Kiss of the Bees Page 2

  “Come back when you can stay longer,” he’d call after her. Lani would grin and nod and keep going.

  This morning, though, he waved her down. “Got a minute?” he asked.

  She pulled off the shoulder of the road. “Is something the matter?” she asked.

  “No. I just wanted to show you something.” He opened a sketch pad and held it up so Lani could see it. The picture took her breath away. It was a vivid color-pencil drawing of her, riding through the sunlight with the long early-morning shadows stretching out before her and with her hair floating on air behind her.

  “That’s very good,” she said. “It really does look like me.”

  The man smiled. “It is you,” he said. “But then, I’ve had plenty of time to practice.”

  Lani stood for a moment studying the picture. Her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary was coming up soon, in less than a week. Instinctively she knew that this picture, framed, would make the perfect anniversary present for them.

  “How much would it cost to buy something like this?” she asked, wondering how far her first paycheck from the museum would stretch.

  “It’s not for sale,” the man said.

  Lani looked away, masking her disappointment with downcast eyes. “But I might consider trading for it,” he added a moment later.

  Lani brightened instantly. “Trading?” she asked. “Really?” But then disappointment settled in again. She was sixteen years old. What would she have to trade that this man might want?

  “You’re an Indian, aren’t you?” he asked. Shyly, Lani nodded. “But you live here. In Tucson, I mean. Not on a reservation.”

  Lani nodded again. It didn’t seem necessary to explain to this man that she was adopted and that her parents were Anglos. It was none of his business.

  “I’ve tried going out to the reservation to paint several times,” he told her, “but the people seem to be really suspicious. If you’d consider posing for me, just for half an hour or so some morning, I’d give you this one for free.”

  “For free? Really?”

  “Sure.”

  Lani didn’t have to think very long. “When would you like to do it?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “That would work,” Lani said, “but I’d have to come by about half an hour earlier than this, otherwise I’ll be late for work.”

  The man nodded. “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll be here. And could I ask a favor?”

  Lani, getting back on her bike, paused and gave him a questioning look. “What’s that?”

  “Could you wear something that’s sort of . . . well, you know”—he shrugged uncomfortably—“something that looks Indian?”

  Lani grinned. “How about the cowgirl shirt and hat I wore for rodeo last year? That’s what Indians all wear these days—cowboy clothes.”

  “Whatever you decide,” the man said. “I’m sure it’ll be just fine.”

  “I have to go,” she told him, putting one foot on the pedal and giving the bike a shove as she hopped on. “Or else I’ll be late today, too. See you tomorrow then.”

  “Sure thing,” he called after her, waving again as she rode away.

  Once Lani was out of sight, Mitch Johnson quickly began gathering up his material and stowing it back in the car. Soon the Subaru was headed back toward Gates Pass and toward the lookout spot up over the Walker house where he would spend the rest of the morning, watching and pretending to draw.

  How was that, Andy? he asked himself as he unpacked his gear once more and started limping up the steep hillside. It worked just the way you always said it would. Like taking candy from a baby.

  The dream that awakened David Ladd shortly before sunrise on the morning he was scheduled to leave his grandmother’s house in Evanston was the same dream that had been plaguing him and robbing him of sleep for weeks. It had come for the first time the night before he was to take his last law school exam—his final final as he thought of it—although he knew that the hurdle of passing the bar was still to come.

  The recurring nightmare was one he’d had from time to time over the years, but the last time was so long ago that he had nearly forgotten it. In the dream he was standing alone in the dark—a terrible soul-numbing blackness without even the comfort of a single crack of light shining under the door.

  He listened, waiting endlessly for what he knew must come—for the sound that would tell him the life-and-death battle had begun, but for a long time there was nothing at all from beyond that closed door but empty, breathless silence. Once there had been other living people trapped in the dark prison with him. Rita Antone had been there with him, as had the old priest, Father John. But they were both dead now—dead and gone—and Davy Ladd was truly alone.

  Finally, from outside the terrible darkness, he heard a faint but familiar voice calling to him from his childhood. “Olhoni, Olhoni.”

