The Man Who Fell from the Sky (18 page)

THE ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
meeting had ended thirty minutes ago, but several members remained behind. Folding up metal chairs, stacking them against the far wall of Eagle Hall, dumping coffee grounds and washing up the containers, bagging Styrofoam cups and wadded napkins. Father John had stood outside, shaking hands as members filed out—more women than men this evening—telling them to keep up the good work. Live in hope. He had been living in hope for more than ten years now. It was the best you could expect. The evening breeze had turned cool. Out on Circle Drive he could hear engines ramping up, tires skittering on gravel. When he went back inside, the place had been wiped clean, as if no one had been there for weeks. The only telltale sign, a slight whiff of coffee that lingered in the air.

Usually Father John stopped in the church for a few moments, allowing the quiet and peace to reach into his soul. But tonight he
found himself heading back to the administration building. The heavy oak door creaked on the hinges as he yanked it open. A dim light burned in the corridor and cast a pattern of light and shadows over the photos of Jesuits past that lined the walls. He thought of them as mentors, these silent men, standing firm and showing the way he must go. He never wanted to let them down; it would have meant letting down the past.

His office was on the right, but he kept going. He flipped on the light in the small hallway that led to the miniature kitchen, a bathroom, an alcove that served as the storeroom and, at the far end, what passed as an archive. The room was the size of a large closet, ringed with shelves that sagged under stacks of books. A lightbulb hung over the rectangular table in the center, with a chain that dangled alongside it. He pulled the chain, then pulled it again, coaxing the bulb into life. A circle of light flowed over the table and melted against the shelves.

It took a while to find the records he was searching for. A series of books, piled against one another and double stacked, with dates from the 1970s imprinted on the spines in a faded gold tint. He pulled out the first book, 1970, and set it on the table. Then he pulled over a stool and began thumbing through the brittle pages with yellowing edges.
St. Francis Mission School Kindergarten through Twelfth Grade
appeared in black print across the top of each page. He turned back to the first page, and there, like a shepherd guarding his flock, was Father Patrick O'Connor, pastor of St. Francis Mission. In the paragraph below, he welcomed the students and the parents, “the St. Francis family,” to a new year at the mission school, a new journey toward learning and growing closer to God.

Father John started with the kindergarten section, scanning
three pages of black-and-white photos of Arapaho kids, some with smiles as big as their faces. Names of students, as well as the names of parents and contact information were printed below each photo. A few kids looked familiar, but that was because the families were still on the rez, and family resemblances ran strong. No photo of Vicky, no photos of Walking Bears.

He turned to the first grade section: He found Ruth first, dark hair and lively eyes, energy bursting from the photograph. He thumbed through the next pages, and there was Vicky, staring out at the world with the familiar determined look, as if she were looking beyond her six-year-old self into a big future filled with possibilities. He would have recognized her anywhere, at any age. Through all the changes and growth, her soul was the same. Below the photo were the names of her parents: Mary and Albert Plenty Horses. After she had divorced Ben Holden and moved to Denver to become a lawyer, they had raised her children. Whenever she spoke about the fleeting weekends, the snatches of summer vacations with Susan and Lucas, it was accompanied by the sound of pain. The children grown now. Susan making a life in Los Angeles; Lucas, in Denver.

He turned to the
W
's. Still no Walking Bears. He moved to the next classes. In the third grade photos he spotted Dallas Spotted Deer. Round, puffy pockmarked face, the signs of scarlet fever that, from time to time, had raced across the reservation. A smiling miniature of the man he would become. In the fifth grade, Father John found Bernice Walking Bear and, next to her photo, Robert Walking Bear. The same eyes and noses, the jut of their jaws, all elements he recognized. He thumbed forward. A few other Walking Bears in high school, but no names he recognized.

Father John returned the book to the shelf and took the one
with 1975 on the spine. There was Vicky, eleven years old in the fifth grade, smiling at the camera now, more confident and self-assured.
Yes, I will be a lawyer someday. I will help my people.
He smiled back at her. He wished he had known her then, but in a strange way, he felt as if he had.

The name James Walking Bear appeared under the photo of a brown-faced kid who peered at the camera out of narrowed, deep-set eyes, a look of daring in his expression, as if there were a world to explore and take possession of, and nothing could hold him back. A lank of hair had fallen over his forehead, but at any moment he might have tossed his head and pushed the hair into place, if he chose. There was something unpredictable about him, unmanageable, and yet Father John had enjoyed teaching kids like that, enjoyed the challenge of channeling all that energy and imagination into something positive.

