Welcome Back to Pie Town Page 6

  “Oh, you’re clear all right,” Gilbert answered. “But you can’t stop me from telling who I want to tell about this.” He grinned.

  “Just don’t do anything stupid,” Roger warned.

  “You just find the boy, and I expect to be given a report when you arrest Raymond Twinhorse. I expect justice for my trouble and all the money he took.”

  Roger turned to face the door. “Thanks for the coffee, Gilbert,” he said.

  There was no reply, and Roger walked out of the bar and headed to his car out in the parking lot. This was one of those cases he wouldn’t consider a real emergency, but he knew he had better find Raymond before Gilbert sent out his own posse.

  He got in the car, started the engine, and began to pull out of the lot. He was just about to ease onto Highway 60, driving over to Alamo, when he heard a loud horn blow. He had not seen the eighteen-wheeler truck barreling in his direction. As he slammed on the brakes, he suddenly felt the steering wheel in his chest.

  He was taking in a deep breath when he turned to check out the rear end of the vehicle that almost hit him. It was a car carrier, loaded with about ten SUVs, all black, all new, and the driver seemed to be in a hurry. Roger glanced at the license plate and almost thought about flipping on his sirens and lights, chasing the guy down and giving him a ticket for speeding, but then thought better of it. He had enough on his plate at the moment.

  “Crazy Texans” was all he said as he carefully pulled out onto the highway.

  THIRTEEN

  Frank followed Father George in his truck to the garage. He parked behind the office and walked around to pull down the doors of the bay, which he had left open while he went to the diner. He checked all the locks, put out the CLOSED sign on the front door, and got into the station wagon driven by the priest. He closed the passenger door as he slid in, and Father George took off in the direction of the church.

  “She didn’t want me to call anybody, but I got Malene to get off work and go check her. She’s with her now,” George explained. “I left to find you before she got there, but I just called, and she said she was bandaging Trina’s back and had given her a couple of anti-inflammatory drugs, but that there isn’t much else she can do.” He was glad when he found Frank at the diner. He had gone out to Frank’s trailer, then to the garage, and finally decided to look around town. “She only wanted you,” he added.

  Frank didn’t respond. He stared out the window as they drove away from town and out into the country to the Holy Family Church. This news about Trina had clearly upset him.

  “She won’t go to the hospital, but the burns look bad, Frank.” George felt as if he was rambling. He had hoped Frank would say something, maybe tell him about the fight that went on between Raymond and Trina, how the event could have happened. “Malene says the same thing. I thought you could get her to go to the emergency room if you say that she could tell the doctors that she got burned from a radiator or something.”

  There was no reply.

  “I thought, since she works in the garage, they might believe that was what happened.” George glanced over at Frank, who was facing the window. “I mean, it’s weird to say that when the burns are on her back, but she could just say she turned around and the top blew off.” He waited.

  “Can’t a person get burned from opening a radiator when it’s too hot?” George asked. “I don’t know if they’re the same as the wounds from boiling water spilling on you, but maybe Malene knows. Maybe nobody would be able to tell.”

  Still no answer.

  “She doesn’t want to press charges, Frank. She says it was an accident. She thinks he probably won’t even remember what happened. He apparently tried to get to her after he did it, tried to apologize and check on her, but she wouldn’t let him in the room. She was too scared.” Father George blew out a breath. “She’s worried that he got in some accident last night.” He turned to his passenger. “She said he was pretty drunk when he took off.”

  Frank watched the scenery beyond the window. It was the landscape he had known his entire life. Sage and snake weed, rabbit brush, broom trees—there wasn’t a plant he didn’t recognize, not a one that he couldn’t tell you, just from a leaf or a twig, what it was and what could be done with it, whether it should be ground or boiled, dried or rolled up in something else, and whether you ate it for nutrition or drank it for healing properties.

