Sunny gave it serious thought. “If it has to do with our work together, then there’s no danger in your telling me anything that occurs to you. Nothing is out of bounds in this process. I’m sworn by my professional ethics—not to mention my own sense of honor—to keep everything you tell me in complete confidence. So the answer is: if you feel it’s of value to the reason you’re seeing me, then you can say whatever you want to me. Obviously, I don’t know anything about your work, so I trust you will take anything I have to say with a grain of salt. My interest is in you, not in anything that relates to what you do for a living.”

  But she did know something that touched on his profession, or at least she asked a question that eventually helped Gaines solve the case. Since the forensic unit of Dupree P.D. consisted mostly of Frank Gaines, he had to rely on what information he was able to glean from colleagues in Phoenix and Tucson. After three days, an expert was sent in from Tucson. What Gaines learned from the Tucson forensics specialist was not as valuable as something Sunny Kacheenay later asked him in passing.

  • • •

  Gaines drives into the attached garage of his modest frame house on the outskirts of Dupree and hits the automatic door button. It chunks closed behind him as Lyle squeezes frantically through the dog door from the house. Gaines gets out of his Jeep and is smothered in drooling affection, which, minus the drooling, he reciprocates.

  He has a so-so tomato bisque along with some ossified chicken tenders for protein from yesterday’s lunch-on-the-go and the last tired half-peach from a can, chased with the remaining juice.

  More than usual tonight, he thinks about Sunny Kacheenay.

  When he first started seeing her, and before they started to form what she calls the transference relationship they will continue to have until near the end of his therapy—once I’m all well, which will be a cold day on the river Styx—Gaines found he was having fantasies about her. He didn’t have to give it much thought to understand that boy/girl flights of fancy about his therapist would not earn him any points toward improved emotional well-being and a sense of self-assurance.

  Those fantasies continued for a while. They weren’t sexual as much as romantic. In one of these imaginings, he pictured her in a pastel sundress, sometimes light blue, sometimes yellow. Those fanciful envisionings evoked lifelike images of Sunny simply sitting on his lap. He was aware of her slender, feminine body, and conscious of the scent of her, as he always was during their sessions together. During those, it was as if she had walked through a finespun cloud of an unusually seductive perfume. He has sometimes wished she wouldn’t do that—except that he likes it.

  In a lucid dream (dreaming, but also aware he was dreaming) one night, he danced with her. He isn’t a dancer, so it was with a mixture of masculine surprise and something like a promised land sort of romantic imagining, that he glided, in this dream, skillfully over a glass-smooth, polished dance floor with her.

  But as their “professional” relationship developed, he shook all these illusions away, and soon they disappeared. Mostly.

  He cleans up the kitchen and heads in the direction of his bedroom.

  He stops in the darkened back hallway as he notices Lyle, at vigilant attention by the French doors that open to the backyard and the wasteland beyond.

  He’s whimpering, staring out at something. Gaines looks too.

  Standing three feet from the glass, illuminated by moonlight, is a boy, wearing a buckskin shirt, leggings, and moccasins. He’s about six years old, with wide, brown, glowing eyes and a melancholy smile.

  Gaines blinks, chills shooting up and down his spine, as if his central nervous system is being flash-frozen.

  When he opens his eyes, the boy is gone.

  He blinks again, several times, opens the doors and goes outside.

  No one.

  He moves cautiously to the side of the house, then circles it, his animal instincts on full alert.

  Nothing.

  Inside, he stands at the exact point where he’d seen what had to be a hallucination, maybe brought on by his slapdash supper. It crosses his mind what a good idea it is that he’s going to have some additional psychotherapy this week.

  Brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed, he senses the image of the little boy in the back of his mind, along with a feeling of uneasiness at the thought of telling his therapist about it.

  • • •

  Sunny Kacheenay is alert but not frightened on her drive home. The message she got could have been sent by anybody—some poor soul she’d been unable to help. Sometimes therapy simply fails.

