Eagle, Kathleen (2 page)
Authors: What the Heart Knows
The
woman with the pretty hands. She'd asked about Reese. Doing real good, he'd
told her, and she'd seemed a little disappointed until he told her the boy had
never married. That sure had surprised her. She'd tried real hard not to show
it, but it pleased her. So he'd given her what she was looking for, spread it
on thick about how hard it was for Reese when he couldn't play basketball
anymore because his body couldn't take it. Didn't tell her any medical
details—Reese was real touchy about his privacy—but she didn't ask too many
questions, even though she was hanging on every word.
He'd
watched her hands, stroking the smooth game stick he'd told her she could keep,
but he'd gotten a furtive peek at her face, gone soft and serene, as though
she'd suddenly draped herself with a sheer, somber-colored scarf, the kind the
old women tied way down over their tired faces. She'd said she'd read about
Reese's retirement, and she'd known it had come too soon. But still, she said,
Reese had done what he'd said he would do, and few dreams as lofty as his were
ever realized.
"What
do you make of lofty dreams?" Roy had asked her then, and she'd confessed
that she didn't much like being up in the air herself, but she thought they
were fine for some people. Tall people, like Reese. She made more of the
dreamer than the dream, Roy thought, remembering how curiously hard it had been
for him not to be rude, hard not to invade her privacy by looking her in the
face when her tone turned melancholy. Hard not to wonder what memory she
cherished behind those wistful-woman eyes. They had connections, he and this
woman. He couldn't define all of them yet, but he could feel them as he watched
her thumb trace a small groove in that game stick he'd carved long ago. Such
grace in those hands. Roy had to wonder what his son had done to chase her
away.
"And
everyday, dirt-common stories told by dirt-common old men? What do you make of
those?" he'd asked.
"Sense,"
she'd said. "Your stories make sense to me. Old stories are dependable,
good for everybody. Dreams are tricky. You can't depend on dreams. I can't,
anyway."
He'd
thought about suggesting to her that dreams weren't meant for depending on, but
who was he to say? In dreams he saw images that were both familiar and strange,
things that beckoned and taunted, often played on his fears. He liked stories
better, too. The woman was right—stories made sense. People were people, no
matter what century they lived in. He couldn't say much about dreams.
"But
tomorrow I'll have plenty to say about those crooks at Ten Star," he told
his dog, his voice sounding bold in the dark. "I'll have a story or two to
tell. Might just make a few people squirm, but..." He noticed a light
swelling below the hump in the highway to the south. He signaled the dog as the
headlights plunged over the hill.
But
Crybaby wasn't there. Roy whistled. "Where did you get to now?" The
headlights were closing in fast, too fast.
Up
from the ditch on the opposite side of the road, the dog's eyes shone, too.
He'd missed a beat, but he was there now. His master had called him, and he was
coming. So were the headlights, hurling through the dark on the force of a
roaring engine.
"No,
stay back now.
Hiya!"
Roy
threw his arms out and waved wildly, thinking surely the driver behind those
high beams saw him, but maybe he couldn't see the dog, he might hit the dog,
don't hit the dog.
Damn you, don't hit my dog.
He pointed. The shepherd
whimpered and crouched in the road, eyes gleaming like stars, caught between
listening to him and being with him.
The
shepherd was the last thought Roy Blue Sky had and the last thing he saw.
Death
had a way of screwing up the
best-laid plans.
Helen
Ketterling was a heavy-duty plan maker. Keeping things in order required a
plan. She very much resented any form of plan bomb, and death was atomic.
She
stood next to her car in the graveled parking lot across from the Bad River tribal
offices and puffed on a cigarette as she watched a trio of old Indian men mount
the steps to the front door. Two of them were older than the man they'd come to
visit for the last time, but the third one might have been a classmate of Roy's
in about 1940 or so.
In
the brief time Helen had known Roy Blue Sky, she hadn't gotten around to asking
him whether he'd finished high school. She didn't want to offend him by asking
the wrong questions. He was a wonderful storyteller, but he preferred folk
tales to personal reminiscences, although she'd managed to get a few of those
out of him, too. She now knew that he'd fought in the Battle of the Bulge and
that he'd been married twice, to young wives, both of whom had died much too
soon. He'd told her less about the second wife, the mother of his children,
than he had about the first, which was how she knew that the memory of the
second loss still pained him.
Or
had.
Nothing pained him anymore. He had found peace now, and as a member
of the Bad River Lakota Tribal Council, he was lying in state beyond those
bright blue doors.
He
was also her son's grandfather, but no one knew that. No one but Helen.
