The Man Who Fell from the Sky (2 page)

RUTH WALKING BEAR
might have been hosting a party. Darting among the Arapahos in the living room, hoisting a metal coffeepot, pulling orange-red lips into a smile around tiny teeth, searching with dark eyes for the next empty mug. “More coffee? Cake? Cookies? Casseroles. Eat up. Eat up.” The silver embroidery on her red, Western-style blouse flashed as she moved about. Her flip-flops squished on the vinyl floor. She had curly black hair tinted red, and the curls sprang free from beaded clips like feathers in a headdress. Odors of fried meat, strong coffee, and warm cookies wafted from the kitchen, where women were arranging trays of food and setting out stacks of paper plates. Ruth stopped before one of the elders. “Why, Grandfather, your cup is empty.”

Vicky Holden kept an eye on the woman. Something forced and terrified about her. In another life, she and Ruth had attended St. Francis School together. Kids, climbing onto the school bus and crossing the reservation in blizzards and wind and rolling dust.
Ruth had exuded confidence, as if she were driving the bus, in control of the weather, but Vicky had suspected even then that the confidence was a mask, like the party face she wore now. During the years Vicky had been married to Ben Holden, she often ran into Ruth at the powwows and ceremonies. They would chat and gossip—two women together. But Vicky had left Ben and that old life, gone to Denver, and become a lawyer. Everything was different when she returned, or was it just that she was different? It seemed that Ruth and the other women had gone away, set their moccasins on the traditional path, as the grandmothers said, and she had been unable to follow.

Vicky tried to excuse herself from a short, gray-haired woman who claimed she had also gone to St. Francis School, although Vicky had no memory of her. The woman had been peppering her with questions. What had she heard about Robert's death? “People don't fall into a lake and die. Must've been pushed, right? Who might have done it? What does the coroner say?” For some reason, the woman—what was her name? Cathy?— assumed that because Vicky practiced law in Lander, she was part of the conversations in the legal corridors of the white world.

Vicky had dodged the questions. She didn't know the answers, but Cathy, like every other woman on the rez, probably knew quite a lot or thought she did. The women never missed a gathering. They looked after the elders, cared for one another's kids. They lived by the moccasin telegraph and took pride in staying connected. What Cathy wanted from her was news to pass on. But the questions had only reinforced Vicky's feeling of being an outsider among her own people. Woman Alone, the grandmothers called her. The Indian lawyer their relatives or friends went to when they got into trouble, but not one of them.

It took several tries before Vicky managed to break free. She
made her way through the conversations buzzing about the room and stopped next to Ruth, who was refilling another cup of coffee. “Wouldn't you like to rest awhile?” Vicky nodded toward the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Most of the houses on the rez were the same Federal style with living room and kitchen on one side, a couple of bedrooms and a bath on the other.

“I don't need to rest, and I certainly don't need a lawyer.” Ruth struggled to keep the orange-red smile in place. “Robert's dead and I have to go on the way he would expect me to, so that's what I'm doing. You need some coffee?” She started to turn toward the kitchen and the stack of Styrofoam cups visible at the end of the counter.

“No, thank you.” Vicky set her hand on the woman's arm. She could feel the tremors rising from somewhere deep inside. “Won't you at least sit down. I can pour the refills.” She stretched out her hand to take the coffeepot, but Ruth stood motionless, her eyes on the man coming through the front door.

“Ah, Father John,” she said, as if she were expecting someone else. Then she handed the coffeepot to Vicky and started across the room. Conversations started to dissolve, like the wind dying down.

Vicky watched the little crowd surge around the tall, redheaded man inside the door, reach for his hand, pat his arm. He had on blue jeans and a blue plaid shirt. The brim of a tan cowboy hat was curled in his fist against his thigh. It had been a long while since she had seen John O'Malley, the mission priest at St. Francis. She thought of the intervals between their meetings not in days or weeks or months, but in seasons. The fall, the holidays and winter, the spring. He looked fit, strong and straight, yet different somehow. A few more gray hairs at his temples, more fine lines around his eyes. He reached for Ruth and drew her toward him. In the
quiet that engulfed the living room, Vicky heard him say how sorry he was. She was thinking that everyone on the rez had come to love this white man who, one day, had shown up among them.