  People often—around half the time, if they were honest—go into therapy only because their spouse or somebody else in the family exhorts them to come see Sunny or somebody else. And when they do, they give up sooner or later, usually sooner, because, God knows, change doesn’t come easy.

  Dr. Root, her favorite professor and her therapist when she was going through training, told her:

  “People resist it. It’s what they do to survive; they hang on like their life depends on it to what they’ve got, to what they’ve always done, persuaded in some shadowy part of their being that the behavior they’ve been practicing for a lifetime, including the self-destructive parts, is what’s kept them alive this long. So, it’s only common sense to keep doing it.

  “We’ve picked an often frustrating line of work,” Dr. Root had said, “helping people change.”

  Dr. Root would have just looked at her funny (Freud would have choked on his cigar), if Sunny had told him that when facing difficult problems, she has experienced moments—often linked to her grandmother in some mystical way she can’t explain—when she has felt herself rise on pinions of inspiration that fall far outside the borders of anything scientifically explained.

  Her mind drifts to the central Apache fable of Changing Woman.

  According to that fable or legend, Changing Woman lived all alone. One day, she had sexual intercourse with the sun. Four days later, Changing Woman gave birth to Nayenezgani, slayer of monsters, killer of enemies, and a primary Western Apache hero.

  She thinks of the burden basket in Shana’s trailer. The Apache culture is matrilineal. Women ran the household. They raised and protected the children.

  Protected the children? Not this changing woman.

  The care of the family was the woman’s responsibility. She made the political decisions—among those, the structuring and honoring of the roles of women in general.

  Then the white man came. And most of those white men weren’t joking when they expressed their thoughts about women: “Keep ’em barefoot and pregnant.”

  Traditionally, the Apache women walked miles to gather piñon nuts and wood, put them in burden baskets, then hauled their loads back, minded the children, cleaned, barbecued mescal and corn, and tended the almost untillable gardens of traditional Apache lands. A woman never stopped working. And she kept at it from the beginning to the end of a pregnancy.

  “Four days later,” murmurs Sunny. “After sexual intercourse with the sun.”

  Sunny hasn’t had sexual intercourse with so much as a mortal man for ... She can’t remember how long ... months. It was in Tucson. A white guy named Harold, a weekend stand. She’d known him before. They had dated for a while a couple of years earlier. But she’d realized, as the weekend began, that she didn’t actually care that much for Harold, that she was with him for one reason. They had made love from dawn until dusk both days and she’d known, before and after, that she wasn’t there to create a monster slayer—even though that’s a thing that could come in handy; she wasn’t sure exactly how, but it felt like something that might be street-smart to have around. You never know.

  But it wasn’t to be. At least not with Harold.

  Harold couldn’t hold a candle to the sun.

  She knows that Harold had reminded her a little, physically, of Reed’s father, who was more or less three-quarters Apache and the remainder, she had no idea what. Sunny had made a conscious effort not to think of him by name after she discovered he was running up a pretty long string of infidelities. She threw him out, and later heard he’d moved to Chicago. He had been a good choice for absent father, a lousy one for husband. After a while, Sunny found it surprisingly easy not to think of him anymore.

  She unlocks the front door of her nicely kept river rock bungalow, turns on the lights, and looks at the trappings of her slant on the world.

  The bookcases on one wall of the living room contain volumes on psychology and Apache lore, as well as a wide range of other topics. There are also various artifacts of the culture she was raised in. On the shelves and on a table against the opposite wall are a tin tinkler, a throwing stick, a grinding stone, pieces of Apache pottery (not shards and not old, but modern urns and pots of different shapes and sizes), and in the center of the simple pine table, a clay doll like the ones in Shana’s trailer.

  Tonight, she finds herself focusing on these things. Something she can’t put her finger on pierces her consciousness, not necessarily to do with the cutouts that were delivered to her—but it’s possible. She wishes she had them here to look at now, to try to decipher—as if she could decipher, just by staring at them—the workings of a deranged mind.