  Olhoni! Little Orphaned Calf—his secret Tohono O’othham name—a name David Ladd hadn’t heard spoken in years. Only Rita Antone—the beloved Indian godmother he had called Nana Dahd—and his sister Lani—had called him that. For years Nana Dahd had used Davy’s Indian name only when the two of them were alone and when there was no one else to hear. Later on she used it in the presence of Davy’s baby sister as well.

  Once again Nana Dahd’s song flowed through the darkness, bolstering him, giving him courage:

  “Listen to me, Little Olhoni.

  Do not look at me, but do exactly as I say.”

  David Ladd held his breath, straining to hear once again the comforting chanted words of the Tohono O’othham song Rita had sung that fateful day while the life-and-death battle between his mother and the strange bald-headed man had raged outside that closed and locked root cellar door. The man who had burst into their home earlier that afternoon was Mil-gahn—a white, but in the song Rita had used to summon I’itoi to help them, she had called Andrew Carlisle by the word Ohb. In the language of the Tohono O’othham—the Desert People—that single word means at once both Apache and enemy.

  Nana Dahd’s war chant had cast a powerful spell, instilling a mysterious strength in Davy and in other members of the embattled household. That strength had been enough to save them all from the Ohb’s evil that awful day. Davy, Rita, the priest, Davy’s mother, and even the dog, Oh’o—Bone—had all been spared. At least, they had all lived. And at age six going on seven, Mil-gahn though he was, it had been easy for Davy Ladd to believe that I’itoi—Elder Brother—had interceded on their behalf; that the Spirit of Goodness had heard Nana Dahd’s desperate cry for help; that he had descended from his home on cloud-shrouded Baboquivari to help them vanquish their enemy.

  Twenty years later, that was no longer quite so easy to accept. Even so, a grown-up David Ladd strained to listen and to gather strength from Rita’s familiar but almost forgotten words. She had chanted the song in soft-spoken, guttural Papago—a language the evil Ohb hadn’t been able to speak or understand. Back then Nana Dahd’s war song had served the dual purpose of summoning I’itoi to help them and also of telling a terrified little boy exactly what he had to do—what was expected of him.

  But at the point where Rita’s song should have been rising to a crescendo, it dwindled away to nothing. And now, with Nana Dahd gone, Davy was once again alone in the dark—a helpless, terrified child listening from one side of a door while on the other his mother fought for her life against the evil Mil-gahn intruder.

  In his dream, David waited—for what seemed like hours—for the shocking roar of gunfire that would signal the beginning of the final stage of that deadly battle. But the gunshot never came. Instead, for no apparent reason, the door fell silently and inexplicably open, as though it had been unlatched by a ghost, or by a sudden stray gust of wind.

  In real life, when the door had crashed open, the Ohb had been lying on the floor, screaming in rage and agony, with his face burned beyond recognition by a pan full of overheated bacon grease. His skin had blistered
and bubbled, leaving his features horribly distorted like a strange wax mask that had been left to melt in the searing sun. Injured and bleeding, Davy’s mother had stood over the injured man, still clutching the smoldering frying pan in her one good hand.

  A terrified Davy had fled that awful scene. He had escaped through the slick, grease-spattered kitchen just as he had been ordered to do. Pushing open the sliding glass outside door, he had opened the way for his dog to get inside. Bone, outraged and bent on protecting his humans from the intruder, had hurtled into the room, going straight for the injured Ohb’s vulnerable throat.

  Twenty years later in David’s dream, the heavy cellar door fell open silently on an equally silent kitchen. And on the floor, instead of a defeated evil Ohb, Davy saw his sister. Lani hadn’t even been born on the day Andrew Carlisle broke into the house in Gates Pass, and yet here she was, lying still and bloody, in the middle of the room. Without moving forward to touch her, without even emerging from the darkness of his cellar prison, David Ladd knew just from looking at her that Dolores Lanita Walker was dead.