Ruth was leaning against his chest, her red blouse with the shiny embroidery stretched across her spine, shoulders rising and falling as she gulped for air. Vicky walked over and placed a hand on the woman's back, conscious of John O'Malley's eyes on her. Finally she looked up and met his gaze. “She's been holding it in. It's a terrible blow, losing your husband like that.”

The room remained quiet, as if a show were going on that held the audience spellbound. Vicky could feel the eyes boring into them, three people huddled together. And the calmness that emanated from John O'Malley, a man accustomed to such situations. So many people he had comforted on the rez, so many inexplicable deaths. They had worked together since he came to the mission almost ten years ago. Trying to help her people: the alcohol and drug addicts, the abused women and neglected children, the scared and lonely warriors facing charges for crimes they hadn't committed.

“I need fresh air.” Ruth lifted her head and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief that, Vicky suspected, he had handed to her.

“I set up some lawn chairs out back.” Dallas Spotted Deer stepped over. Related to the Walking Bear family, one of Robert's cousins, if Vicky remembered correctly. Everyone on the rez was related somehow, distant cousins of distant cousins, in-laws two or three times removed. Dallas had been at St. Francis School when she and Ruth were there. A middle-aged man now with red and blue ribbons woven into black braids that hung down the front of his yellow shirt, and a serious, pockmarked face.

John O'Malley nodded a thank-you to the man as they started across the living room. Past the sympathy-filled faces, past the
kitchen counters piled with food, past the women drawing themselves back to make room. A grandmother darted ahead and opened the door. They stepped out onto the stoop and down the three wooden steps, John O'Malley holding on to Ruth's arm, guiding her toward a pair of lawn chairs. He handed her into one and motioned Vicky into the other. Then he found another chair stacked against the house and shook it open as he brought it over. He sat down across from them.

“I'm sorry for breaking down like that, Father.” Ruth looked sideways. A barbed-wire fence ran between the bare-dirt yard and the pasture where two horses grazed on clumps of grass. The brown hills traced with green rose in the distance against a blue-white sky. She slipped off the flip-flops, tucked her feet under her, and kneaded at the fabric of her jeans skirt as if it were dough.

“You don't always have to be strong,” John O'Malley told her.

Vicky looked away. She tried not to smile. There were times in the past when he had told her the same thing.

“I wasn't expecting Robert to die,” Ruth said. “When the fed knocked on the door and told me Robert had been found in the lake, I told him there must be some mistake. He said that Alan Fergus, runs a body shop in Lander, found Robert's body.” She lifted her shoulders and dropped them in a defeated shrug. “The moccasin telegraph must've gotten the news before I did. Before I knew it, all kinds of people were at my door.”

Mostly related to Robert, Vicky was thinking. A few distant relatives of Ruth's, but everyone close to her had died or moved away years ago. And now—a new thought breaking through—with Robert gone, Ruth would be almost as alone as she was.

“All the women brought food,” Ruth was saying. “It's like they make a lot of food and wait for something terrible to happen.” She
dabbed the wadded handkerchief at her eyes again. “The worst part is what they're saying.”

“What do you mean?” Vicky said.

“If they aren't saying it, they're thinking it.” A stream of tears and black mascara ran down the woman's cheeks. She pulled at the handkerchief in her hands without making an effort to wipe away the moisture. “Stories go around faster than lightning.”

“What stories, Ruth?” John O'Malley leaned toward her. “Tell us.”

“The fed started it, asking stupid questions. Made me sick to my stomach.” John O'Malley was quiet. Patient, Vicky thought, unbelievably patient. He had once told her he had learned patience from the Arapahos, learned to sit and wait while people ordered their thoughts and decided whether he was trustworthy enough to give their thoughts to him. She, on the other hand, had learned impatience from years in the white world, college, law school, the years in a big law firm followed by her own small firm. Learned to jump up, be quick, be alert, never let down her guard. Pace the floor to order her own thoughts; rise in the courtroom:
Objection!