  She thinks of her grandmother. Shana is an old lady, raised in a world very different from hers. But Sunny is a child of the Apache culture, connected at a deep level to her late mother’s mother, although not necessarily in the way Shana contends they are. There is an odd communication between them, but it’s not, as Shana says it is, some kind of psychic link. It’s simply because—Sunny is sure—they are each other’s closest, dearest friend and relative, and they’re connected on whatever the wavelength is that goes along with that, and there doesn’t seem to be any use in trying to put a name to it.

  She remembers what Shana said about Reed. She’d blocked it out of her mind for hours.

  What I really ought to do is find a good shrink.

  No, but there’s a reason to forget: her sanity. She does not believe Shana saw him.

  She could not have seen him. She did not!

  • • •

  She turns out the lights and looks out her open bedroom window. The winds have died down, but a steady breeze continues to move the curtains. As she gets in bed, a wolf howls.

  That’s odd. It’s nearer than usual.

  She falls asleep and has her nightmare.

  She’s driving on a desert road with Reed. It’s late afternoon. A thundercloud hanging low in the sky begins to pour rain. Reed is next to her, strapped into the passenger seat.

  “I thought we might beat this,” says Sunny.

  In the nightmare, their voices echo—as through a hollow chamber of time. She knows what’s coming. The other side of her, the side that dwells in trust, believing that in the end good must prevail, is without influence. A reverberating blast of thunder rolls across the solitude surrounding their Honda Civic.

  Now, Reed points a small finger forward. “Look.”

  Ahead of them, on the right, a car is pulled over on the shoulder of the road. A figure stands next to it in the rain, apparently doing nothing—staring.

  Sunny eases the Honda onto the shoulder and turns off the engine.

  “I’ll be right back,” her echo chamber voice says to Reed. “I’m going to see if this person needs a hand. Stay here. Do not move.”

  She opens her door and gets out as lightning flashes, followed by more thunder. She pulls her slicker tight around her and runs through the downpour.

  Almost there, she notices the figure is pointing toward her—no, behind her.

  She stops and spins around.

  Reed is out of the car, following her, walking almost in the middle of the road.

  She shouts, “Reed! Don’t! Look out …”

  Lightning flashes again as a third car, a large yellow one, speeding from behind the boy, smashes into him.

  Reed flips over the car’s roof and reappears on the pavement behind it. The yellow car squeals to a stop, remains there for less than two seconds, peels out, and is gone.

  Sunny screams, runs to her son’s motionless body, and picks him up.

  The person she’d meant to help has apparently followed her. Sunny notices this as she passes him, carrying her son back to her car.

  • • •

  Frank Gaines is also dreaming of the desert. He is moving across it on foot. Ahead of him, on brush flats, is a circle of Apache warriors. He’s confused, as he is in most of his dreams, although this one is especially baffling.

  Dreams, Sunny Kacheenay has told him, take place on an unfamiliar landscape, even if the dreamer recognizes it. But this dream is unlike any he’s ever had. He’s floating above his bed one split second, watching himself sleep; and the next, he’s walking over the desert toward the circle of Apache warriors.

  He feels as if tiny needles have been injected up and down his spinal column and hears the sound of a gourd rattle.

  Nearing the circle, he sees that the braves are all motionless, staring at something at the center of the circle.

  Now Gaines sees the object of their attention.

  It’s a wolf, sitting motionless.

  In a single fluid movement, it stands up. It is huge, and now no longer a wolf. It’s a man.

  He can’t see the face, but he knows who it is.

  5

  Drawn by a thunder of death, we emerge from the darkness, and cautiously move into the light. We are in a space where, sometimes, other animals dwell, but not now.

  As we enter, the smell of death is close. It is not because of us. We are not carrion. We eat only what we kill.

