The Ghost Walker (8 page)

Laying the sheepskin over the sofa, he smiled at her. Years in the outdoors had imprinted squint lines at the corners of his eyes, which glistened like black pebbles in a mountain stream. She knew the contours of his face better than her own—the strong jaw and high cheekbones,
the noble nose of her people, the confident mouth. She had fallen in love with him the summer she’d graduated from St. Francis High School. He’d been out of high school for four years, and had been in the army and gone to Germany. He talked for hours about the outside world, a world she knew nothing about. He spun a fantastic web of words, and she got caught in the web. He was everything she wanted. She was seventeen.

She forced her thoughts to the present, the Time Being. “What about Susan?”

“What about the coffee?”

Her eyes locked with his a moment. He had driven sixty miles on snow-crested roads, in plummeting temperatures, across the reservation from the Arapaho ranch up north where he was the foreman, and had waited in the truck two hours. She could throw herself upon him and beat against his chest, but he wouldn’t tell her why he was here until the time was ready.

She walked past him into the shadowy alcove. Moonlight filtered through the sliding glass doors that led to the patio, which was mounded in snow. She turned into the small kitchen and flipped on the overhead fluorescent light. A white glow suffused the wood cabinets and cream-colored countertops.

Ben leaned against the edge of the counter as she measured out the coffee grounds and poured water into the Mr. Coffee. “I was going to scramble some eggs,” she said.

“Sounds good.”

She felt his eyes on her as she broke the eggs into a bowl and whipped them with a fork. After pouring the thick yellow liquid into a frying pan, she dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster.

“Just like the old days,” Ben blurted, as if his thoughts would no longer be contained.

“Don’t, Ben,” Vicky said, pushing the lumpy eggs across the pan.

“Sometimes at night, I lie awake in my bunk and watch the pictures in my head. You and me and the kids back on Lean Bear’s ranch. They’re good pictures, the way it used to be.”

“You used to hit me, Ben.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him shift against the counter. “I try to see that, too, Vicky, but the picture’s blurry. The drinking times are big black holes.” He was quiet a moment, then said, “I haven’t had a drink going on six years now.”

“It’s no longer my business,” Vicky said, dishing the eggs onto two plates. She laid a slice of toast beside the eggs and, skirting around him, avoiding his eyes, carried the plates to the table. A gauzy light floated across the alcove from the kitchen and living room. Ben planted himself at the end of the table, a puzzled expression on his face as if he weren’t certain which of the turns in the past had been the wrong one.

Opening the top drawer in the buffet that stood against one wall, Vicky removed two place mats, two napkins, and a handful of knives and forks, which she arranged on the table. Then she returned to the kitchen and poured two mugs of coffee.

“I just wanted you to know about the drinking,” Ben said as she delivered the coffee mugs and settled into the chair across from him. The drinking. The words reverberated inside her as if he had shouted them in a mountain canyon. It was true, he had only hit her when he was drinking. If there was anything she was grateful for, it was that he had never hit the children. He had truly
loved the children. Yet, that had been the hardest to accept—the fact that he had been able to control his rage around the kids, which meant his treatment of her had been deliberate. That was the Ben she must remember. Not the handsome and confident man across from her.

“Please, Ben,” she said, scooting her fork under a clump of eggs. “What about Susan?”

The Arapaho took a long draw from his mug before saying, “You know she’s back?” His black eyebrows rose upward, as if he suspected she did not know. “Susan came to see me last week. Drove all over the ranch lookin’ for me. I was out pitching hay for the cattle.”

Vicky swallowed the eggs slowly, trying not to betray the emotions boiling within her. Her daughter—their daughter—had returned to Wind River Reservation and had not called her, had not come to her, but had gone to Ben. In Susan’s and Lucas’s eyes, she was the one who had broken up their home, had given them to her own parents to raise, had gone away to Denver to college and law school, had gotten the court order that kept their father away.

“I guess she’s not mad at me,” Ben said, not in a hurtful way, but as if he’d read her mind.

“When did Susan leave Los Angeles?” Vicky heard her own voice, disembodied, calm. She could feel her heart thumping.

“Didn’t say. She’s here with some white man and a couple of his buddies. She wanted to know if they could rent our old place.” Finishing the last of the scrambled eggs, Ben rested his forearms on either side of the plate. “Nobody’s lived at Lean Bear’s ranch since you took the kids and left. I only stayed long enough to close up the place. But I keep an eye on it. It’s still in good shape. So
I told her, sure, but she didn’t have to pay me rent. She said her friends wanted to keep everything legal. So I said, okay, and the next day she came back with a certified check for six months’ rent.”

As he talked on about how glad he was Susan had come back, how he’d never liked the kids living in L.A., how he believed families belonged together, the image of Lean Bear’s ranch flashed through Vicky’s mind. Ten miles up Sage Canyon in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains, it was the place Lean Bear had chosen for his family when the Arapahos came to the reservation a hundred years ago. Lean Bear was Ben’s great-grandfather, one of the leading men of the tribe. He had ridden with her great-grandfather, Chief Black Night. It had always seemed as if invisible threads, stretching into the Old Time, had woven her life to Ben’s long before either of them was born. It was to Lean Bear’s ranch he had brought her after they were married.

“What are Susan’s plans?” Vicky took a sip of coffee, conscious that it had turned lukewarm.