Ruth unfolded her legs, wiggled her feet into the flip-flops, and shifted forward on her chair, pulling at the handkerchief in her hands. A pair of reddish curls hung loosely along her neck. She was struggling to say something, lips forming and reforming the words. Finally she said, “The fed wanted to know if Robert was depressed. Did he ever talk about taking his life? Had he ever tried to take his life? If he did decide to take his life, how do I think he might have gone about it? What was he saying? Robert walked into the lake, laid down, and died?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, as if she might squeeze out more tears. Then she tossed her head toward the pasture. “He had the
ranch. Meant the world to him. Maybe it's a nothing ranch, but we had meat on the table and Robert picked up jobs with the highway department every summer, and I got my job at the dental office. The Creator never saw fit to give us children, but Robert said we'd be okay, just the two of us.” She was staring out at the pasture. The breeze riffled the manes of the horses. “I'd say, anybody depressed around here, it was me. Same old, same old every day. No way out. Nothing ever changing. But I never thought he'd leave me like this.”

Vicky caught John O'Malley's eye for a second. All she knew about Robert's death had come over the moccasin telegraph. First, to Annie, her secretary. Then Annie had brought it to her. But maybe there was more, facts the telegraph hadn't yet picked up. She could read the same thought in John's face.

He took one of Ruth's hands in his own and waited until she turned back to him. “Nobody knows yet what happened.”

“The coroner will order an autopsy and issue a report.” Vicky tried to match John O'Malley's calm, assuring tone. “We'll know the truth then.” She was thinking the report could take several weeks.

“That's not all the questions the fed asked. Robert have any enemies? Altercations with friends or strangers? Anybody like to see him dead?”

“The fed has to look at every possibility.” Vicky was thinking that the local FBI agent, Ted Gianelli, was a thorough investigator. No stone would be left unturned. Eventually Ruth would appreciate his thoroughness.

“Nothing would have happened if Cutter had been with him.” Ruth turned toward Vicky. “You remember Jimmy Walking Bear? He went to St. Francis School with us. Got the name Cutter on a
Texas ranch, where he was the best at cutting out cattle during roundup.”

Vicky tried for the third time this afternoon to reach back to the years at St. Francis School, all the brown-faced, black-haired kids bent over papers and books at desks arranged in perfect rows, and a nun—Sister Mary Rita, perhaps—or one of the priests explaining a mathematical problem, writing assignments on the blackboard, rapping a ruler on the desk to stop the giggling in the back of the classroom. There were several priests at the mission who taught classes then. Good teachers, the Jesuits. She tried to picture a boy named Jimmy Walking Bear, but all the gangly, pimply boys blurred in her mind.

“I'm afraid I don't remember him,” she said.

Ruth waved one hand, as if she were shooing off a mosquito. “Robert's cousin. Two or three times removed, but still a relative. Anyway when Cutter was about eleven, his father packed up the family and moved to Oklahoma. So Cutter grew up not knowing his own people, where he came from. He came back to the rez a couple months ago looking for family. First thing he did was find Robert. They formed a real tight bond. I wish Robert had taken him hunting, but Robert never took anybody hunting . . .”

“Hunting?”

Ruth gave a small smile of memory, unlike the fake, plastered smile she had worn earlier. “Treasure. Robert was hunting treasure. Long as I've known him, he talked about finding the treasure Butch Cassidy buried up in the mountains around Bull Lake when he was hiding out here after a robbery. Robert heard the stories when he was a kid and they clamped on to him, wouldn't let him go. It was his hobby, hunting for that treasure. He worked all week on the highway, laying down asphalt in the hot sun, and on Friday
he'd head up into the mountains where it was cool and he could relax and hunt for treasure. He liked to go alone, be by himself for a few days. I never knew for certain when he would come home. If he was onto something, he'd camp up there and keep working all weekend. So I wasn't worried when he didn't come home last night. I figured he thought he found something.”

She stopped and bit at her lip a moment. “I never expected him to find treasure. If you want to know the truth, neither did Robert. It was the looking that was fun. Until . . .” She left off again and squinted into space, trying to fix a memory. “When his grandfather Luther died, Robert found a leather case in the old man's barn. Inside was a map. Well, Robert got real excited. Said Butch Cassidy left a map behind, just like Luther always said. With all those movie people on the rez making a documentary about Butch Cassidy, Robert figured there'd be a stampede of people hunting for Butch's treasure. So he took time off his job and went up into the mountains every day. Said he was getting close.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “He was always getting close.”