The Man Who Fell from the Sky (14 page)

THE WOMAN ON
the other side of the desk was small, barely taking up half of the chair. Probably in her fifties, with thin blond hair and large eyes set in a narrow, reddened face that tapered to a pointed chin. She smiled often—smile lines appeared at the sides of her mouth—exposing a row of white teeth too large for her face. “I'm Charlotte Hanson,” she had said when she walked into the office, hand outstretched. “Julia's daughter.” The sounds of
Pagliacci
drifted through the air.

Father John had risen to his feet, walked around the desk, and taken her hand. The strong, forceful grip of a woman accustomed to hard work, mostly in the outdoors. He offered her a glass of iced tea, and when she said that sounded good, he went into the closet-kitchen off the back hall, poured two glasses of tea from the pitcher he kept in the under-the-counter refrigerator, and dropped in chunks of ice. He handed her a glass and sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk.

“I hear you stopped by to see my mother. Sorry she wasn't having a good day.” Charlotte Hanson talked with her hands; the ice in her glass clinked over the notes of “O Colombina.” “Sharp as a tack some days, remembers every detail. She can tell a thousand stories. Of course I never know which ones she's made up.” She laughed. She was used to laughing, Father John thought.

“I was hoping she might remember family stories about Butch Cassidy.”

The woman nodded. “I stopped by the site on the river where they're filming. The security guard wouldn't let me get very close, but I saw Butch himself riding into a camp. Takes you back in time. Made me feel like I was there, the way Butch lit up the scene and made everything seem exciting. I imagine that's the way my great-grandmother Mary must have felt when he came around.”

“I've heard he hid out with Mary and her husband after a train robbery.”

“The Wilcox robbery. Mom's told me about it a thousand times. Famous robbery in Western lore. Took place down on the Wyoming border. Stopped a Union Pacific train, blew up the mail car and the safe after the express agent refused to open the doors. The gang made off with sacks of money.” She was shaking her head, smiling, as if she were recalling an event she had witnessed herself. “The way Mom figured it, if the agent had opened the doors, the railroad would have blamed him for not protecting his precious cargo and deducted the stolen amount from his paycheck, which would have put him in hock the rest of his life. Anyway, the railroad had the memory of an elephant. They never forgot Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid, either. From then on, they only wanted one thing: to see them dead.”

She leaned forward. “Mom told me Butch didn't actually take part in the robbery. Had he been there, she said, the gang wouldn't
have set explosives on a car with the agent inside. Butch didn't go for violence. Oh, he was the brains behind the robbery. And he met up with the gang to divide the loot before they got away. Oh yes.” She stared off into space, as if the gang were riding away in front of her eyes. “I can imagine how excited Mary was when Butch and Sundance rode up after the robbery. She knew Butch quite well, you know. In the biblical sense, you could say. About 1890 Butch was running a ranch out by Dubois, and Mary Boyd caught his eye. She was real pretty. Petite with long black hair. She was a half-breed from the rez.”

The woman sat back in the chair, considering. He could see the conflict moving like a storm over her face. Eventually she said, “I don't know if Mom would want this known. There's no evidence, no historical proof. Just a story handed down in our family.”

“I won't say anything.”

She shrugged. “What does it matter? It happened a hundred and twenty-five years ago, so who cares? Correct?”

Father John nodded. She was probably more correct than she imagined. So many things that had happened last year, last week, yesterday, were already forgotten. When he was a kid in Boston, adults were always talking about something important. All forgotten now, like dust blown in the wind.

“They planned to marry, Butch and Mary,” Charlotte went on. “But he got arrested for stealing a horse and was sent to prison in Laramie.” She was smiling again. “Seems he just couldn't go straight, hard as he tried. Well, Mary found out she was pregnant. Imagine a woman with no husband, pregnant, in the 1890s. Lucky she was from the rez, because an Arapaho family took her in and welcomed her baby girl, who was also named Mary. The child grew up with the Arapahos. Mary found work wherever she could
on the ranches in the area. I mean, she had to support herself. That's how she met Jesse Lyons and married him.”

“What became of her child?”

The woman was still smiling at the memories. “She married a man from Riverton named Edward Levelts. Mom was their only child. She was still a baby when her mother died, so we don't know my grandmother's story. But Mom always said we were descended from Butch Cassidy. There's no proof. Only an old family story.” She paused before she said, “Mom grew up in Cheyenne with her father's family. Later she came back here—something about this place that draws people back—and married my father. I was born on their ranch across the border from the rez, same ranch Mary and Jesse had owned a long time ago. Of course it had gone through several owners after the bank repossessed it.”

