The Man Who Fell from the Sky (3 page)

The screened door opened and people began to flow onto the stoop, down the steps, and across the yard, heading for the lone cottonwood tree and the shade splashed over the dirt. Several women hovered over Ruth, wanting to know how she was doing. Was there anything they could get her?

“I should see about the coffee.” Ruth jumped to her feet.

“We'll take care of it.” The women wheeled about and started back up the steps. The screened door slammed behind them.

“I have to check on the elders.” The lawn chair toppled over as Ruth started past.

Father John stood up. “We'll come with you.”

He was so tall, Vicky was thinking as she stood next to him.
She barely reached the top of his shoulder. He looked slim and fit, yet he filled so much space.

“I must be strong,” Ruth was muttering under her breath as she started for the house. “I must show them I am strong.”

Vicky followed Ruth up the steps and into the kitchen, conscious of the sound of John O'Malley's footsteps behind her.

TRAFFIC HAD COME
to a dead stop on Ethete Road. The asphalt glowed in the afternoon sun, and dust whirled about the line of vehicles ahead. Father John pulled in behind a white SUV. The minute he stopped, the heat started to accumulate inside the cab of the old Toyota pickup. The prologue to
Pagliacci
blared from the CD player on the seat beside him. It was the last week in May, the Moon When the Ponies Shed Their Shaggy Hair, as the Arapahos marked the passing time. The weather already turning warm. He shuddered to think of how far up the thermometer the temperature might crawl in July.

He got out and tried to see past the SUV. What looked like a bunch of cowboys came galloping across the prairie on the right, raising great billows of dust that hung like brown clouds against the sky. Arranged alongside the riders were cameras on black tripods and, behind the cameras, groups of men and women. Other
cameramen in Jeeps followed the horses, holding out cameras. A row of pickups stood at the edge of the road. Beyond the pickups, what looked like a village sprang out of the prairie: a circle of campers, RVs, more pickups.

He got back inside the Toyota, turned up the CD player, and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. So this was where the Butch Cassidy documentary was being filmed today. Cowboys galloping at full speed, probably portraying the getaway after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the rest of the Wild Bunch had robbed a bank or a train. Now the cowboys rode back the way they had come, moving at a slower trot, which, he suspected, meant they would film the scene again. He drummed his fingers harder and wished he had paid attention to the list of filming sites in the
Gazette.
He considered turning around and taking the long way back to Seventeen-Mile Road and the mission, but he had pulled in close to the SUV and a blue pickup had pulled in behind him. It would take some maneuvering to turn around. He decided to wait. One more getaway and maybe the road would open up. The prologue of the opera came to a crashing end. He opened the door to let in more air, but it was hot air, all of it.

He thought of Ruth. She would need to summon strength for the days and months ahead, maybe the years. He had counseled so many people who had lost their life partners, trying to help them find the way forward. But what did he know? He tried to imagine what it would be like to lose someone who was a part of yourself. Like losing an arm. Sometimes, when he was going on about trusting in God, taking one day at a time, and all the other platitudes, he wondered how any of it could ever help.

For an instant, he let the thoughts of Vicky circling the edges of his mind come into focus. There had been times when she had been
close to death, and he remembered the icy grip that had taken hold of him. He wondered how he would have managed if, in fact, she were no longer part of the world. He pushed the thought away. Seeing her today had been reassuring and comforting, even in a house of grief.

He got out again and stretched. The cowboys were galloping over the prairie, but this time other cowboys galloped behind, brandishing guns. A series of pops split the air. Lawmen after Cassidy and his gang. But did they ever catch up with him? He tried to remember the bits and pieces he had read about the Wild Bunch, the movie he had watched years ago. Who knew if the stories were based on historical fact? He realized another cowboy was coming along the line of vehicles, talking to the drivers. He waited as the man stepped back from the SUV and started toward him.

“Sorry for the inconvenience.” The cowboy had pale blue eyes and sun-reddened skin. “Director wants one more shot.” He gestured toward the prairie and the riders reining horses into a line. “Always a danger the horses might break away and run across the road, so tribal police say we have to keep the roads clear. Give us a few more minutes.”

The man had started for the pickup behind when he turned back. “Say, you wouldn't be that mission priest we've heard about.”

