Adult: L, S
Chapter 1
Stones thumped the bottom of Eddie CloudRunner's yellow sedan as he drove southwest; the wheels whirled gray dust into the mid-August air. Three hilly miles behind, his house set at the edge of rugged slopes above the sage-prairie sections of his ranch. This was his weekly trip to town: check the mail, pick up supplies. Even once a week seemed an imposition. Recently, he was satisfied to restrict his social interactions to working at the rodeo and all-too-infrequent visits to Naomi Lagland. He smiled, anticipating their weekend tryst.
At the black asphalt highway, he eased the car over the cattle guard and turned south toward the town of Lamp Creek. His was the only vehicle on the highway, surrounded by high-plains prairie and irrigated alfalfa fields. Morning sunlight glared into the driver-side window while blue sky stretched west into a gray blur of clouds. The rural land quickly gave way to a more modern setting. The Greenwood Parish Estates' golf course sprawled to the east, fringed with multilevel homes, richly fenced and landscaped. He slowed as a motorcycle roared out of the development's main entrance. On the west side of the road, the large house of the Bar RG appeared modest and serene, a contrast to the flamboyant public front Ross Gaston had presented when he was here.
Eddie rubbed his hand over his stomach. Queasy sensations hit him at odd moments, and he hoped he wasn't getting an ulcer. He pulled an antacid from the pack on the dash and popped it into his mouth.
Once in town, Eddie avoided tourist motor homes and camper vans by taking the alley that ran parallel to Main Street. He crunched the last of the antacid and parked his car behind Ditkins's barbershop near a Restricted Parking sign. When he entered the back door, he was greeted by a friendly, "H'lo Runner." Gray mustached Jim Ditkins paused in his scissors clip of a stranger's hair and grinned, knowing where Eddie had parked. "Passing through, huh?"
"Yep."
"You're always passing through. When the hell are we gonna get you in here for a haircut?"
Should have parked on the street, Eddie thought, ignoring the regular joke. He wished he had another antacid.
"Why, ain't a thing wrong with Eddie's hair," spoke old Luke Jerrens. He looked up from his corner seat by the front window, a place he had occupied daily for more than nine years. His milky old eyes twinkled at Eddie. "He don't have to change his haircut for every fad comes along. Sideburns, no sideburns. Long, short. Bah." Luke waved a thick-veined hand with disgust. His own yellowish-white hair hung unkempt along his shoulders. "No. He's doing fine." He chuckled, making no sound.
"I'll get him one day," Jim teased. "Charge him by the inch."
"Sure, Jim," Eddie said. "Do it the day after you ride Red Zinger." Red Zinger was an angry-eyed Brahman bull at the rodeo.
"There you go, Runner. Make him an offer he can't refuse!" laughed a younger man lounging in the other barber chair. "How long's it been now? Ten months?"
"Eighteen since he was last ridden," Jim said. "Some sort of damn record."
"It's good for business," Eddie said as he headed for the front door.
"If I was a mite younger, I'd give it a shot," Luke spoke up. "Why, in my day--"
"When was that?" Jim called over the sound of the clippers he had turned on. "Before Custer, right?"
"Shoo! In my day, folks was tough. Stood up to what had to be done. Nowadays?" He shook his head. "People swarmin' around like ticks on a mule deer. Don't nobody have to rely on their own selves."
The other men started a conversation, ignoring the old man, but Eddie respectfully stopped and listened to Luke's familiar speech. "These fool new folks. Always needing someone else to make their way. No roots, flitting from here to there. But the land'll make them pay. They leach it, abuse it, move on to somewhere else when it's used up, but there's gonna be no place to run 'fore long. What d'you say, Runner?"
"Could be, Mr. Jerrens."
"Yes, indeed. Folks gotta get some foundations. Declare some values...Yes, indeed." Luke Jerrens smiled as if he knew a secret and stared back toward the street.
Eddie left the barbershop, certain he wasn't one of the people Luke Jerrens talked about. Eddie had marched down Main Street with other junior high schoolers in Fourth of July parades; was cascaded along with the football team when the high school won All State his junior year, his senior year, too. And he always came back to Lamp Creek: the summer after junior college; winters--if trucking was slow; the spring before he married a long-haired blonde who loved the big rigs and fucked him with hot passion during cool Seattle nights. When he quit the road, she quit him (it was two years before he thought to get a divorce). He came back after his BA; he returned the next year with Masters degree in hand before he took the teaching job at an Arizona government school. He stayed five months in Lamp Creek after he lost his government job to cutbacks. Another teaching job...Then Taylor Stanton's death had brought him back to help Mae Stanton with One Way Ranch while her children, Kendra and Jess, were in college. He had been here ever since.