Father John sat back. What a tangled web, the past. Lives lived in the midst of heartache and loss. Somehow the hard times—leaving a child, losing a ranch—often turned into the stories that were passed down. But what about the joyous times, the moments of sunshine and lightness? Surely they also existed. Moments of hope and love that Mary must have felt for a man she knew as George Cassidy, and that he had felt for her.

“Have you ever heard . . .” he began, picking his way. “Whether Butch Cassidy gave your great-grandmother a map that showed where he had hidden money from the train robbery?”

“The old map story.” Charlotte shook her head, looked away, and gave a different smile, quiet and inward, as if she were contemplating something impossible to understand. “Everybody around here believes Butch left behind a map. Folks have been hiking through the mountains the last hundred years with a version of the so-called original in their hands, sure they were about to strike it
rich. It's like gold fever. Rumors of gold brought thousands of people out West. Some actually struck it rich, so their stories kept people coming.”

Father John smiled. “Anybody strike it rich with Butch Cassidy's map?”

She let out a snort of laughter. “That never kept people from trying. In fact, it encouraged them. Nobody has found Butch Cassidy's treasure yet, so it must still be there, waiting for them. Greed,” she said, allowing the word to hang in the air. “It never changes. I heard Robert Walking Bear was looking for the treasure when he died.” She paused, forehead wrinkled in a new thought. “I've heard rumors he was murdered.”

“As far as I know, the FBI hasn't concluded the investigation.”

“I suppose he had one of those bogus maps.”

Father John shrugged. “He believed it was the original, according to his wife.”

“There was no such thing.” Charlotte Hanson took a long drink of tea, then examined the glass a moment. “If Butch Cassidy did draw a map, would he have given it to anyone? I didn't think so. Why would he do that? Then I thought, if he got caught and the posse found the map on him, they would steal his treasure. So it makes sense that he might have given a map to someone he trusted.”

“Such as your great-grandmother.” Father John could hear Eldon Lone Bear's voice in his head:
If Butch gave a map to anybody, it would have been Mary.

Charlotte shook her head and sipped more tea. “Logical, I suppose. The only problem is, logic can be wrong. Mom has never mentioned a map, not in all the stories she's told through the years. Oh, Butch and the Sundance Kid hid out for a while with Mary and Jesse after the train robbery and helped out on the ranch.
Butch may even have given Mary the money to keep the bank from foreclosing.” She gave a quick shrug. “The hard times came soon enough. Jesse died, the bank eventually foreclosed, and Mary was left alone with no way to take care of herself or her little girl, even if she had wanted to take her child from the only family she had ever known.”

“You're saying that if Butch had given her a map, she would have used it.” The woman across from him was nodding, as if they had circled to the same place. “If she'd had the money, she could have saved the ranch and made a home for her little girl.”

“Logical,” Charlotte Hanson said again. “Butch would have wanted her to find the treasure if she needed it. But she had no idea where to find it.” She set the glass on the floor and laced her fingers together in her lap. “Butch came back in 1934, you know. Despite what the history books say. A lot of people here knew George Cassidy, and they welcomed him back. They spent days with him, reliving old times, reconnecting.”

“It was thirty-five years later. Some historians believe Butch's friends were mistaken.”

“Folks around here? They never forget people. Butch and his friends went on a camping trip in the mountains. You ask me, Butch was hoping to find his treasure.” She looked at a point across the office. “Mary went along. She was living in Riverton then. She'd married a rancher after Jesse died, but her second husband had also died, and she was alone again. She and Butch were reunited on that camping trip. If she had kept a map all those years, never using it to help herself, wouldn't she have given it to him? He was old then, probably could have used the money. After that trip, Butch sent Mary a beautiful ring. You must've seen it. Mom never takes it off. It is the only thing she has of her grandmother's.”

Father John didn't say anything. He tried to picture Julia,
slumped in the chair, lost somewhere inside her own mind, gaze fixed on the flickering black-and-white images of an old movie, clasping her hands together and perhaps . . . Was he imagining it now? Had she been running a finger over the ring on her left hand?