She
turned her back on the building and the mourners mounting the steps as she
puffed madly on her cigarette like a sneaky kid. It was the only way she ever
smoked. The only good cigarette was a secret cigarette. Sidney had caught her
at it a couple of times, and he'd read her the riot act, saying, "You're
supposed to be a
teacher,
Mom." She'd been proud of him, the way he'd
whipped those health-class facts on his mother, who still called herself a
teacher even though she'd gotten into this other business because... well,
partly because it paid well. But Sidney was always holding her to her own high
standards, and she'd felt guilty about her lame claim that this was such a rare
indulgence that she could hardly be called a smoker. He'd asked her what it did
for her, and she couldn't tell him. She hated it when she needed a good answer
and realized there wasn't one.
Helen
had come to Bad River to look for answers. She had a job to do, and she told
herself that learning everything she could about the Blue Sky family was simply
part of that job. She needed to know about their involvement with the casino
she was investigating. Roy had asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs for an
investigation, a fact that was particularly interesting because his son Carter
was Pair-a-Dice City's general manager. In the time Helen had spent around the
two men, she had observed, as was her habit, she'd listened, and she'd put a
lot of pieces of a still patchy picture together, which was her job.
But
she had motives beyond the duty to her assignment She had a duty to her son.
Sidney had always been
her
son, hers alone. It was a necessary
selfishness on her part, but now that he was barreling headlong into
adolescence, she had to start thinking about who he was
besides
her only
child, and who he would become. He had questions, and God only knew how she was
going to answer them when the time came for a mother's full, unambiguous
explanation of the ways of the real world. So she was angling for family
history, and she had been reeling it in quite nicely since she and Roy had
become friends.
There
were times when she was sure he knew what she was up to, and she decided he
didn't mind. She sensed that he actually approved. Tacit approval counted as
approval in Helen's book. It wasn't such a huge leap from knowing to not
minding to approving, one small hop at a time. She wanted the old man's
approval. She liked him and she knew that Sidney would like him, that they
ought to meet, that Sidney ought to hear his grandfather's stories; and knowing
these things pained Helen,
still
pained her, for she was very much
alive. Her secrets were very much alive, as was the risk she was taking just by
coming to Bad River. The risk was huge.
The
risk was over six and a half feet tall. Thirteen years ago she had known Roy's
other son, who must surely be waiting behind those blue doors, too. She turned
and stared at them, tried to bore a hole through them, tried to see how he
looked now, how much the very public end to his illustrious professional
basketball career had changed him, and how he carried his grief.
Helen
had loved Reese Blue Sky once.
She
had lusted after him, anyway. From the moment her craving for him had hit
her—and it had hit her hard— she had told herself that this was the
Romeo-and-Juliet kind of love that could never last and should never be
declared unless you wanted corpses lying all over your personal stage. Reese
believed, even if no one else did, that he was on his way to becoming a sports
star. Helen was on her way to graduate school, after adding Indian-reservation
teaching experience to her resume. She was too busy for love, and he was too
young, too unsettled, too quiet, too sexy, too improbable by half.
But
he was a powerful temptation, and she had made little attempt to resist. She
had denied love and fallen headlong in lust because he was the essence of her
secret, silly female fantasies. The American West was etched on his angular,
rough-hewn face, and he moved like a wild and natural creature, wondrously
agile for his size. She knew full well that her fanciful fixation with the myth
of the noble warrior had followed her into early adulthood, and it embarrassed
her to think about it.
She
was an intelligent woman, mostly. Responsible to a fault, but when her faults
shifted and her shield cracked, she had a bad habit of folding in on herself
and tumbling into the fissure. That tiny vein of romanticism was one of her
weaknesses. She indulged in a private love affair with the myth and mysticism
of the stark plains that rolled beyond the little clutch of boxy brick
buildings across the street. Behind the tribal offices, the Bad River flowed
between the Missouri and the Badlands, and beyond the river, the hills harbored
history, the buttes remembered days of triumph and tragedy. She loved this
place, and she was enchanted by its history. She had read about a man named
Touch The Clouds, a name that had flashed inside her head the first time she
saw Reese.
He'd
been shooting hoops against an old backboard with a group of children who had
been chased off the playground by the high school boys. School wasn't in
session, but one of the elementary school teachers had complained about the
bullies on the playground. Helen had gone in search of the dispossessed
youngsters with the intention of championing them in their claim to their
rightful territory. But the little ragtag group had found its champion in the
form of a lean and lanky giant who could lift them close enough to the netless
hoop for even the smallest child to score. He was Touch The Clouds, dressed in
snug, threadbare jeans, a black tank shirt, and shoes that looked like ordinary
Nikes until she'd seen them, two weeks later, lying beside her bed next to her
own size sevens. A small child could have canoed in Reese's shoe.
He
was a very big man with very big dreams, and, oh, what a very big time they had
had that summer. What a short, sweet, grand and lovely season.