“I don't know what you may have heard, but I'm Father John O'Malley, pastor at St. Francis.”

“The director would like a word with you.” He glanced over at the horses again. “Todd Paxton. Looks like he'll be tied up the rest of the day. Could he give you a call?”

Father John pulled out the little notebook and pen he kept in his shirt pocket, wrote on the top page both the mission telephone number and that of his cell phone, and handed it to the cowboy.

“Todd thinks you might be able to help us out.” He gave a nod of appreciation and walked back to the driver's window of the blue pickup.

Father John slid behind the steering wheel. He wondered how much help he could be to the director of a documentary film on Butch Cassidy. About as much help as he had been to Ruth.

*   *   *

ANOTHER TWENTY MINUTES
passed, the opera well into Act I,
Don, din, don, din
, and the vehicles ahead started forward. Father John pressed lightly on the accelerator as the old pickup growled and shook and finally settled into twenty miles an hour. Ahead actors in cowboy hats milled about; horses grazed on sparse outcroppings of grass. Like a giant machine, the crowd started rolling in the direction of a blue and white truck with a metal curtain raised on one side, revealing what looked like a counter in a diner.

Finally he was past the movie site, the pickup shuddering as it picked up speed, the SUV already far ahead, glinting in the sun. He turned onto Blue Sky Highway and picked up Seventeen-Mile Road heading east, thinking about Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch and what the reservation must have looked like more than a hundred years ago. The same endless stretch of prairie, the same brown foothills stretched low on the western horizon, probably some of the same log cabins around the rez. The same feeling, he suspected, of openness, expansion and—what was it? Freedom.

The blue billboard with St. Francis Mission in large, white letters loomed over the road ahead. He slowed past the billboard and turned into the tunnel of cottonwoods. Branches scraped the top of the pickup; white downy fluff painted the road. He could feel the rear tires slipping, and he slowed down. He had been trying to
forget that the tires were bald. No money this month for replacements. He would have to remember to drive carefully.

He turned onto Circle Drive, the mission all around him. On the west, the redbrick residence; at the far end of the circle, the gray stone school building he had turned into the Arapaho Museum; and lined up to the east, the white stucco church decorated with bright red, yellow, and blue geometric symbols of the Arapaho—lines for the path of life, triangles for the buffalo, tipis for the people—the dirt road that led to Eagle Hall and the guesthouse, and on the other side of the road, the large two-story yellow stucco administration building sheltering among the cottonwoods that crept away from the tunnel. Bishop Harry stood at the foot of the concrete steps tossing a Frisbee to Walks-On. The dog leapt on his three legs through the tall grass in the center of Circle Drive, then paddled back like a swimmer pushing through the waves. He started for the bishop, pivoted on his single hind leg, and came at a full run toward the pickup. Father John stepped on the brakes. A spray of gravel and dirt peppered the pickup's rear end. He leaned across the CD player, opened the passenger door, and helped the dog crawl onto the seat, the Frisbee still clenched in his jaws. He closed the door and, running his hand over the dog's soft coat, drove to the front of the administration building, and pulled in next to the bishop.

Bishop Harry Coughlin, gray hair going white, pale blue eyes, a permanent band of sunburn across his nose and cheeks, walked over to the pickup and opened the door. “You interrupted a good game of Frisbee just when I was winning.”

“Against Walks-On?” Father John turned off the opera, got out of the pickup, and waited for the dog to lumber across the seat and jump down. He closed the door. He was thinking that this old
man—this competitive Frisbee player—had to be close to eighty years old, but he had never asked the bishop's age. The bishop seemed healthy and strong despite the two heart attacks and surgeries that had sent him to St. Francis, supposedly to rest. Another subject Father John never brought up. The bishop had spent thirty years looking after thousands of Catholics in Patna, India, and on the first day he arrived at the mission he had made it clear he did not know how to rest and would die if he tried. As simple as that. Father John had cleared out the back office, occupied at various times by various assistants. A parishioner donated a used laptop, and Father John found one of the kids on the Eagles, the baseball team he coached, to set it up. The bishop had settled in.

“You missed a visitor,” the bishop said as he led the way up the concrete steps. “Maris Reynolds. I told her to check back later.” He turned toward the muffled sound of an engine in the cottonwood tunnel, and Father John followed his gaze. “I believe your visitor may be returning.”

