle shows up. Anyway, once that nuclear facility gets approved, I’m gonna have some good, steady work. That’s if them outsiders don’t blow up the whole deal. Wouldn’t surprise me none if one of them got himself shot last night.”

“He was an Arapaho,” Father John said, his thoughts abruptly pulled from the ordinary problems—the leaking roof, the chronically depleted finances—to the dead cowboy. The cowboy would be there, he realized, at the edge of his thoughts, until he knew what had happened to the man. “He was from Oklahoma,” he heard himself explaining. “He’d been working on a ranch in Colorado. His name was Gabriel Many Horses.”

The screen door slapped against its wood frame, and LuAnn stood on the cement stoop, a baby slung on one jeans-clad hip. Peering around her was a little boy with eyes as black and shiny as river stones and wide with curiosity. It wasn’t every day a red truck drove into the driveway.

“Stay for lunch, Father?” LuAnn called. “I got us some bologna sandwiches and lemonade.” She looked like a schoolgirl, with black hair trailing over her shoulders and down the front of her red-print blouse. Her face was scrubbed clean, no trace of makeup. Light glinted in her eyes, which were dark and oval. She was a beautiful woman, Father John thought, and in that instant he understood what the elders meant when they
said that in the Old Time, the warriors from other tribes tried to steal Arapaho women, so that beautiful children would be born into their tribes.

He started to decline her invitation. He hadn’t come here to take food from the family of an out-of-work man. But the elders also said something else: The world is full of good things. Sometimes they will be offered to you. Never turn down the good that someone brings. He smiled at the young woman and said he’d be glad to stay for lunch.

Ralph hoisted the baby onto his shoulders and clasped the chubby brown legs, swinging from side to side. The child giggled out loud and pulled at his father’s hair. Within moments LuAnn had spread a blanket over the bare dirt in front of the stoop. A plate of sandwiches, a pitcher of lemonade, and a stack of red plastic glasses materialized in the center. Another moment, and Father John found himself sitting cross-legged on the edge of the blanket along with the family, biting into a bologna sandwich, washing it down with the sour-sweet lemonade.