He slid the book toward the center of the light and studied the features, looking for something familiar. The wide-set eyes, the nose with the prominent bump, the ears that stood out at attention. The eleven-year-old boy who would become Cutter? Who had come to the mission to reminisce, who remembered a boarding school that didn't exist when he was a student? Maybe, Father John thought. The photo could be of Cutter. Dark skin, black hair, and suspicious eyes. Perhaps they were the same, changed and developed over the years. Life had a way of inscribing itself on faces. Still the photo made him uneasy, as if it were untrue, inauthentic, like an image forged from multiple pieces. With Vicky's photo, and even photos of the Walking Bear cousins, their elemental selves shone through. He slipped the small pad out of his shirt pocket, found a pencil on the shelf, and wrote down the name of James Walking Bear's parents: Agnes and Macon Walking Bear . . .
my father took us to Oklahoma.
Where in Oklahoma? Cutter hadn't said.

The sound of an engine shattered the silence, followed by footsteps on the concrete stoop and the crack of the front door opening and shutting. He should have locked the door, but it was late for anyone to stop by. He hadn't expected a visitor. He left the book on the table and went down the hallway to the corridor. Vicky stood inside the door, staring into his darkened office, a dazed look about her as if the wind had deposited her in a strange place.

“Vicky!” He hurried past the photos of Jesuits past, and she fell into his arms.

“Oh, thank God you're here.” She was shaking, her fingers pulling at the back of his shirt.

“What is it? What happened?”

“I'm a fool.”

“You're not a fool. Are you hurt? Are you in pain?”

Vicky shook her head, but she kept her eyes down, avoiding his eyes. He waited. When she was ready, she would tell him. He guided her across his study to the upholstered chair in the corner. Then he hooked a hard-back chair with his boot and pulled it over. He sat on the edge, leaning toward her, circling her again in his arms.

They sat in silence for several minutes. Finally, she said, “I went with him on a picnic in the mountains. I shouldn't have gone. I have a court hearing in the morning; I have to get ready.” She didn't say who he was, and Father John didn't ask. He understood they were talking about Cutter Walking Bear. “I never should have trusted him. He comes on so strong, so assured, like the world exists just for him. He had taken care of everything. The food, the
cooler with drinks, a blanket, newspapers to start the fire with. He handled it all, and I allowed myself to think . . . God, I was so blind. I thought he was strong, confident, interesting and . . .” She hesitated a second before she said, “Respectful. I thought he really wanted to get to know me, and that maybe, just maybe, when we got to know each other, we might find something. How could I be such a fool.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“He held me down. He tried to rape me, but I was able to get away. I kicked at the fire until it spread to the blanket, and I ran.”

Father John could feel the heat rising inside him, like the fire spreading to the blanket. He wanted to protect her; somehow he should have protected her from this. But how? At what point should he have warned her? Warned her of what? A good-looking Arapaho who seemed to know who he was, where he was going? It had been only minutes since he found the photo, minutes since he had wondered if Cutter Walking Bear was an impostor. He felt his muscles tensing, his hands closing into fists. He wanted to smash in the impostor's face. He pulled her closer and tipped his head onto the top of hers, his lips on her hair, the warm, frightened smell of her in his nostrils. The whole scene played like a movie in front of his eyes: the mountains, the night falling, the fire crackling. Cutter and Vicky on the blanket . . . He struggled to make the scene fade out, and yet he didn't want it to fade. He wanted to share the fear and the horror. He didn't want her to carry it alone.

“He assaulted you. He tried to rape you. You have to report this.”

Vicky pulled away and sat back against the chair, a sad amusement in her eyes, a smile almost of pity at the corners of her mouth. “Call the sheriff? Make a long report? I've seen cases like this,
John. Nothing will be done. He didn't succeed. There is no evidence, and it would be my word against his.”

“He assaulted you.”

“He didn't hit me. I don't have any bruises. I don't want the trouble. It's bad enough . . .” Her voice was cracking, tears blossoming in her eyes. “I want to put it behind me, get over it. Learn from it. Listen to my own instincts. There was always something about Cutter that wasn't, I don't know, real.”

He told her then about the photo, and when she said she wanted to see it, he went to the archive and retrieved the book. On the way back, he stopped in the little kitchen and filled a glass with water. He handed her the water first, which she took in both hands and drank as if she had been wandering the parched prairie for days. After she set the glass on the floor, he found the page of smiling fifth graders and handed her the open book.

“I don't know.” A long moment had passed before she spoke. “How can we know for sure? Look at me?” She tapped a finger on the photo of her eleven-year-old self. “I don't look like that anymore.”