Father John walked back down the steps to where Walks-On stood shaking the Frisbee, eyes lit with expectation. He waited until the pink Cadillac sedan that looked as if it had materialized out of a retrospective film on American cultural icons pulled in next to the Toyota. Then he threw the Frisbee into the grass and watched Walks-On bound past the elderly woman emerging from behind the steering wheel. He walked over and held the door as Maris Reynolds straightened herself to her full six-foot height and patted her blue-flowered dress around her hips. A large red bag hung off one arm.

“Always nice to see you,” Father John said.

“Likewise, I'm sure. Is there somewhere quiet we can talk?”

“It's pretty quiet everywhere.” The mission, the entire reservation—
the quiet of open spaces. From his first day at St. Francis, he had been drawn into the immense solitude.

“I like the shade on a warm day like this. If it is all the same to you . . .” The woman gestured with the red bag toward the picnic table and benches under a cottonwood in front of the church, then walked around the car and started along the gravel road.

Father John fell in beside her. “How about something cool to drink? Iced tea? Lemonade?” He was pretty sure he'd seen Elena place pitchers of both in the refrigerator this morning.

“No, thank you. I am perfectly comfortable.” The woman stepped into a circle of shade and sat down on the bench facing the table, as if she were positioning herself to play a piano concerto.

Father John sat across from her. “What can I do for you?”

“For once, you are wrong, Father.” She fixed him with a hard gaze, but she was smiling. “The question is, what might I do for you? I am going to come straight to the point,” she said, opening her bag and slipping out a white, letter-sized envelope. “I've never gone for circling the point with a lot of trivia about the weather and the kids' health and everything else the Arapahos use to take up time. My philosophy is: state your business and get on with it.”

“A useful philosophy.” Father John smiled. He was accustomed to the polite preliminaries that ensued before any conversation with an Arapaho, the way of connecting with another human being. Maris Reynolds lived on a ranch near Dubois, surrounded by other ranches, all owned by whites.

She opened the envelope and tipped out a smaller envelope, which she pushed across the table. “I have brought you a gift,” she said. “I believe the Arapahos would call this a double gift. I had the first pleasure of receiving these tickets to the Central City Opera from my son in Denver. Since I have no intention of spending two
days driving to and from Denver to attend an opera, I have the second pleasure of giving this gift to you.”

“That's very kind.” Father John opened the small envelope and glanced at the tickets.
Rigoletto.
August. Orchestra seats. It had been years since he had seen an opera. Years since he had listened to a live orchestra, to voices that soared like the voices of angels. Years since he had lost himself in the music, the elaborate costumes, the settings. All of it bigger than life, magical.

“I imagine your son might have a couple of friends who would like the tickets.”

“Poppycock.” Maris thumped her knuckles on the table.

“Poppycock?”

“Yes. A very good word. Derisive and dismissive. I believe our culture is much diminished by forgetting such useful and exacting words. I have made it my business to use such words at every opportunity in order to bring them back into general usage. Now that you've been reminded of
poppycock
, I hope you will pass it on to others who will also pass it on. Within a short time, it will be heard everywhere.”

Father John smiled. “I wish you luck.”

“Thank you.” The woman looked as serious as if he had just wished her luck on a long journey. “I believe you are avoiding the tickets.”

“It's very generous of you.” Father John slid the small envelope inside his shirt pocket. He could imagine the orchestra playing the prelude and the opening notes of “Questa o quella,” and the hush falling over the theater as the curtains parted. “I'd like very much to go to the opera . . .”

“That settles it. You will go.”

“I wish it were that easy.”

“Of course it is. You must find a way.” She swung her legs around the end of the bench and pulled herself upright. “I must be going. I'll have to take a roundabout way home to avoid that foolish film crew that has been closing roads everywhere.”

Father John stood up and walked the woman along the graveled road to the pink Cadillac. She stopped at the driver's door and waited for him to open it. “He was a good man, Butch Cassidy. Never killed anybody in his years of outlawing. I hope the documentary will reflect the truth.”

Gathering the blue flowery skirt around her, she folded herself behind the steering wheel. “George Cassidy is how he was known in these parts. He was a good friend to my grandfather.”