At the post office Eddie's mail included a call slip for a registered package. He waited in line amid hellos to acquaintances and nods to curious tourists. Lamp Creek was nearly 100 miles from the reservation, and most Easterners never expected to see an Indian unless they were on the rez. Restlessness caught him, and by the time a clerk pushed a large manila envelope across the counter to him, he wished he hadn't come to town.
He signed the form and eyed the package. The return address was Waldhams, right there in Lamp Creek. Frowning, he carried it to a counter and opened the bundle.
Large script--short note:
Runner,
Your father has ignored my plea for help, but I thought after you read these you might not consider my request so ridiculous. My life has been miserable since that day. --Pete Waldham
"What the hell." Eddie scowled and tucked the package under his arm before heading to the hardware store and striking out for home.
Back at his ranch he helped his hired man, Lou Gavick, move stock across the two miles of ranch roads to the Taylor Stanton Memorial Rodeo Grounds. Early evening (after checking his horses and feeding his dog, putting fresh water in the bird bath, and changing a burned out light in the truck shed) Eddie shucked his hat onto the brass wall rack near the kitchen door and carried his mail to the desk in the front room. The package from Waldham seemed a bright lump on the dark desk as he sorted bills and tossed circulars. Just throw it away. But he sat in the high-backed swivel chair staring at it. Shadi, his orange cat, leaped into his lap and got comfortable, purring loudly. Eddie turned on the desk lamp and withdrew Pete's note.
...My life has been miserable since that day.
That day...Like stones rupturing through ground in a hard freeze, old memories pushed to consciousness. A flash of heat swept him as he remembered the day--twenty-eight years ago--when three hunters drove a truck pulling a horse trailer up to the canyon--the original land of the One Way. Taylor Stanton had declared the canyon off-limits for hunting; his father, Taylor, Sr., had enjoined the rule thirty years before. The land was posted. But these men had come anyway. Eddie had gone with his dad, Sam, to stop them, but they were too late. By the time they caught up, the three men had unloaded their horses and gear, and ridden into the canyon. Ross Gaston had been one of the men, Pete Waldham another. "Come on, Pete!" Chic Fenner had called, "Don't let no crazy Injun talk scare you out of this. Best hunting in the world!" Fenner fired his rifle into the air, completing the defiance. The shot reverberated from the high cliffs near the waterfall, startling cattle, ducks, the very air around them. Eddie had flinched as if stuck with thorns. Pete Waldham, his auburn hair catching the bright autumn sunlight, had hesitated, but jogged his horse after his friends.
Eddie spilled Shadi from his lap and walked to the kitchen sink. He stared out the back window toward the curves of steep hills on the One Way's eastern sections. The area was backed by the blue-gray dominance of Taggart Peak. Evening sunlight illuminated the prominence, tinged some of the high spots orange while leaving the rugged slopes murky with shadows. Eddie sensed shadows in his mind. Something else happened after the men rode off. Something...
He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.
One thing he had no trouble recalling was how his parents had packed the household that very day. "Where are we going?" Eddie had asked, stunned as he helped fit things into the big horse trailer they owned. "Home," his mother replied. Sam CloudRunner had been Taylor Stanton's ranch foreman for ten years. The only home Eddie had ever known was the One Way where his three siblings had been born. So in some ways it didn't seem odd when his father drove the horse van down the long road from the log house with his mother driving the pickup behind it, and he, Eddie CloudRunner, was left behind. I want Eddie to finish high school here, his father put in a note he left for the Stantons who were out of town for the weekend. The Stantons would have tried to dissuade Sam--might have succeeded. How would things have been different if his family had stayed?
Sam told Eddie. "You must stay here. It will be all right for you."
You must stay. Must!
The memory perplexed him; he hadn't thought about the incident in years--and his father's words...Had his dad actually said that?