“She said they plan to start a business buying and selling Indian arts and crafts.”

“In Sage Canyon? It’s so far away, so isolated,” Vicky stammered. Something about this didn’t make sense. She saw in Ben’s eyes that he had reached the same conclusion.

“I’ve been askin’ myself why any white man wants to live like a hermit with an Indian girl,” he said. “And how come his friends are hanging around?” Ben was quiet. After a few seconds he went on. “I’ve been worried about her, so I drove up to Lean Bear’s place this afternoon, first chance I got. Nobody around. The house was locked up, and they’d changed the lock. I looked in the windows. Stuff everywhere. A real mess, not like
you used to keep the place, Vicky. I’d like to go back tomorrow, but we’ve got to get the hay bales to the upper ranges, or the cattle are gonna be real hungry.”

“I’ll go there first thing tomorrow,” Vicky said.

Her ex-husband looked at her a long moment, a blend of approval and gratitude in his eyes; then he pushed back from the table and got to his feet. She watched him slip on the sheepskin coat, sensing its heaviness as if it had fallen over her own shoulders, and methodically set the cowboy hat on his head, an act he performed every day. She fought against acknowledging the empty space he had left in her life.

“Let me know what you find out,” he said. “You can leave a message at the ranch office.”

Vicky stood up and followed him across the living room to the front door. He had more than an hour’s drive ahead, in temperatures no creature should be out in. “You can stay here tonight,” she said. “On the sofa,” she added hurriedly.

Ben turned toward her and smiled. “Not this time.”

8

V
icky managed to open the door to her office while juggling her briefcase, a stack of folders, and the black leather bag, the strap of which had slipped off her shoulder and was riding down her coat sleeve. She balanced herself on one foot to close the door with the other. Ginger, her secretary, jumped up from behind the computer desk and hurried across the small waiting room, grabbing the folders before they spilled over the brown carpet.

“She barged in here and said she had to see you
now,
” Ginger said, blue eyes blazing. She was a breed—an Arapaho mother and a long-vanished white father—which accounted for the combination of rosy skin and oil-black hair that hung in a single braid halfway down her back. Dressed in her usual blue jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse, she looked as if she might depart for the rodeo at any moment, but she ran the office like a war chief, causing documents and letters to materialize out of the computer, fielding phone calls, marshaling clients through the day. Ginger did not appreciate any sudden change in the schedule.

Vicky glanced through the doorway across the waiting room to the little space that served as her private office. Mary Featherly sat in one of the rounded wood chairs in
front of the desk, a yellow parka draped around her shoulders. She clasped a large red purse on her lap. Her appointment wasn’t until this afternoon, and this morning Vicky had intended only to drop off some documents before driving out to Lean Bear’s ranch. Susan had come to her in a dream last night, walking across the snowy fields, crying. Vicky had bolted upright and pulled the comforter around her shoulders to hold back the cold seeping into her bones. She had lain awake the rest of the night thinking about Susan at the ranch with three strangers—white men—and rerunning in her mind the old movies of Ben and her and the kids, wishing the ending had been different, for the kids’ sake.

She walked into her private office and greeted her client in as cheery a voice as she could muster. After depositing her brown wool coat and black bag over the coat tree, she settled into her swivel chair and withdrew the agreement from the briefcase.

“That bastard gonna let me and the kids have the house?” The Arapaho woman looked middle-aged; her face was leathered and wrinkled, her lips were pulled into a tight line, and her black hair hanging over the yellow parka was streaked with gray. She was thirty, the mother of two kids, about to be divorced, and furious at the dreams crumbled at her feet. Vicky recognized the signs.

Patiently Vicky began to explain the different points in the agreement. Yes, Mary would have the house, but only until the kids became emancipated, at which time the house would be sold, the profits divided between the parties. It was a small house in Lander; the profits wouldn’t be much. The good news was that Herman had been working for the state highway department nearly two months, and he could pay child support.

“As long as he has a job,” Mary interrupted.

“Yes, as long as he has a job.” That was the problem. Jobs for Indians had a way of vanishing overnight. If there was anything the
Hinono eino
needed, it was jobs.

Mary said, “That bastard should pay for all the times he drunk up everything and didn’t come home, and me and the kids went hungry.”

Vicky went over the points again. This wasn’t about revenge; why was it always about revenge? This was about getting the best deal possible so that Mary and the kids could move into a new life. Vicky could tell by the look of resignation creeping across the other woman’s face that she was beginning to understand. It was another thirty minutes before Mary got to her feet, leaned over the desk, and signed the agreement.

An hour later, Vicky guided the Bronco up the winding, snow-glazed road in Sage Canyon. She could feel the rear wheels slipping, and she steered toward the center, halfway between the jagged boulders and the drop-off into Sage Creek. The sense of place flooded over her. She hadn’t driven here since the day she’d taken the two kids and fled down the canyon like a madwoman. Yet it was familiar: the rock formations washed in sunlight, the snow like downy feathers on the branches of the ponderosas, the soft mountain air.

She turned onto the white road that led to Lean Bear’s ranch and hit the brake pedal. The Bronco slid in a half circle before stopping at the metal gate blocking the road. It was over five feet high, with three horizontal bars, and it hung between the posts of the barbed-wire fence Ben had set out the first summer they were married.