“But
you
are there.”

She went back to staring at the kid named James Walking Bear. After a moment she looked up. “All the Walking Bear cousins accept him. They would know if he were a fake. Besides, why would anyone come around and claim to be someone he wasn't when there are people here who knew him as a kid?”

“There's something else.” He had debated telling her about Dallas Spotted Deer. She'd been through enough tonight, but now it seemed that she should know. “Dallas Spotted Deer's truck went off the mountainside today. He was killed.”

“Killed! My God. How sad for the family.”

“He drove a white truck.”

Vicky jolted upward, eyes wide in shock and comprehension. “The caller drove a white truck. He witnessed Robert's murder.”

“Vicky, we don't know . . .”

“Oh, you know that we know. Dallas must have gone on the treasure hunt, and whoever killed Robert has now killed him. What happened? How did he go off the road?”

“It was a sharp curve. He must have taken it too fast and couldn't correct. Or another vehicle could have been in the oncoming lane and he veered to the outer edge.”

“Or somebody nudged him off the road.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, John. Because . . .” Then he was listening to the rest of the story. How Cutter had shown up at her office prepared for a picnic, how he was driving a rental pickup because he'd had a fender bender and his truck was in the shop. They had taken her Ford. Somehow she had managed to drive off, Cutter running alongside, pounding on her window, shouting and swearing. “He'll have to hitchhike out,” she said. “He might have to walk.”

“He knows where you live.”

She nodded. “He left the rental at my apartment.”

“He could be very angry when he gets back. You have to stay here tonight. The guesthouse is vacant.”

She nodded again, as if she had been turning the idea over in her mind. “I'll have to leave in the morning in time to get to court for a hearing.” She looked at him with such trust that after a second, he had to look away. He couldn't shake the sense that somehow he had let her down. He should have taken care. Take care. Take care. The words echoed in his head. Take care of the people you love.

“You'll be safe here,” he told her. “I promise.”

1899

A THUNDERSTORM HAD
moved across the prairie, with great bolts of lightning that shook the house and left the air heavy with electricity. Mary had stayed at the kitchen table, sipping on a mug of coffee and telling herself that Jesse would be fine out in the pasture. He and Anthony had been caught in storms before. They would know what to do. Maybe head into a dry arroyo and wait. Nothing to do but wait. After the storm had passed, she turned her attention back to the chores. Always the chores. A basket of laundry to fold and put away, the kitchen floor to scrub, butter to churn, dinner to put on the table.

Jesse spent long days out in the high pasture now that Butch and Sundance had gone. Just Jesse and the hired hand left to round up the cattle and herd them down to the lower pastures where they could feed them in the winter months with the bales of hay stacked against the barn. And yet, they hardly spoke. A few nods and grunts, but mostly Anthony stayed to himself out in the bunkhouse. He
even carried his meals out there now rather than sit at the table with her and Jesse. She hadn't minded. It was nice to spend time with Jesse; it eased the emptiness she felt after Butch left.

The Pinkerton agents had returned twice, and it wouldn't surprise her to see them riding up the road again. They never gave up. Sometimes she had to sit down for a moment to fight off the waves of nausea. At first she had allowed herself to hope there might be a baby coming, but all the hoping and praying did not make it true. For several years now, she and Jesse had accepted the fact there would be no child for them. Not long after they had married she had asked Jesse if she could bring Little Mary home, and he had agreed. Laughing and making plans to raise a daughter, building a small bed out of wood stashed behind the barn. But when they took the wagon to the reservation and found Mary playing with children she thought were her brothers and sisters, happy with her Arapaho family, they had understood the child was already at home. And later that year Mary had lost their child, a tiny, unformed life that had slipped out of her. No, the nausea that came over her now was from the thought of Butch running, running, always running from the stone-faced agents. They would chase him to the ends of the earth. It was only a matter of time until they caught up with him.

She hadn't told Butch about Little Mary. All the time he was here, she had argued with herself over whether she should tell him. She had tried to imagine what he might do, but she couldn't form a clear picture. An outlaw on the run? How could he claim a child? And what about Little Mary? Settled in her family. What did she need with a white man she had never heard of? She had decided not to tell him. Their child would stay settled and happy.

But there was something else—a ripple of pain that ran through her every time she allowed herself to think of those past times.
Butch, running his own ranch near Dubois. Going straight, living an ordinary life, like the other ranchers. Dancing at the get-togethers, and oh my, how he could dance. All the girls lined up to dance with him, but he had wanted to dance only with her. She, a half-breed, sneered at and looked down upon by the white cowboys, had caught his eye. Her heart fluttered even now at the thought of those days.