Charlotte was saying something about the ring being a sign that Butch had always loved her. “He never forgot her,” she said, “and she hadn't forgotten him. Don't you think she would have known if he weren't Butch Cassidy?” She lifted herself to her feet, the matter settled. “I'll be in touch if Mom has a good day. I'm sure she would like to relive the old times for you.”

Father John stood up and walked the woman out into the corridor. She barely came to his shoulder; her boots made a soft clicking noise on the wood floor. “Do you think Julia might be willing to relive the old days for the film?” He pulled open the heavy door and waited as Charlotte brushed past and stepped out onto the stoop.

“Are you kidding?” she said, turning back. “My mother has always wanted to be in the movies.”

THE PHONE WAS
ringing. Before Father John could locate the receiver under the piles of papers on his desk, the bishop had picked up. “Yes, yes, hold on a moment.” The old man's voice drifted down the corridor.

Father John got up from his desk and hurried toward the back office before the bishop could head his way to tell him he was wanted on the phone. He found the old man working his way upward out of his chair. Throwing Father John a grateful look, he sank back down. “The man on the phone sounded as if you were expecting his call. I'm afraid he has hung up.”

I wasn't expecting any call, Father John thought as he retraced his steps down the corridor to his own desk. People called and dropped in unexpectedly. Every day a surprise. The phone had started ringing again, and this time he located it under the papers. “Father John,” he said.

A clicking noise sounded on the other end, as if the caller were grinding his teeth. Father John could sense the concentration, the effort. “How can I help you?”

“I'm a dead man.”

The statement demanded respect. Father John took a moment before he said, “What is your name?”

“It don't matter. I don't want to die.” He sounded Arapaho, the cadence of his words.

“I understand. What can I do?”

“He'll listen to you, a priest. You tell the fed that Robert's death was no accident. I seen him murdered. I told the Rap lawyer . . .”

“Vicky Holden.”

“I told her twice now. She's a lawyer; she knows Agent Gianelli. She's always talking to him. I figured he'd believe her. Oh yeah, he acted like he did, went around talking to the same folks he'd talked to before. Didn't learn anything new. He's overlooking the most obvious thing. The map. I told her, he finds out what happened to the map, he'll find the killer.”

So this was where the rumor that Robert had been murdered started, Father John thought. Someone on the rez claiming he'd seen the murder. Someone seeking attention, like people who confess to murders they've read about in the newspapers. Imagining things, telling stories.

But he didn't believe the caller was making up a story. He'd heard confessions now for nearly twenty years; he could hear the truth beneath the camouflage of words, the sense of desperation, the shades of fear. “Why don't you start at the beginning. What did you see? Tell me what happened.”

“You're like that lawyer. You want all I got, but you offer me nothing. I give you the . . .” He struggled with the rest of it. “I give
you the details, I'm the one that goes to jail. The fed will say, ‘How's he know that? He must be the murderer. Nobody else would know.'”

“And now you believe you're in danger.”

“You bet I'm in danger. The killer's coming after me next.”

“I can go to Agent Gianelli with you. I can tell him your fears about coming forward. He'll under . . .”

The laughter came like the blast of a horn. It was a moment before the caller said, “I'm begging you, Father. I went to school at the mission. I wish I could've played on your baseball team. What is it, the Eagles? There wasn't any team then. I've come to your games though. Yeah, saw the Eagles beat the Rangers. Not having the best season so far.”

It was true, Father John was thinking, but there was every reason to believe the team would start winning. He'd had to miss the practices this week, and one of the team mothers, Marcy Hawk, had been coaching the team, and she was a better coach than he was.

Father John leaned into the receiver. “Let me help you. Tell me the name of the killer.” He was speaking into a vacuum. Nothing on the line, no human presence; then, the electronic beep of the disconnect signal.

He pressed the numbers for Vicky's office, aware of his heart thudding in his ears. Annie answered—calm and controlled, businesslike: “Holden Law Offices.”

“This is Father John. I have to speak to Vicky.”

“Sorry, Father. She's on the rez, but I can try to reach her. I'll give her the message.”

He thanked her and hung up, then he flipped through the Rolodex until he found the number for the local FBI office. In a moment,
another cool, controlled voice came on. He told the voice who he was and said he had to speak to Ted Gianelli about Robert Walking Bear's death. Gianelli would return his call, the voice said, still unperturbed. Another death to investigate; there were so many.