  He had awakened from the awful dream with his heart pounding and with his bedclothes soaked in sweat. He could barely breathe. For a while, he thought he was having a heart attack—that he was actually dying. Later that night, a jovial and not overly sympathetic emergency room physician told Davy that what had happened to him was an ordinary panic attack. Nothing serious at all, the doctor assured him. With the pressure of law school finals and all that, Davy was probably overstressed.

  Nothing to worry about, the doctor said. He’d get over it.

  The stress of those final exams was long gone. He had spent the last few weeks working around his grandmother’s place, painting the things that needed painting, refinishing furniture, clearing out dead tree branches, and generally making himself useful. He did it in no small part to repay his grandmother, Astrid Ladd, for the many kindnesses she had offered him during the years he had been in Chicago going to school. The whole time he had lived there, he had stayed in the small chauffeur’s apartment over his grandmother’s garage.

  He had hoped that a few days of hard physical labor would help relieve whatever was causing the panic attacks, but as he lay in bed, gasping for breath that early Friday morning, he knew it hadn’t worked.

  Brandon Walker was cutting wood. Cutting and stacking wood. Once a week—on Friday afternoons—a ramshackle old dump truck would arrive. Filled to the rim with a drying tangle of creosote, greasewood, palo verde, and mesquite, the truck would turn off Speedway, rumble down a steep incline, and then labor slowly up a rock-scattered sandy track that led to a house perched on a mountainside in Gates Pass west of Tucson, Arizona.

  Out behind the house with its six-foot-high river-rock wall, the truck would disgorge another sorry load of doomed desert flora. For months now, Brandon Walker had waged a dogged one-man war, working to salvage the throwaway wood that had been bulldozed off the desert to make way for yet another thirsty golf course. He knew he was powerless to stop the burgeoning development that was eating away the beautiful Sonora Desert that he loved, but by cutting and stacking the wood, Brandon felt as though he was somehow keeping faith with the desert. In some small way he was keeping what the bulldozers destroyed from simply going to waste.

  Late on those Friday afternoons, the empty dump truck would pull away, leaving behind its ruined mound of wood. Throughout the following week, Brandon would pull one log after another out of the snarl, saw it, and stack it. He had bought a gasoline-powered grinder that chewed up the smaller branches into chips. Someone had told him that those could probably be used as mulch, so each day he gathered the leavings into a growing mountain of shredded wood chips. The mound of drying chips and the stack of wood grew along the outside of the rock wall that stretched around the backyard perimeter of Brandon and Diana Ladd Walker’s secluded desert compound.

  The hard physical labor was good for him. He had sweated off the flab that was the natural outgrowth of four four-year terms as sheriff. His blood pressure was down, as were his triglycerides and his cholesterol. He ignored the fact that some of his neighbors thought him peculiar. During the hours when other men his age and in his position might have been out whacking endless golf balls around artificially grassy courses, Brandon fought his solitary battle with himself and with that week’s messy jumble of wood, gradually bringing the dead mesquite and palo verde to order, even if he wasn’t able—with a chain saw and ax—to work the same miracle on his own life.

  Brandon worked on the wood in the early morning hours while the sun was still relatively cool. He put in another shift in the late afternoons and evenings, just before sunset. During the middle of the day, he slept.

  It was funny that he could go into the bedroom in the late morning after a quick shower, tumble onto the bed, and fall fast asleep. At night he tossed and turned, paced and thought, and did everything but sleep. At regular bedtimes, as soon as he lay his head on the pillow, his mind snapped into overdrive, tormenting him with every perceived or imagined flaw in his life. During the day, with the sun on his back and with the sweat pouring off his face, he knew how lucky he was. Diana’s increasing success meant that, after losing the election, there was no need for him to eat humble pie and go looking for another job. He’d even had offers. Roswell, New Mexico, had tried to entice him there with the job of police chief—a position he had been more than happy to turn down.

  As soon as it was time to go to bed at night, however, his cup was half empty rather than half full. In the dead of night, Diana’s growing monetary success merely underscored his own overriding sense of failure, his belief that he had somehow not been good enough or provided well enough. Diana never said anything of the kind, of course. She never even hinted at it. In the cold light of day he could see that his nighttime torment was merely a replay of his mother’s and his ex-wife’s old blame-game tapes. At night, however, that clear-cut knowledge disappeared the moment he turned out the lights.

