Wind Song (8 page)

“Good!” She praised the other children’s effort at the English word.

The need for the Indian children to learn the primary English words that Anglo children their age already knew slowed down her progress in teaching the basics of reading. She spent the rest of the morning working with the consonants. When the bell rang, she stopped Robert as he filed past. The boy looked at her obliquely, as though awaiting some reprimand. She handed him the shirt and loincloth.

“The next time you see your friend Cody,” she said slowly and distinctly, “would you give these to him?”

Not a flutter of an eyelash. Did he understand her? At last he inclined his head in the barest of nods. He understood her; he understood that she knew he would run away again sometime. A sparkle of bared teeth showed between his lips. She would have called it a victory smile. But it was her victory, too. She had communicated with him, at least.

It was going to be a good day, she was sure. The day got even better when at recess Becky stopped her at the crosswalk to apologize. “I’m sorta sorry about what happened a couple of weeks back.” The young teacher toyed with an oily strand of hair and looked off toward Navajo Mountain as if it were of captivating interest. “I guess I’m just getting cabin fever. You know, it kinda gets to you after a while—living way out here in the middle of nowhere.”

Abbie found herself also looking out toward the great mauve dome. “Yes, I know,” she murmured in agreement. She must forget the Navajo.

He wasn’t even fully Navajo, she reminded herself disagreeably. And he wasn’t some medicine man, some shaman who could control her thoughts and actions. No man would ever have that hold on her again. She would do
what
she wanted,
when
she wanted. She simply needed to be with people who were at least semisophisticated more often. Why hadn’t Marshall dropped by to see her?

The day seemed to take a sour turn and stayed that way when Delbert Yellowman later closed the classroom door on Julie Begay’s hand. The only sound the girl made was a sharp intake of breath. No whimpering, no tears. Navajo children rarely cried. But the fingers were swelling so rapidly that it was difficult for Abbie to distinguish the knuckles.

She left Linda McNabb, who was on break, in charge of the class and, with Julie in tow, hurried over to her apartment. Thank goodness she hadn’t prepared her can of frozen orange juice yet! She grabbed the can from the freezer and quickly bound it to Julie’s palm with a dish towel.

The hand would need to be X-rayed. “Let’s go,” she told the six-year-old, who uttered not a word of protest.

Miss Halliburton did. Her face seemed to turn the same shade of blue gray as her wig. “This is your fault, Mrs. Dennis,” she said coldly. “You are supposed to be supervising these children.”

Abbie faced the martinet across the office desk. “It was an accident, Miss Halliburton. Accidents do happen.”

“A teacher who cannot properly watch the children is not fit to teach!”

Never had Abbie felt so frustrated. She didn’t know whether to cry or yell. “The child’s hand needs proper medical treatment. May I take her to the public health clinic in Tuba City?”

“If you think you can get there without another accident. And the time you’re absent—that time will have to be made up, you understand?”

“Time is no problem, Miss Halliburton. I have nothing but time.”

Fuming, Abbie left the office with Julie silently trailing behind and crossed to the shed where the Jeep and wagon were kept side by side. The modern and the primitive. When she remembered that the Jeep was a stick shift, she thought she would cry for sure. All right, she told herself, you figured out the gears on Justin and Jason’s motorcycles. The Jeep can’t be too much different.

It was. She drove out of the school compound in reverse before she backed into a fence post. Julie laughed until tears were streaming down her rosy cheeks. This time Abbie did cry. She put her head in her hands and, leaning against the steeing wheel, silently wept. Wept for twenty years of illusions and shattered dreams.

At last she lifted her head. The little girl’s big black eyes watched her warily. Abbie laughed. “I’m just a foolish old woman, Julie Begay.”

She tried the Jeep again. Finally she found first gear. The jungle green Jeep coughed and spurted and died when she pushed the stick shift into second. An infinite number of tries and five miles further down the road she mastered the movements from first to third gear. Fourth gear she gave up on.