Now
she would see him again after almost thirteen years, and she would offer
commonplace condolences, and she would be collected and polite. It was the
proper time for collected and polite.
To
go in there and see him in the flesh again after all this time would be
foolish, but she'd made up her mind. She ground her cigarette into the gravel
and waved to her friend Jean Nelson, who'd just gotten out of her battered
Bronco. Jean was still teaching at Head Start, still seemed to enjoy her job as
much as she had when Helen had first met her, when they'd been young and
idealistic and questing. Neither of them had gone back to school as they'd
planned, but Jean was now in charge of her program. Helen was working hers.
"Let's
do this together," Helen suggested when Jean drew close enough to link
elbows.
"Have
you seen him?"
"I
haven't gone in yet. I just got here."
Jean
gave her a knowing look. "I meant Reese."
"No,
I..." Helen glanced at the blue doors. "I just got here."
"Nervous?"
Jean
thought she knew how Helen felt about Reese. She was one of those frustrated
would-be counselors who was always trying to pick the emotional garbage cans of
her friends' brains. She was too damned intuitive to suit Helen, who returned a
blank look.
Jean
tightened down on the elbow link as they walked. "How long has it been
since you've seen him? In person, I mean. For a while there, he was all over
the—"
"Since
I left," Helen said, cutting her off. "I haven't seen him since
then."
"We
didn't see much of him around here, either. Once in a while he'd show up at a
high school basketball game, but that was rare. And it sure created a
stir."
"He's
a celebrity." Helen said this with an easy shrug, but the concept wasn't
so easily managed. "No, I'm not nervous. He probably won't even recognize
me. I'm here for Roy Blue Sky, Jean. This is about him."
"He
and Reese were sort of estranged lately, I guess."
"That's
too bad. I was just getting to know Roy." And what she knew was that if
Reese had shut his father out in recent years, his loss would be magnified. The
old man had been a delight. He'd had a dry sense of humor and an anecdote for
every situation. "He said I could come over and ride his horses anytime,
and that's what I've been doing for recreation."
"While
you played cards for a living," Jean admonished.
"It
actually pays better than teaching summer school."
"Almost
anything you can name pays better than teaching."
"Roy
was hoping to change that. He wanted to use some of the casino profits for
education." Except that there had been scant profits. A little-known fact
that Helen had not discussed with Roy, even though it concerned them both.
"He'll
be missed," Jean said as they threaded their way among the parked
vehicles, most of them sporting a dried crust of summer bug guts and South Dakota
clay. "He was a man who was just coming into his own, late in his life.
There was talk that he was going to be the next tribal chairman."
Helen
had heard the talk, and she'd mentioned it to Roy. Just talk, he'd said. He
wasn't sure old age was much of a qualification for office. "We need an
educated man," he'd said, and then he'd laughed and amended his last word
with a gender-neutral noun. Then he'd told her that he'd heard Reese had gone
back to school.
He'd heard.
And what she'd heard in his voice was the
distance mixed with a father's heartache.
"Roy
will be missed," Helen echoed quietly as they passed through the blue
doors.
She
spotted him immediately. Surrounded by people, he stood head and shoulders
above all of them and could easily see over their heads. He looked straight at
her when she came in the door, but there was no change in his face, no sign of
recognition or welcome or displeasure. He simply looked at her, kept on looking
at her in a way that drew her directly.
She
made an attempt to smile, then let it slide away. She'd thought about what she
would say if he didn't recognize her right away. Something witty and flippant.
A casual quip, some sweet, private little joke to jar his memory and maybe
throw him slightly off balance. Then she'd have the upper hand. But he was
still looking at her, his dark eyes completely unreadable, and she couldn't
think of a single clever thing to say.
So
she offered a polite and collected handshake. "Helen Ketterling."
"I
remember." His big, warm hand swallowed hers up completely. "It's
been a long time."
"Yes,
it has."
"Ten
years?"
"More
than that. You're looking—" Casting about for her wits had left her
suddenly short of breath.
"Yeah,
I'm looking." His smile was slow in coming, but finally his eyes befriended
hers. He wasn't releasing her hand. She wasn't drawing it away. "You
haven't changed."
"Yes,
I have. I'm really very..." She shook her head and glanced away. She was
going to say "sorry," but it felt like a pale, simpering word, and it
had little to do with his comment.
Different.
She was really very
different, but she didn't want to say that, either, because part of her wished
she hadn't changed so much.
He'd
changed, too. She'd known him when he was raw-boned and edgy, when his
everlasting hunger burned in his eyes, but now she beheld a cautious, confident
man who had made his mark. "I've only been back for a short time,"
she said quietly, suddenly noticing Jean's absence and wondering when she'd
moved away. "But your father had become a friend."
Reese
looked surprised. "To you?"
"He
remembered me from..."