  In the darkness he wrestled with the reality of being fifty years old and let out to pasture. On his fortieth birthday, he had counted himself as one of the luckiest men in the world. He had a wife who loved him and, according to his lights, a reasonably well-blended family—his two sons, Diana’s son, Davy, and the baby, Lani. The icing on the cake had been his job. The chance to be elected sheriff had fallen into his lap in a way he hadn’t anticipated, but the job had suited him. He had been damn good at it.

  Now, ten years later, most of his “dream” life was gone, wiped out of existence as if it had never existed in the first place. The job had disappeared with the results of the last election. Bill Forsythe was the new Pima County sheriff now, leaving Brandon Walker as an unemployed fifty-year-old has-been. He still had Diana, of course, but there was a cool distance between them now—probably one of his own making and one he doubted they’d ever bridge again. Careerwise, she had moved beyond him—beyond anything either one of them had anticipated. She no longer needed him, certainly not the way she had in the beginning. As for the kids—the boys were pretty much lost to him. Tommy was gone—dead, most likely; Quentin was a lying, cheating, boozing ex-con; and Davy was off in Chicago being beguiled by his paternal grandmother’s money and the myth of his long-dead father. In this bleak landscape, Brandon Walker’s only consolation, his sole ray of sunshine, was Lani—the baby he had once argued fiercely against adopting.

  Now, though, laboring over the wood, he felt the need to distance himself from her as well. She was sixteen and still dependent, but she wouldn’t be for long. She had a job now and a driver’s license. It was only a matter of time before she, too, would grow up and slip away from him.

  And when that happened, Brandon wondered, would there be anything left for him, anything at all? Well, maybe that never-ending mountain of wood, waiting to be chopped and stacked and salvaged. There would probably always be plenty of that.

  He worked until it was too hot to continue, then he went in, showered, and thre
w himself onto the bed. Only then, at eleven o’clock in the morning, was he able to fall asleep.

  From his perch high up on the mountain, Mitch Johnson had a perfect view of the Walkers’ river-rock compound in Gates Pass. He liked to think of it as a God’s-eye view. If he’d had a rifle in his hand right about then instead of a damned stupid sketch pad, Brandon Walker standing out by his woodpile would have been an easy shot. Bang, bang, you’re dead. But as Andy had pointed out, killing Brandon Walker wasn’t the point. Destroying him was. If the United States was going to continue to survive as a nation, people who contributed to that destruction—people who helped the job-eating illegal scum—had to be destroyed themselves.

  “Mr. Johnson,” Andy had asked him once, early on, “why do you suppose the cat toys with the mouse?”

  Mitch Johnson had already learned that Andrew Carlisle was sometimes an irascible teacher. Even his most oddball question required a thoughtful response. “I suppose because it’s fun,” he had answered.

  “For whom?” Andy had persisted.

  “Certainly not for the mouse.”

  “Don’t be so sure. You see, in those moments, the mouse must have some moments of clarity, when it may possibly see through its own terror and imagine surviving. Continuing. There’s a real beauty in that, a sort of dance. The mouse tries to escape. The cat blocks it. The mouse tries again, and the same thing happens. As long as the mouse keeps trying, it hasn’t lost hope. Once it does, the cat becomes bored and simply eats it. End of story.”

  They lay on their bunks in silence for a while, Mitch Johnson in the upper bunk and Carlisle in the lower so he could get to the toilet more easily during the night.

  Mitch didn’t want to seem stupid, but he couldn’t see where Andy was going on this one. “So what’s the point?” he finally asked.

  “Did you enjoy shooting those guys in the back?” Andy asked.

  A peculiar intimacy existed between the two men that Mitch Johnson was hard-pressed to understand. If somebody else had asked that question, Mitch would have decked the guy, but because it was Andy asking, Mitch simply answered. “Yes,” he said.