It was Julie’s first ride in a car, and the child’s black eyes sparkled with delight during the fifty- mile trip. But the trip couldn’t end soon enough for Abbie. When she pulled up into the BIA parking lot, she forgot to use the clutch, and the Jeep screeched to a whiplash-inducing halt and sputtered its last.

Marshall came around from behind his desk when she entered with Julie. He took one look at the dish towel wrapped hand and, without asking for any explanations, said, “I’ll run you over to the public health offices.”

“I thought they were in the same building,” Abbie groaned, but she let him usher her and Julie back through the door. He began laughing, and she saw that he was looking at the preposterous angle at which she had parked the Jeep. “It was the best I could do.”

“And you did it wonderfully, my girl!” He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed it. “Now,” he said to Julie, “let’s take care of that hand.”

While the young doctor on duty X-rayed Julie’s hand, Abbie gave the receptionist the little information she knew about the girl, when the receptionist paused at “father’s occupation,” Abbie had to smile. If asked, all children gave their father’s occupation as tribal policeman. The job carried the most prestige. “Tribal policeman,” Abbie replied.

In fact, Julie’s father had been a coal miner. But since the reservation mines had been shut down the year before, he was among the many who sat listlessly in front of his hogan. With the money from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the uranium royalty checks from the Navajo Nation, the men simply had no incentive to work. They had been hunters. Now food and shelter were provided for their families.

Marshall flashed her a conspiratorial smile.

“I needed that smile,” she told him while they sat waiting on a vinyl-covered couch that had holes like a sieve. “And a cigarette—but don’t tempt me.”

“It’s been that bad a morning, eh?”

“The BIA’s stringent rules about emergencies —they’re so damned frustrating, Marshall.”

“You can imagine how the public health doctor feels when a child is brought in with trachoma or a mother with TB and he has to say, ‘Sorry, but we don’t have the money to send you to Phoenix.’ ”

The hopelessness again. . . .

The doctor came back with Julie. “Two fingers broken. I’ve splinted them, and they should be all right in four or five weeks.” He smiled at Abbie. “Your ice pack was quick thinking, Mrs. Dennis.” She laughed. “Brownie first aid, doctor.”

“Were you really a Brownie?” Marshall asked later after he had helped Julie into the Jeep and come around to Abbie’s side.

“You bet.”

He braced his hands on the open window. “I can just picture you—knobby knees and pigtails.”

“How did you guess?”

He grinned. “That’s the kind that always grows into a beautiful, warm, intelligent woman.”

She started the engine. “Marshall, come by for coffee sometime when you’re at Kaibeto.”

He winked. “I’ve been waiting for the invitation.”

* * * * *

A haze of smoke permeated the Phoenix hotel bar. In the corner of the booth Cody propped his arm on one raised knee and watched the woman sitting next to him. She was nothing at all like Abbie Dennis. Shorter, with russet brown hair. Green eyes instead of blue. Too much makeup. Yet she had that same indefinable air of sophistication. But not quality, he thought, recalling Orville’s story about the orange juice can and Julie Begay’s broken hand.

The woman—what was her name? Jacqueline? —leaned toward him, her overblown breasts swaying enticingly beneath the expensive dress of red taffeta, as she had meant them to. Her beringed fingers played with his horsehead belt buckle. “Is it true you won this riding bulls?”

“Saddle broncs.”

“Marvin says you were a world champion.”

“National intercollegiate champion. It helped pay my way through college.”

“Marvin says—”

“Where
is
Marvin?”

The Scottsdale dealer’s wife looked up at him innocently through thickly applied mascara. “I thought I told you. He isn’t going to join us until seven.”

Marvin Klein, famous for the prestigious list of merchants he bought jewelry from, had been asking Cody for more than a year to let him handle Cody’s work. But it had been Abbie’s perceptive thrust—that he was hiding out from society—which had made him accept Klein’s wheedling to come to Phoenix to discuss a possible consignment.