  The big cats, prairie dogs, jackrabbits, coyotes—he knew every track, could tell the slide of lizards, the trail of snakes. He read storms, knew formations of clouds, knew within the hour when the rain was approaching. He had always had an eye for things in nature.

  Of course, he never let on about those kinds of things to the people in Pie Town. Instead, he pretended he had given up his Navajo ways when he left the reservation, his family, in Ramah. He quit wearing the traditional bun and had long ago started wearing his long black hair in a braid. He rarely attended ceremonies, did not speak the language in public, and acted as if he knew nothing more of the desert and the world in which he lived than any of the other settlers who had decided to make Catron County home.

  But Frank Twinhorse knew a lot. He had learned much about the natural and supernatural world from his grandparents, his neighbors, his mother. Everyone said that he could have stayed in Ramah and become a leader. Great achievements were expected of him at the house, and maybe even with the entire Navajo nation, even if most of the off-reservation groups had rarely excelled in that arena. His family had had high hopes for him. And then, he had finished school, gone off to the military, and fallen in love with a white woman who gave him a son and then left him. He had never gone back to Ramah.

  He had been angry with how his family treated his wife and son, angry that they had never fully accepted her, and he blamed them for his wife’s departure. He had believed that they were the reason she was unhappy and abandoned her child. So he had rejected his past and all of its traditions and learned the auto mechanic trade, while living in a small trailer off the reservation and near Pie Town.

  He wondered as the priest drove them along the dirt road across the desert how it was that he could know so much about nature—plants, animals, weather—and yet know nothing about his son. He wondered how he could pinpoint the arrival of a storm just by the way the grasses swayed, the clouds danced, and the air smelled, but had not noticed the tempest brewing in his only child’s mind. He wondered how he could be so proficient at listening to the idle of an engine and knowing whether there was a loose belt or a faulty wire, but had sat in a room with his son probably a hundred times since he returned from the war and had not heard or seen the pulling away of the threads in his mind.

  “You saw Raymond yesterday, right?” George was still trying to engage his passenger. “How did he seem?” he asked. “Didn’t you say you had been with him in the afternoon? Didn’t you say you had been with him yesterday?”

  Frank wasn’t listening to the priest. He was not interested in having a conversation with him. Instead, he was watching the world outside the car window and wondering if he was the ultimate cause of the demons his son wrestled. He had, after all, kept Raymond away from the only family he really had; in distancing himself from the boy’s grandparents and extended family, he had left Raymond in a kind of no-man’s-land.

  He had not allowed his son to participate in the ceremonies and rituals as other Navajo boys and girls did, and he had seen that being one of the few Navajo children in the white schools of Catron County had been difficult for him. All of Raymond’s life, Frank now realized, had been spent walking a fine line between two worlds, two cultures. Raymond was never completely accepted in the white world and never allowed into the Navajo one.

  Frank wondered if he had created the landscape that led to Raymond’s breakdown when he returned from the war. Frank worried that, by keeping his son away from the Navajo ways and forcing him into the white settlers’ world, he had pushed him into deciding on military service and ultimately into harm’s way.
And he wondered now, as he and the priest drove along the empty road, heading to the church where his son’s girlfriend had taken refuge after a violent episode with him, whether it was too late to do anything about the choices they both had made.

  “Frank, did you see Raymond last night?” Father George asked.

  Frank finally answered a question, with a shake of his head.

  The church was just ahead of them in the distance, and Frank worried about what he would see. He was afraid that the burns were even worse than George was saying and that Trina might be left scarred for life.

  He worried about his son, wondered where Raymond could be, whether he was in a ditch on the side of some road, drunk, hurt, dead. Frank could only imagine what had happened after he left Raymond, after Trina had called him at work the previous afternoon worried that Raymond was going to shoot himself. Frank had talked to him for a couple of hours, and in the end Raymond claimed he was fine. He was sorry for getting Trina upset and said he was getting rid of the gun. He gave his father the box of bullets and promised he would contact the VA Hospital for some help. He wasn’t going to have anything else to drink, he had said. And Frank, desperately wanting to believe his son, had chosen to do so.