  We come into the light through the opening that is sometimes there and see one of them on the floor, artificially lit.

  It is dead. Not from nature, but collateral to the sharp blast we have learned brings death with it.

  We smell it; we see it and take it in. We will carry the message—for tonight and until it is over.

  THEY are with us. THEY have come into us and guide our resolve. THEY make us perceive this kind of death, and carry the news of it once more.

  • • •

  Dawn has broken over the cliffs. The winds have unraveled the clouds that hung over them last night. The sun shines on a hillock of rocky debris covered with cast-off aluminum siding, and reflects onto the county sheriff’s age-worn Ford as it pulls up in front of an isolated ranch house.

  Sheriff Bob Persky gets out and shambles around toward his waiting deputy, who looks too young to be in law enforcement, or for that matter, to be out of school.

  Jim Willis is a blue-eyed youth with unruly blond hair and an open, boy-like manner that wouldn’t inspire much confidence if it weren’t for his habit of frowning slightly and watching the eyes of people he listens to, as if they were saying the most interesting thing he’s ever heard. At the moment, he looks queasy.

  “What have we got?” says Persky.

  “Apparent suicide,” Willis replies in squeaky, almost teenagey tones. “A man named Gordon Cody. He’s back in the barn. Shotgun to the chest.”

  Persky sighs. “Point me the way.”

  He ambles after Willis, past a bleak but nicely tended farmhouse, toward the even more loved barn.

  Persky, fifty-three years old, is about six foot two, has a slightly pudgy but agreeable face, a sleepy countenance, and a slow way of talking that misleads unobservant people into thinking he’s simple.

  They enter the barn and Persky sees a human form, under a horse blanket. The coroner is taking notes. His young assistant is looking away from this assignment, perhaps wondering if it’s too late to consider another line of work.

  Persky nods at them, kneels next to the corpse, and pulls back the blanket. He studies it as long as he needs to, replaces the blanket, and rises heavily to his feet.

  “This is the man who found him,” says Willis, beckoning a Native American into the barn as the coroner and his assistant head off.

  Ray Berryhill, a gaunt old Apache man, stops near the covered body and stares down at it.

  “Do you have any idea why he would have killed himself, sir?” says Persky.

  Berryhill looks up with sad eyes. “He lost his land.” He frowns. “But it wasn’t only that. He had friends who lived on it. He felt he’d let them down.”

  “How’d he lose his land?”

  “He sold it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Berryhill searches the sheriff’s eyes. “He didn’t know he’d sold it. He thought he’d borrowed on it. The courts said otherwise. His family had gotten it in the first place under the Indian Rights Fund.”

  Persky nods. “What about the Cobell settlement?”

  “Well, yes, but it’s still the leavings of the Dawes Act.” Berryhill sighs. “I know, the allotments weren’t supposed to apply to uncultivatable land, but the Department of the Interior found ways to loop all of us in, or almost all of us. The Cobell settlement wasn’t signed till 2010 and didn’t do a lot to help those of us who’d been forced to sign those papers. All of it still comes out of the legal ins-and-outs of the original allotment act. And the court said what happened to my friend was all perfectly legal. He sold it to a white man.” Berryhill swallows. “He just didn’t realize that’s what he’d done.”

  A flash of anger crosses Persky’s face, then he nods respectfully at Berryhill. “Thanks for your help.”

  Berryhill doesn’t turn to leave. “Do you know that some Apaches think of suicide as murder?”

  “No, I did not know that.”

  “It’s up to the maternal relatives to avenge it.”

  Persky rubs his chin. “Who do they avenge it on—if he killed himself?”

  “The one responsible.”

  The sheriff thinks this over. “I see.” He indicates the body of Gordon Cody. “Any of his … mother’s family still around?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a nephew … or great nephew … or niece.”

  Out toward the cliffs, a coyote lets out a series of doleful yips. Two or three more join in, making it a chorus. Further away, a lone wolf howls.

 

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