He hung up and went over to the window. The wind had picked up; a cottonwood branch knocked against the side of the building. The other branches stayed in perpetual motion, white billowy clouds moved across the blue sky. The caller's words kept running in his head.
I'm a dead man. I'm a dead man.
If he had told the truth, if he
had
witnessed a murder, it was only a matter of time before the killer would come for him. Dear Lord, the caller could be a walking dead man. He stepped back to the desk and checked the caller ID; the last call had come from Unknown. A pay phone, most likely on the reservation. He had no way to trace the call, no way to help the man.

He sat back down and thumbed through the papers until he found the budget he'd been working on. He pushed it aside.
I'm a dead man
kept drumming in his brain.

Father John grabbed his cowboy hat, went down the corridor, and told the bishop he was going to take a walk. Send any calls to his cell.

A hot, dry wind pressed against his shirt and tugged at the brim of his hat as he started for the alley that separated the administration building from the church. At the far end of the alley, a path ran through a grove of cottonwoods to the Little Wind River where the Arapahos had camped when they first came to the reservation. It was cool and quiet there, a good place to walk and think. The spirits of the ancestors gathered there, the elders said, and the place had a holy, set-apart feel that was hard to fit into any logical syllogism.

He was about to turn into the alley when he noticed the pickup in front of the old school building that was now the Arapaho Museum. Visitors came throughout the day; more visitors in the summer, with the tourists. And this pickup belonged to a tourist, judging by the Texas license plate. A tall man in cowboy hat and blue jeans came through the front door and stepped onto the porch that stretched across the front of the museum. Probably in his forties and agile, the way he hooked an arm around the post and glided down the steps. “Hello!” he called. “Father John?”

Father John started over. The man was already coming along Circle Drive, gravel spitting under his boots, a wide smile on his face. An Indian, possibly an Arapaho, with the high cheekbones and hooked nose, dark complexion. A large turquoise-and-silver bracelet gleamed on his wrist. “I was hoping you'd be here.” He stretched out the hand with the bracelet. “Cutter Walking Bear. I've heard a lot about you.”

Father John shook the man's hand and tried to place the name. He had it: Ruth had mentioned Robert's cousin Cutter recently moved back to the rez. The man was saying something about having come home after a long time away.

“Ruth mentioned you had moved back.”

“What a tragedy.” Cutter shook his head and lifted his gaze toward the foothills, still hazy and indistinct. “I was just beginning to get to know my cousin again after thirty-five years when he had the accident. I blame myself.”

Accident? The word reverberated through Father John's mind. An anonymous caller claimed he had seen Robert murdered.
I'm a dead man.

“Can't help thinking,” Cutter was saying, “if I'd been there, I could have prevented it somehow. Kept him from going near the
lake. He could be unsteady on his feet sometimes.” He nodded in emphasis. Ruth hadn't mentioned anything about that, Father John thought. He wondered if she had realized it. “Oh yes,” Cutter went on. “Surprised me, Rap like Robert, ranching and breaking horses, outdoors every day, a little unsteady at times. Loved the Wind Rivers though. Nothing could keep him from searching for buried treasure.” He tipped his head back and laughed at the sky. “I have some good memories of us hiking together.”

“You went with him?” Robert always went alone, Ruth had said.

“Sure did. I was planning to go with him the day he died, but I had a job interview in Casper.” He paused and glanced around the mission. “Robert was showing me around the rez, helping me get my bearings. We had plans to come to the mission, you know, relive old times. Well, I decided to come here on my own.”

“Did you and Robert go to school here?”

“Sure did,” Cutter said. “Got a whole bunch of great memories of this place.”

Father John smiled. So many Arapahos had gone to school at the mission. Like a community center, the mission, a gathering place. Children, parents, volunteers, teachers, all coming together. Sometimes when he looked at the old stone building, especially on quiet days like this with no one about, he tried to imagine what it must have been like, people coming and going, school buses rounding Circle Drive, a half dozen or more Jesuit priests teaching classes, kids spilling over the grounds, shouting and laughing—the sounds of children everywhere. A hundred years the school had been here, then it was gone. Closed down for lack of money and replaced by the BIA school close by. The old stone building vacant and crumbling, a ghost from the past.

“Hard to leave home and board at school,” Cutter said, “but once we got here with our friends, we had a great time. Although, if I remember right some of the proctors . . .”

“Proctors?”