He would come back for her as soon as he got out of prison, he told her. Imagine Butch going to prison for stealing a horse that he hadn't stolen! Justice, she supposed, for all the bank robberies and train robberies he would later get away with. When he got out, he hightailed it out of here without even stopping by to see how she was doing. Without the courtesy of telling her he had to ride on, that some wild restlessness called him and he couldn't stay. Without even that much, and it had come to her over the years, the painful knowledge that she hadn't wanted to face: he hadn't loved her enough.

She lifted herself off the chair and went out to the back porch to churn the butter. She supposed the knowledge would always hurt, but it made no difference. She had met Jesse, another white man who had looked beyond her black eyes and black hair, the brown of her skin, and loved her. So it was for the best, all of it, wasn't it?

She had started to pour the cream into the churner when she saw Anthony galloping across the lower pasture with a large bundle behind him. She set the metal cream container down, stepped off the porch, and started for the fence, alarm spreading through her, bells clanging in her ears. Anthony dismounted and she saw the boots dangling below the tarp. She was running now, throwing open the gate. “Jesse! Jesse!” She could hear the panic in her voice.

“Best to stay calm.” Anthony grabbed her and tried to pull her
back, but she was already yanking at the tarp. Jesse's face, smashed and bloody, his eyes staring out as if he were examining the haunches of the horse. “Nothing we can do.”

She fought him with all her strength, punching at his iron-hard arms, flinging herself sideways and bucking like a wild horse to get free. “He's my husband!” she shouted. “Let me go!”

Gradually he let her go. She would not be restrained. “My husband!” she was screaming, and the wild, frantic screams filled her ears.

“It's too late. Nothing to be done,” he said as she cradled Jesse's head in her arms, pulled him close against her body.

“Don't go!” Screaming again. “Don't leave me.”

“Let's take him inside.” Anthony started lifting Jesse's body off the horse. “You take his feet; I can handle the rest.”

And there they were, carrying Jesse through the gate, across the yard and onto the porch, past the butter churner, across the kitchen floor still wet from the scrubbing and into the living room. They laid him on the sofa, his eyes now staring at the ceiling.

Mary knelt down beside him. She had no idea of when she had dropped down. All she could focus on was Jesse, stretched in front of her, one arm dangling over the sofa, fingers touching the floor. She had the sense she was looking at a tintype, an image of someone else. How could this be Jesse? She laid her head against his chest and listened for the familiar heartbeat that had sustained her through the long, dark nights when the sense of loss had pressed down over her.

She was barely aware of Anthony, a blurred image standing at the foot of the sofa, starring down at Jesse. “How could this have happened?” she said.

“The storm came on out of nowhere. Lightning flash spooked
the horses, and Jesse's mount bolted and threw him off. Hard, rocky place.”

“I don't believe it.” Jesse was an expert rider; he had ridden horses all his life, through all kinds of storms. There wasn't a horse he couldn't handle. So what if the horse had bolted? Jesse would have kept control. No horse would throw him.

“You better believe what's real.”

“He would've known what to do.”

“Didn't have time. It was an accident.”

Mary turned back to Jesse and sank down into her skirts. She picked up his hand, warm but still and lifeless, little smudges of dirt in the creases around the nails. Pieces of the ranch he had built for her. She pressed her lips to his palm. Then she rose on her knees and placed a finger on the top of his right eye and closed the lid. Then the left eye, the way Grandmother had done when Grandfather died.

She waited a long while before she spoke again, conscious of the man stationed like a guard a few feet away. Eventually she said, “We have to notify the sheriff.”

“It was an accident,” Anthony said again. “Sheriff will stir up trouble, ask a lot of questions, want to go out to the pasture where Jesse got bucked. Won't none of it bring him back. Best thing's to bury him on the ranch. Sooner better than later.”

Mary felt his eyes sweeping her face. She mopped at the moisture on her cheeks and kept her own gaze on Jesse. The red and black bruises on his face, the black-shadowed eyes, and what was this? A small crater on the right side of his head. It sank in on her then, like an iron pressed against her skin, that, rather than allow her to ride into town and notify the sheriff, the man at the end of the sofa would kill her.

What she couldn't know, couldn't work out in her mind was why. What had happened between Jesse and the hired hand? The nervousness she had felt lately, the nausea that came over her out of nowhere—worry over Butch, she knew, but now she understood there had also been something else nagging at her, something as hard to grasp as the electricity after the storm. Jesse and Anthony had seemed to get along well enough—for a man who owned a ranch and a hired hand with no hope of ever owning a spread himself. Anthony did his chores, but now and then, yes, now and then she had caught him staring out over the pasture and, sometimes, even staring at her with such envy in his eyes that it had made her look away. As if the world should make up to him for all the ways in which it had failed.