  When Frank had left Raymond the day before, he had known that things were still not great, but he had assumed the crisis was over. He had been hopeful that the army would take care of his son and everything would soon be okay; now he realized that the crisis had not been over, that things were not better, and that the army might never have the chance to try to fix Raymond. He had missed the signs, ignoring what the landscape clearly showed him. He had never fully grasped the nature of his only child.

  Frank closed his eyes as they pulled into the church parking lot and wondered what exactly had happened the previous night when the lightning flashed and darkness swept across the county. He wondered what had happened while he was walking north of town, out beyond his trailer, following a pack of coyotes as they chased a pair of rabbits, after he had caught the image of someone hiking up Techado Mountain. He wondered what had caused his son’s brain to fracture and finally snap, what would have led him to injure the girl he claimed to love.

  He opened his eyes as the car came to a stop. Malene was standing at the front door of the church.

  FOURTEEN

  I found it by the northwest corner of the pasture. Out of gas, leaning against the fence post.” When Bernie finally returned to the house to tell Francine what he had discovered, he had been gone for more than an hour. There was a small motorcycle in the back of his truck. He got out, walked around the truck, opened the tailgate, and jumped up in the bed. “I’m pretty sure it’s Raymond’s. I guess he left it out there and started walking north. That must have been when we saw him.”

  “Well, don’t you think he’ll be looking for it?” Francine asked. She had gone outside as soon as she saw Bernie driving up the driveway. She had changed out of her robe and pajamas and was dressed for the day. He had promised her he wouldn’t be long, that he just wanted to make sure there was enough feed for his cows. Once he took care of that task, he planned to drive her to her house so that she could get to work by the afternoon.

  “He’s going to need gas anyway, so I just thought I’d load it on the truck and bring it here. Save him from having to push it the whole way.” Bernie stood in the truck bed next to the motorcycle. “I figure he’ll know I have it here.”

  “I guess he’d walk it down to the house for gas, right?” Francine asked.

  “Nobody else around these parts to give him help,” Bernie replied. He stood over the bike. “I always liked Raymond Twinhorse. He worked out here on the farm almost every summer after school from the time he was twelve until he was eighteen.” He paused. “Had I told you that?” he asked.

  Francine nodded. They had spoken about the young man’s work for Bernie before.

  She watched as Bernie picked up the motor bike and set it down by the side of the truck. “There ain’t much to these things,” he said.

  “Looks heavy to me,” Francine noted. She smiled at Bernie. She figured he was showing off how strong he was. She was impressed.

  “This is really nothing more than an old dirt motor bike, not really built for road travel. I remember when he got this thing.” Standing next to the truck, Bernie wiped his face with his handkerchief. “He was only fourteen or fifteen. Frank bought it at some auction he went to.”

  He stuffed the handkerchief in his pants pocket and grabbed the bike by the handlebars to push it. “I’m surprised it still runs. He had to work on it all the time when it was new.” He rolled it forward a few paces. “I’ll just take it over to the barn and put it inside for him.”

  “Here,” Francine said as she stepped off the porch and walked over to Bernie. “I’ll go with you.”

  Bernie smiled. He faced Francine. “You look beautiful today,” he said. “Have I told you that already?”

  Francine blushed. “About four times,” she answered. “But I don’t mind hearing it again.”

  The two of them headed to the barn behind the house. Bernie was pushing the bike, Francine beside him.

  “Good thing I went out to that part of the pasture to check. The water was real low in the trough by the rear fence. It would have been empty by the afternoon for sure.”

  Francine smiled. She loved hearing Bernie talk about his work on the ranch.