He walked back to the desk and flipped through the papers Pete had sent. One sheet was a dossier on Ross Gaston. A bio-sketch outlined the man's life up to the time Ross rode into the canyon, followed by events occurring after that date: a severe case of pneumonia, twice failing the bar exam, car wrecks, his parents' death in an airline crash. Ross moved to the valley full time to run the family ranch. He had also collected an incredible amount of life insurance--restitution paid by the airline.
Eddie pondered another entry: death of son at age 4. Seven years ago. The boy died right when Ross was elected to the U.S. Senate. Ross and Rosemary moved to DC and never returned although their ranch survived, and Ross's various investments and businesses still thrived. All three hunters had prospered. Pete Waldham ran a successful livestock business with the five-year-old transport division keeping pace; the Fenners had owned several businesses in Lamp Creek, as well as a lucrative ranch and campground.
The next paper: Charles "Chic" Fenner. Attached to an upper corner was a handwritten note from Pete.
I know for a fact Chic hunted in Spirit Canyon before the day I was with him, back when his folks first moved to the area. He told me.
Eddie frowned, scanning two sheets with Fenner's name on it. Two early child deaths, car wrecks, near-fatal ranching accidents to Chic or his family members. Chic's father had been killed in an Idaho avalanche. Pete had included news clippings where available to cover the years up to what Eddie had witnessed. Then, more illness, family catastrophes of varying magnitude, ending with the conviction of Chic and Judy Fenner for arson, property destruction, fraud, and accessories to two murders for which their son, Clayton, was tried and convicted--all stemming from the Fenners' obsession to own the One Way--especially the canyon. Clayton received a thirty-to-life sentence, but he was already dead; knifed in a prison fight just this spring.
Next were clippings and pamphlets and an old paperback book, Legends of the Fontenelles. Eddie opened it where a blue sticker flagged a page. Yellow highlighter marked "The Old Ones who protect the canyon will not allow it to be defiled..."
The shrill ring of the telephone made Eddie jerk. Two...three rings...He drew a long breath--answered the phone.
"Runner?" The forceful baritone was unmistakable. Eddie suppressed a groan. "Pete Waldham, here. You got my package?"
"Oh...Yes; I got it." He took a pack of cigarettes from a bookshelf.
"Good. When can we talk?" Pete went on. "I moved to Lamp Creek just so I could get this solved. I know the canyon legend. Spirit Canyon, your people call it. What I sent you is most of the research I've been doing on it."
"Look, Mr. Waldham...Pete...I--" He wanted to sound reasonable, but it irritated him that this event was being refreshed to him. He had never mentioned to anyone what happened that day, not once in all these years. "I haven't had time to read the material, and I really don't know what you expect me to do." He put an unlit cigarette to his lips.
"Retribution is being exacted on us, Runner!" Pete declared.
Eddie rolled his eyes.
"It's the only way to account for so much disaster in all these families!" Pete went on. "You got to the Cambee section, didn't you?"
"Cambee?"
"Yes. I found out Old Richard hunted in the canyon. It's in a journal of his donated to the state museum, and damn! You know what's happened to that family!"
Richard Cambee's family was the first to settle in Lamp Creek Valley. They established a large ranch that Richard willed to his granddaughter, Donna (his son and daughter-in-law both died young). Donna suffered an inglorious marriage and became notorious for her keeping of younger men. Old Richard's great-granddaughter remained in a private sanitarium after having a nervous breakdown, after stock killing, after her attempted murder of her mother's lover--all occurring eight years ago when the girl was seventeen.
Eddie blew a silent stream of air through his lips and rubbed his hand across his stomach. I don't need this.
"My family has suffered, too, you know," Pete was saying. "My Anne...one day smiling and happy, the next hospitalized, and then dead. Damn, I'm scared. Future generations, Runner! Like my son. What if Sean should turn out like Clayton Fenner?"
"From what I've seen, there's nothing malicious about Sean." The personable young man, had come to Lamp Creek seven weeks ago after finishing college.
"And my daughter. I worry about her. You might call it coincidence, but my first wife left me just three weeks after that goddamned hunting trip, my girl only two years old. I haven't seen either of them since. I'm hoping distance will protect her." Pete gave a harsh laugh. "But, hell. It didn't work with the Fenners. Clarice moved away from home nearly thirty years ago, and look how messy..."
Clarice! The name slashed Eddie's thoughts, nearly staggered him. He set the unlit cigarette in the ashtray, his hand shaking.