“I want my family to know,” she managed. “They will help me . . .” Help me grieve, help me find a way to hold this man accountable for Jesse's death. “Help me bury my husband.”

“I say we bury him now out behind the barn.”

Mary rose to her feet. “My husband is not an animal.” She tried to keep her anger down. A small nerve had started to twitch at the side of Anthony's face. His hand rode on the holster on his belt. She was aware of being alone, surrounded by nothing but land and air and sky, twenty miles from town, fifteen miles from her family. “Besides, if we buried Jesse like that, the sheriff would hear about it and come out here asking more questions.”

She could see by the way he flinched that she had struck home. He did not want the sheriff coming around; that was her trump card. “I'm asking you to ride over to the rez and tell my people about Jesse. I want to stay here with my husband.” For a moment, she didn't know if he would agree. Then something in him, perhaps the desire to appear normal and innocent, overrode whatever objections rose in his head.

“You'll stay here?”

“I just told you.” The man was so easy to read, she felt a chill run through her. A simple man capable of grasping one thought at a time, and that thought was to save himself. “My family will help me bury him,” she said, hoping to dispel any lingering thought of the sheriff.

Anthony took a few steps into the living room, then stopped and glanced about as if he had forgotten something. Finally he strode into the kitchen and out the back door. Mary waited until she heard his footsteps in the yard before she ran to the back door and threw the bolt. Then back to the living room to throw the bolt on the front door. She took the rifle down from the rack, cocked the hammer, and went into the kitchen. Out of the side of the window she watched Anthony head into the barn. He was there for a long time. And doing what? The sorrel stood in the yard, still saddled. He had only to mount the horse and ride away.

She slid the bolt back and stepped outside, the rifle trained on the open barn door. Slowly she made her way across the yard. Afternoon sun, clean and hot after the storm, flooded the barn and outbuildings; thick shadows fell over the ground. Inside, the barn was in half darkness. She had to squint in the sunlight to make out the figure moving about. She moved closer to the door. “What are you doing?” she called, but she could see what he was doing. Packing up his gear, rolling everything he had brought with him into a knapsack that he flung over one shoulder. She kept the gun steady as he came toward her.

“You fixing to shoot me?”

“Not if you ride out of here and don't ever come back.” She waited a moment before backing outside into the sunshine to give him room.

“Why the hell I'd ever want to come back here.” He fixed the
knapsack behind the saddle and, in one smooth move, mounted the sorrel and yanked the reins to the side. The horse trotted toward the house, and Anthony yanked the reins again, directing the horse down the side of the house and out to the ranch road. Mary kept the gun trained on him until he was nothing more than a dark speck in the middle of a dust cloud out on the main road.

She went inside and rebolted the door. Then she sank down on the floor again, next to Jesse, the rifle beside her. She wasn't sure how long she had stayed with her husband; she would have stayed forever. Time collapsed in her mind, the present and the past all bunched together. The time when Jesse had come courting in such a fancy surrey that she'd had to stifle a laugh. A fancy surrey for the likes of them, a cowboy and a half-breed. He had big plans. He had been saving money for years, he said, and he had enough to get them a stake. A little spread just over the line from the reservation, where she would be close to family. Close to her child, and she had loved him the more for understanding. Working hard on the ranch, hiring hands from time to time, whenever money allowed. But there was never enough money until Butch had come back and insisted she and Jesse take some of his.

She understood everything then. Jesse going to the bank to pay the mortgage, and where did he get all that money? And Anthony going into town and seeing the reward for eight thousand dollars, all for turning in outlaws nobody cared about anyway. The Pinkerton agents riding down the road a few days later. All of it making sense now. Anthony had been set to collect his reward, but Butch and Sundance had gotten away, and he was left with nothing.

She made herself get to her feet and, still cradling the rifle, went outside, taking her time to affirm what she knew was the truth. In the barn she pushed through the dimness to the large chest under
the tackle wall and lifted the heavy cover. “Nobody'll ever think of looking in here,” Jesse had told her when he stuffed the small envelope into the folds of a saddle blanket. She pulled the blanket apart and ran her fingers over the folds until she touched the crisp edges of the envelope. She pulled it out, went back outside, and leaned the rifle against the barn. She opened the envelope and turned it in the sunlight. The map was gone.