“The older students in charge of the boys' dorm. Some of them could be tough. I guess they'd had tough proctors in their time, so they passed it on.” He laughed and shook his head. “Didn't keep us from raising hell. I mean, Robert and I used to jump into that old fire escape tube on the back side of the building and slide down. More fun than an amusement park, but what did we know about amusement parks? No such thing in the entire state.” He turned partway around and looked at the building. “If I remember, the boys' dorms were on the third floor. I got that right? Which floor were the girls' on? Second? Or were they at the other end of the third floor?”

“Before my time, I'm afraid.” Something wrong here, Father John was thinking. Like a dissonant note in an aria.

Cutter was going on about how he used to climb the trees and swing from the branches. “I remember Vicky. She was as gutsy as any of us boys. Used to be up in the tree with us. Priests would come out and tell us to get down before we fell and broke our heads. I always had the feeling . . .” He stopped at that, then pushed on. “I felt like they would have liked to climb those trees themselves. Maybe they did after we went home at the end of the semester.”

“What other memories do you have?” Father John said, still trying to grasp the off-key note.

The man drew in a long breath. He hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets and looked down, as though he were reading a book. “That's what Robert and I planned to do, recall the old days, relive
the good times. I hated it when my father took us to Oklahoma to be with Mom's family. The Walking Bears were here. I was about eleven. We moved in the summer when my cousins were getting ready to go back to school. But I remember—I remember.” He looked up. “Wasn't there some kind of basketball hoop up around here? We used to scrimmage, and we were pretty good, too. Wasn't there a shop? Yeah, we made things out of wood and metal. Over there, wasn't it?” He nodded toward the white building next to the church, set back from Circle Drive. A storage shed now. “In the spring, there was baseball. I already walked around the diamond out back.” A nod now in the direction of the redbrick residence. “Brought back a lot of memories. I'm glad to see it's still here.”

Baseball? Father John saw it now, as if he had opened a photo album with pictures of a mission that hadn't existed, not when Cutter and Robert Walking Bear and Vicky Holden had been in school. There was no baseball diamond. Ten years ago, his first summer at St. Francis, he and the kids had cut down the wild grasses and stamped out the bases. The parents had helped him build the dugouts and the benches. It had taken all summer.

The sound of ringing cut into the quiet. Father John took the phone out of his pocket and glanced at the ID. Federal Gov. “Sorry, I have to take this.” He stepped away a few feet and pressed the answer key. “Father John.”

The voice on other end: “Ted Gianelli, returning your call.”

Father John thanked him and started to tell him about the anonymous caller, aware of Cutter Walking Bear off his shoulder. He took another few steps. “The caller could be telling the truth.”

“Anything else that would give me something to go on?” The fed sounded as if he believed in the possibility. “Any names? Anything at all?”

“He sounded frightened. I got the impression he wants you to locate the murderer without any specific help from him. He doesn't want to be involved.”

“If he's a witness, he's involved.” There was a long pause, the sound of rustling paper, a pen or pencil—something solid—tapping a hard surface. “I've talked to everybody around Robert Walking Bear, all the relatives. They all have alibis. This investigation is over, unless I find something new. It makes me sick to think”—there were several rapid intakes of breath at the other end—“there's a killer walking around in my jurisdiction. If he calls again, see if you can get him to come in.”

Father John said he would do his best. He might not hear from the caller again. In fact, he thought, ending the call, it was highly unlikely that he would. It would make more sense for a frightened witness to walk away, go where the murderer couldn't find him.

“Trouble?” Cutter said.

“Could be.” Father John slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned around. He had the sense the man hadn't taken his eyes from him throughout the call. He told him to feel free to continue looking around, then he headed back to the office. A dozen thoughts clanged in his mind. An investigation into a possible murder, with no evidence. Nothing except an anonymous, scared voice on the phone. A detective eager to wind things up, stamp
closed
on the file. And a stranger back on the rez, trying to find his roots, looking around the mission, remembering things that hadn't been here. How fragile memories were, like air or music, hard to grasp. It was easy to misremember, to be jolted into an imaginary past by the things around you. The baseball diamond behind the residence—maybe it had made Cutter think there had been a
baseball diamond in the past because there should have been a baseball diamond. The boys' dormitory. There had been a dormitory when the mission was founded, but not in the last fifty years. And maybe there should have been, instead of the creaking, chilly buses Cutter and Robert and Vicky had ridden across the rez. Maybe memories were just that, the longing for a better past.