Hawk Moon (20 page)

She glared at me then looked back at him. "I don't want to go, David. I want to be here with you. I can help you get a car and get out of here."

She went over and sat down on the edge of the day bed, the only place to sleep, except for the floor, in the cabin. If he looked old, she looked young, very young and sad and lost.

She said, quietly, "We didn't finish talking, David. This is the first good talk we've had in years."

He stared at her a long time. "You heard me, Cindy. I want you to go."

"You sonofabitch," she said to me. "You had no right to come here and do this to us."

I wasn't sure what to feel. Things had been so simple when I'd been outside the cabin. Rhodes was a bad guy and Cindy his naive victim and I her knight in slightly tarnished armor. I would rescue the damsel. But things hadn't worked out quite the way I'd hoped.

Now I was an intruder, and a callous one, and I saw that whatever tenderness we'd shared in the lonely darkness last night had been furtive at best. She was in every respect, good and bad, right and wrong, in love with this man. I felt ridiculously betrayed, as if a few moments in the rainy shadows of a motel room had given me some kind of spiritual claim on her.

Now I really was an intruder.

I needed to hate Rhodes pure and clean, and I tried to, too.

I told myself that he had escaped from police custody, that he had never done a damned thing for this wife of his here, and that he was most likely the killer of at least two women.

But that didn't help any.

He was sad and she was sad and now I was sad, and we were all together in this tiny sunless mildew-smelling cabin and it didn't seem to matter if he was a killer or if she was going to lose her job. We were just three people who knew only one thing – that what lay ahead was likely very, very bad.

"Go on, Cindy. Please." He looked old; and now he sounded old, too.

"You don't have to do what he says, David."

He raised his eyes to hers. I sensed he was about to cry. "I've done things, Cindy – things you don't know about things you'd hate me for if you knew."

"Don't say any more, David. Not in front of him."

"I'm not exaggerating, Cindy. If you knew the things I'd done . . ."

"Why don't you go, Cindy?" I said. "Somebody might have spotted you here and told Gibbs, and—"

"You think I give a damn about that? That's your white-man bullshit. Worry about the job, worry about being respectable. They're going to kill him, or haven't you figured that out yet, Payne?"

She went over, knelt down next to him. Her knees cracked in the stillness.

She took his hand, smoothed it across her lovely cheek.

She set his hand down on hers, then, and she said to me, "One or two men in that posse, they'd just love to kill an Indian and that's just what they'll try to do with David."

"You go back to town," I said. "I promise I won't let that happen"

She laughed bitterly. "Do you know how pontifical you sound, Payne? The Great White Father! ‘I promise I won't let that happen.’ This isn't the FBI, Payne. This is a small town with a lot of people who hate Indians and who now have a half-ass excuse to kill one in cold blood."

"I'll call Gibbs. I'll tell him to come out alone."

"It could still happen." She had a child's terror at that moment, an image of death so compelling that she couldn't let go of it.

"He's right," Rhodes said. "I'll be fine." He leaned down and kissed her gently on the mouth.

The intruder, I looked away.

"I've treated you like shit all my life and I'm sorry, Cindy, I really am."

And then he was crying.

She held him and let him cry and after a time I went to the door and opened it and stepped outside so I wouldn't have to intrude so much. I had both their guns stuffed into my belt. They weren't going anywhere.

I gave them ten minutes and sometime during it, Cindy started crying, too, and I had a sense of what wives visiting husbands on Death Row must sound like, that gravity of loneliness and fear and oppressive dread.

And then he was laughing.

It was a sad laugh, maybe even a crazy laugh, and I felt sure it was about some old memory they'd come upon together, like something valuable glistening at the bottom of clear water, and now they were holding it up to the sunlight and turning it around for observation, and enjoying themselves with the beautiful simplicity of children.

When I came back in, she was kneeling next to him and her head was in his lap as if he were her father. His hand looked knuckled and outsize on the slender beauty of her head.

"You go now, Cindy."

"I don't want to leave you."

"Payne's right."

"Payne doesn't give a damn about you. Or me. He wants to keep Chief Gibbs happy."

"Go now. Please."

She glanced up at him and saw that he was not likely to change his mind. Once again, she glowered in my direction, then got slowly to her feet, her khaki uniform wrinkled, her eyes red from crying.

I said, "I'll give you an hour to get back to town and then I'll bring him in."

"You really are a white man, Payne," she sneered. "Only a white man would think I'd care about my career that much."

"He's right," Rhodes said again. "You have to worry about your career."

I held her gun out to her. She couldn't hide her surprise. "What's this for?"

"You come back to town without your gun, it's going to look damned funny."

"What's to stop me from taking it and shooting you?"

"Nothing."

"You're crazy if you don't think I'd like to."

"But I don't think you will."

She nodded to Rhodes. "He'll never get a fair trial. You should let him run."

"I can't let him run. You know that."

"White people make me sick. Did I ever tell you that?"