"Look. Let me get back with you, okay?" Eddie tried not to stammer. "It's rodeo season, and there's ranch work to be done...then school will be starting. Maybe sometime this winter we can sit down and talk this out."
"I hear what you're saying, Runner, but maybe if you had children you'd know what I'm feeling. The more I learn, the more panicked I become. The burden. That's the awful part. Damn it, the guilt for my family's lives! You know what that legend says."
"Legend? Oh, yeah." He looked again at the booklet. "That's just a myth, Pete. You know how old stories go 'round." Eddie tried to ignore the hollow sound of his words.
"Is it? Can you swear that?...Just look over those papers, Runner. Think about it. I have to know if there's a way out of this. Not for me, but for my family."
"Sure, Pete. Sure." He hung up and started to shuffle together the papers, but a paragraph at the bottom of the page caught his eye. He sat down.
Clarice Fenner Bradley. She separated herself from her family right after high school, but she's had a miscarriage and two divorces, and is living on welfare in St. Louis.
Eddie covered his face with his hands. He had last seen Clarice in the courtroom at her parents' trial. She avoided him and he hadn't approached her under the circumstances: her family had tried to ruin what he considered his family--the Stantons. But he admired her from afar, taking in her blonde hair, even lighter than he remembered, falling in soft waves to her shoulders. Big-boned, her full-busted figure was attractively athletic beneath a simple gray dress. He remembered her determined walk, her profile he always liked with smooth jaw, straight forehead and an almost chiseled nose. Her intense eyes were green and turbulent like stormy seas. In seventh grade, during a nature study trip to River Park, Eddie had chased her into the woods after lunch and backed her against a gnarled cottonwood. Fascinated by those compelling eyes, so vibrant from her pale, pale skin, he had teased, "You better holler for your pa. Tell him how this Injun boy tried to kiss you."
"I'll never tell!" She had thrown her arms around his neck, kissing him firmly on the mouth before running off.
Clarice was one reason he hadn't protested too much when his family left him with the Stantons.
An odd blend of exhilaration and discomfort stirred in him. The last time he actually talked with Clarice was seven--eight years before the trial. She had been married--Bradley had been the name. When he was in Denver at a Native American Educator's Convention (he almost hadn't attended) she came to his hotel. He never learned how she knew he was there, but he answered a knock the door; and there she was. He could still remember her troubled expression, and the bruise on her cheek that makeup didn't hide. "I--I just had to see you," she whispered, close to tears. And they had talked, they kissed. They loved--slowly, gently--her body yielding to him in passionate emotions just as when they were in high school.
Eddie's thighs tightened. He leaned over the desk, his breathing shallow, as a moment from the past swept over him. Dizzy, he saw Clarice. Incredible eyes. Such longing. No, he thought. The pressure in him increased. He was on fire, burning, and he took her, moving slowly, feeling the softness of her skin. Surface thoughts rejected the sensations, but murmurs cajoled him; dark shapes hovered with unintelligible babbling and forced him to accept this happening, stay in it as if it were real, as if Clarice were really under him, around him warm and tight.
"No!" His throat hurt from the word. He thrashed his arms, sweat drenching him. "I have someone else. Someone else!"
He forced his thoughts to Naomi, wanting the hot pulsing in him to cease. Naomi: an energetic lover, a stimulating person with a gentle laugh, teasing smile. Naomi.
The wild lust ebbed, his normal breathing returned, but he glanced around, feeling scrutiny by something unseen. He touched his groin, disturbed by his remnant erection. His head throbbed. He paced to the sofa and back to the desk--took up the cigarette. The papers and pamphlets drew his attention. He stuffed the material into the brown envelope and eyed the waste can.
Is it a myth?
His father believed. Believed enough to warn people away from the canyon, to think himself inadequate when three men hunted there. Or was Eddie imagining the reason for his family's hasty departure? Perhaps Sam feared his anger at Chic Fenner would be too great to control if he saw the man every day. Perhaps--
Eddie shook his head and jerked open the bottom drawer of his desk. He put the envelope under a stamp pad and a box of canceled checks. He closed the drawer and lit his cigarette.
The telephone rang. Pete again? With some extra piece of information to tag on? Eddie stared at the instrument, his pulse pounding. He could hear his heartbeat. I don't want to talk about it!
The ringing stopped. He drew a long breath.
The phone rang again. An odd expectation tightened his stomach. Five rings...Six...He snatched up the handset.