The consignment would mean an international market for his jewelry, something he had always rebeled against. He felt only revulsion for people who valued a piece of jewelry for its ostentatious price rather than its beauty. And he had learned early—at his mother’s knee, he thought with bitterness—that the women who moved in the upper echelons of society made that kind of judgment as a matter of course.

Jacqueline’s finger slipped over the belt buckle to rub against his stomach muscles like a purring cat rubbing against a leg. “Actually, darling, I do all the primary negotiations for Marvin. Ever since I saw the pair of earrings you did for the wife of the president of the Philippines, I’ve been after Marvin to snap you up.”

Cody’s gaze burned through the smoky haze. “Oh? You’ve been a guest of the Filipino first family?”

Her finger burrowed between the buttons of his shirt. “Well, no. It was a photo in the paper—one of the president visiting your shop—that first caught my attention.”

Cody had limited his clientele to a select few. His royalties on the South American oil well investments he had made enabled him to sell his work as he chose.

But perhaps Abbie’s infuriating observation was right; perhaps it was more than just artistic temperament that influenced his sequestered lifestyle. In the rare moments when he was tempted to philosophize, usually after one drink too many, he often wondered if he had rejected the accouterments of celebrity to avoid the possibility that society could reject him.

Damn Abbie Dennis and her perceptiveness. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, she had an elusive quality, a refinement honed by the years, that he had found in no other woman. No, that wasn’t completely true. His stepmother possessed it, and she was full-blooded Indian.

He tried to remind himself that Abbie was married, but so was the very attractive woman across from him; he tried to remind himself that his world could offer Abbie nothing, nor hers him; but then, Jacqueline Klein could offer him nothing, either. She wanted only to take. At that moment—as she had for a long time—she wanted him.

“Marvin says you are a master artist,” Jacqueline said now, her fingers dropping lower. “I bet you’re also a master lover.”

He tossed off his scotch and soda, set the glass down and removed her hand. “Tell Marvin to call me when he’s ready to negotiate.”

Jacqueline’s gasp of indignation was lost on him as he rose and made his way out of the bar. Her sensuous body would not appease the hunger he felt, a hunger more of the soul than the senses.

His thoughts turned once more to Abbie, the afternoon of the flash flood and that one glimpse of her lovely, exquisite body. He wanted to run one fingertip along the marks that feathered across her stomach. She had been a mother. How many times? And she was still a wife. He wanted to know more about her, the mother and the wife. Abbie the woman ... he was falling in love with her. A taboo. Different cultures, different race. Though he was more white than Indian, he thought like an Indian. They couldn’t possibly blend as one. Perhaps that was why he had tried to frighten her that afternoon of the flash flood with his angry words of wanting her.

His words ... all empty threats. And his thoughts ... all dangerous.

* * * * * *

In the soft light of dusk the wind-blown patterns in the red sand contrasted with the jagged lava rocks and cinder stone strewn across the area by the violent volcanic activity of thousands of years ago. The land was different from Pennsylvania’s soft, rolling hills and the maple and walnut trees that autumn had already colored with reds and yellows and oranges.

And the people were different. There existed in the Indians none of that frantic need to do everything, to experience everything, exhibited by the Anglos. At times Abbie was frustrated by the slower pace, but most of the time she simply felt like the outsider she was, a foreigner.

Perhaps that was what prompted her to accept Dalah’s invitation to have dinner with the young woman’s family. Such invitations were not normally issued to a non-Indian. The Navajo were a shy but proud people. Yet Abbie had established a friendship with Dalah—essentially because she often visited the children’s dormitory in the evenings and helped Dalah, though that wasn’t part of her duties. Then, too, Dalah sensed that Abbie was genuinely interested in the Navajo language and customs, which helped bridge the distance created by their cultural differences.