Obviously she was insinuating something about last night but didn't want to hurt Rhodes' feelings by making it any plainer. She was doing a good job of hurting my feelings, which was her intent.

"You go on now," Rhodes said, sounding more tired than before. "He'll take care of me all right."

Another glare at me.

She walked over and kissed him. It was almost maternal, that kiss. The way she slid her arm around his shoulder, she was a mountain lioness defending her cub from all peril. You'd be crazy to go up against her at this moment unless you absolutely had to.

Then she was done and she stood up and walked over to me.

She spat in my face.

All sorts of feelings went through me. I felt more alone at that moment, I think, than at any time since my wife died.

While Rhodes was looking embarrassed for me, she stalked out of the cabin, khaki legs rasping against each other as she moved.

Only then did I realize what had just happened. When she'd gone over to kiss him, she'd slipped him her service revolver.

He had the .38 Smith & Wesson in his right hand and he
was just bringing it up to the level of my chest.

And I was starting to bring my Ruger up, too.

Right here, in this small cabin, we were going to shoot it out.

And then he did something I never would have expected.

Another snapshot: Rhodes turning the gun around, putting the long barrel of it in his open mouth. Me, just now understanding what he was going to do, starting to lunge forward at him, trying to stop him but—

Too late.

He got a good clean barking shot off, one that carried maybe half the back of his head away and affixed it, with blood and hair and shimmering pieces of brain meat, to the rough wall behind him.

She came screaming in, terrified of what she was going to find.

She didn't seem to see me at all, went right past me, right up to him, and dropped to her knees again, and held him, mother and child, as his eyes rolled back dead white and all force and spirit rushed from his body.

The strange thing was, she didn't cry at all, just rocked him gently back and forth, back and forth, easing his soul across the great dark river, to the other side where sweet warm eternity awaits all us sad and frightened mortals.

I
n the fall, a librarian sent me a Xerox copy of a pioneer wife's journal. Not all the pages were there, and not all the handwriting was legible, but I'd been trying to write a piece about pioneers at harvest so this was very helpful.

Among other things, the journal reported how the woman had made mattresses from large quantities of moss stripped from trees; and spun yarn from the hair of wolves and coyotes, material that didn't always work so well; and turned worn canvas from tents and wagon-covers into overcoats; and battled the head colds and flu of the colder months by rubbing the children with warm goose grease and turpentine.

On the last day of the month, when the fiery leaves of the hills looked like the undulating wings of a vast butterfly, I knelt by the simple stone grave-marker of Katherine Louise Payne in the little country cemetery where I'd buried her. I formed soft words that were something like prayers, and shaped sentimental thoughts that were something like songs, and thought of how long I'd loved her — all the way back to First Communion in 1957 — and how long I would love her still, which was forever.

O
ne day a package came from my friend in the Bureau who'd been checking up on murders involving the mutilation of noses.

The note attached read:

Similar Cases:

Cleveland, November 6, 1978

Syracuse, February 3, 1981

Los Angeles, June 4, 1986

Chicago, June 28, 1989

Robert, these were the cases I found in the computer. When you called originally, I mentioned the possibility of copycat killings. The Syracuse and Los Angeles murders received national attention.

Best, RD

I spent a lot of time around the story-and-a-half colonial farmhouse my wife had picked out for us, putting a new roof on the garage; making cider from bright red apples the neighbors had dropped by; taking the cats Tasha, Crystal and Tess in for their annual checkups; flying the old biplane every chance I got; and talking to a university publisher in Ames about possibly submitting my book of Iowa history when I was a little further along with it.

At dusk, I usually went for walks, the frost just starting to silver the pumpkin patches and the forlorn scarecrow on
the horizon and the thin disc of cloudy moon riding the prairie night.

At home, I warmed up some cider in the microwave and sat with the cats in the library watching movies of the thirties and forties on American Movie Classics. I'd developed this rather boyish crush on Jean Arthur and watched everything she was in. I tried not to think about how much she reminded me of Kathy.

There was enough money in the savings account so that I didn't have to take any jobs for a while. And then the month was suddenly October, and the cats had taken to wanting the winter blankets out on the bed they let me share with them.

"P
ayne?"

"Yes."

"Richard Gibbs here."

"Hi, Chief."

Chief Gibbs and I weren't enemies but we weren't friends, either, so anything he called me with was not going to be good news.

"How you doing?" he said.

"Chief?"

"Yeah?"

"Did something happen to Cindy?"

"She quit. Or tried to."

"Her job, you mean?"

"Right. I finally convinced her to just take an extended leave."

"What happened?"

"She decided to do a little investigating on her own."

"I guess I don't understand."

Pause. "She doesn't think that David Rhodes killed those two women."

"Why else would he have committed suicide if he hadn't?"

"That's what I told her."

"Where is she now?"

"That's the trouble." He was a man who spoke in circles.

He went on: 'She took a little room for herself in Cedar Rapids and that's where she's staying."