  “I don’t know what Raymond could be hunting for this time of year,” Bernie said. “It’s too early for quail, and I know he wouldn’t be able to carry anything else on this bike bigger than a bird.” He stopped, glancing across the pasture in the direction where they had seen the young man earlier, the same area near where Bernie had found the bike.

  “Maybe he’s not hunting,” Francine said. “Maybe he just wanted to get out of town, get away by himself for a little while.”

  Bernie nodded. They had both visited the young man when he was in the hospital in Albuquerque. They had taken him magazines and a couple of books, at Trina’s suggestion, and Francine had baked him a brown sugar pie. They knew he had been having a difficult time since he returned from the war.

  The two of them stood a while, just staring across the horizon.

  “Shame about that boy,” Bernie finally spoke. “We think we’re so smart as a country, think we’ve gotten so advanced with our weapons and our military.” He shook his head, turned to Francine. “War is still hell, and it’s always our young people who suffer.”

  Francine knew how Bernie felt about war. He was a true patriot, but he didn’t always think war was the answer. He had suffered his own losses earlier when several men in his family died fighting in World War II. He was drafted as well, to go to Vietnam, but released from duty since he was the only child of his parents. It was argued that he was needed to run the family farm.

  “Well, at least he’s home now. At least he’s out of that godforsaken place and here at home. And he doesn’t have to go back. That’s a blessing.” Francine slipped her arm inside Bernie’s.

  He glanced down and smiled. Being with Francine had become so easy for him, so natural. “I just hope there wasn’t too much damage already done,” he said, and then kept walking with Francine holding on to him. “He hasn’t seemed himself since he got back. Remember the party?” he asked.

  Francine nodded. They had talked about how uncomfortable Raymond had seemed at his homecoming party. He had stayed outside for most of it. Trina and Frank had to keep going out and bringing him in. He didn’t seem pleased that an event had been held in his honor. He hardly said three words to anyone. And it just seemed he had gotten worse since then.

  When they got to the barn, Bernie held out the dirt bike to Francine, who took the handlebars while he went ahead and opened the door. “Still, I’m surprised Raymond went out there without talking to me. He’s always been real polite about asking before he went hunting on the property. He never drove up there before without asking my permission.” He moved bac
k to the bike. “Just isn’t like him.”

  “Maybe he thinks now that he’s older he doesn’t have to ask anymore,” Francine guessed. She followed Bernie into the barn, glancing around as he pushed the bike inside and leaned it against the far wall. “I never knew you had a Cadillac.”

  An old black car was hidden inside the barn. It appeared to be in good shape, clean, waxed. Francine thought it was from the 1960s. She remembered the model from when she had been younger and seen the ads, but she had never actually seen a real one.

  “It was my folks’,” Bernie replied. “My dad only drove it when he took my mother out for something special.” He smiled, running his hand along the top of the car. “My mother always said he loved this automobile more than he loved her. Called it his mistress. He called her Mattie.” Bernie laughed.

  “I don’t know—when they died, I just couldn’t get rid of it. I’ve kept it in here all these years.” He opened the driver’s door. “Still runs, though. I drive it out of the barn on occasion, just over to the house and back, maybe down the road a little ways is all.”

  Francine opened the passenger’s side. “How come you never drove it to town?” she asked, sliding in and sitting in the front seat. She slid her hand along the side of the seat, then up along the dashboard.

  Bernie took her lead and got in behind the wheel beside her. “Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t want folks thinking I was high and mighty, I guess.”

  “It’s a great car, Bernie,” Francine commented. “Puts Oris’s Buicks to shame, that’s for sure.” She grinned.

  “Frank’s come over a couple of times and tuned her up for me. He’s nice enough to work on it here instead of making me drive it to the garage.” Bernie gripped the wheel. “He asked me a while back if I would sell it to him. I think he was going to give it to Raymond when he returned from his tour of duty.” He put his arm across the back of the seat. “But I don’t know. Just sentimental, I guess. Told him I’d think about it.” He reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror.