by John Saul
“Oh, I recognized you all right,” Frank replied. “But you’ve grown up. What are you now? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-six,” Judith told him.
Frank’s brows rose slightly in a dismissive gesture. “Same difference,” he said. “It’s not like when we were kids, and a couple of years’ difference in age put us into different worlds.” His eyes darkened slightly. “Have you seen Jed?”
Judith nodded, but there was something in his tone that told her the question was more than just casual conversation. “I haven’t talked to him, but he’s certainly just as handsome as ever. With your eyes and Alice’s features and skin, he ought to be in the movies.”
Frank smiled, but it seemed forced, and when he spoke, there was an edge to his voice. “Maybe you ought to suggest that to him.”
Judith stepped back, abashed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Hey,” Frank said quickly, “don’t you be sorry. It’s just that I’m having a rough time with Jed right now.” He managed a crooked grin. “They don’t give you a book of instructions when they give you the kid, and right now I guess I’m feeling a little inadequate. But I shouldn’t take it out on you. I apologize.”
Judith let herself relax a little, but when Frank reached out to squeeze her arm reassuringly, she felt something very like an electrical shock run through her. “It’s all right,” she assured him. Then she thought she understood what Frank had been talking about. “It was Jed who found Heather, wasn’t it?”
Frank nodded. “It was pretty bad for him, but that’s not really the problem.” He seemed about to say more, then apparently changed his mind. “And I sure don’t have any call to bother you with my troubles, do I? I hardly know you.”
A twinge of unexplainable panic ran through Judith as Frank started to turn away. This time it was she who grabbed his arm. “Not so fast, Frank,” she said, doing her best to keep her tone bantering. “You’ve known me all my life, and Jed was my favorite kid when I was a baby-sitter. Also, I happen to be a high school teacher, which is supposed to make me some kind of an expert on teenagers. Tell me what the problem is.”
Frank eyed her appraisingly for a moment, then finally came to a decision. “All right,” he said, matching her bantering tone on the surface, but making no attempt to cover the deep worry beneath. “He says he’s going to quit school and get a job so he can get out of here. He thinks no one here likes him because he’s half Indian, and he thinks his mother killed herself because she was an Indian and didn’t think anyone here liked her either.”
Almost to her own surprise, Judith’s eyes met Frank’s squarely, and she asked the first question that came into her mind. “Is he right?”
Words of denial immediately sprang to Frank’s lips, but when he spoke, the words that came out were not the ones he had intended. “I don’t know,” he said softly, his pain clear not only in his voice, but in his eyes as well. “Maybe he is.”
Judith said nothing for a moment, having to fight an urge to put her arms around Frank’s broad-shouldered body and comfort him. “I-If there’s anything I can do …” she began, then let the sentence hang, feeling suddenly awkward.
Now it was Frank who was silent for a moment. Then he grinned at her almost shyly. “Maybe you could come over for dinner some night,” he suggested. He hesitated, and reddened slightly. “Jed always liked you.”
Again their eyes met, and this time the look held for several seconds.
“Tonight?” Judith heard herself ask.
Plainly flustered, Frank managed a nod.
Max Moreland peered up at Judith over the rims of his half glasses, an almost comical expression of surprise giving him the look of an old Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. “Frank Arnold invited you to dinner?”
Judith eyed him quizzically. “Is that so strange? We’ve known each other for years—I used to baby-sit for Jed, remember?”
Max ignored the second question, choosing to focus on the first instead. “Well, I don’t know what you call strange, but Frank hasn’t invited any woman anywhere since Alice died.”
Judith felt a warm glow in her face, and hoped it didn’t show. “It’s hardly like a date,” she said, but could see that Max didn’t believe her. “It’s just for dinner.”
The old man’s eyes gleamed with wicked humor, and Judith turned to Rita Moreland for support. “Aunt Rita, will you tell Max there’s nothing to this, please?”
“There’s nothing to this, Max,” Rita parroted, not even looking up from the pillow she was working in an incredibly complex needlepoint design. “Do you believe me?”
“No,” Max replied comfortably. “How about you?”
“I don’t believe me either,” Rita replied, then glanced fondly up at Judith. “Will you be home tonight?”
Now Judith’s blush turned scarlet. “You’re both terrible!” she exclaimed, but bent down to kiss each of them before she left. And yet, as she drove into Borrego the thought she had been suppressing all afternoon rose once more into her consciousness. What if her spending the night was exactly what Frank Arnold had in mind?
How did she feel about it?
The truth was, she didn’t know, or at least wasn’t yet willing to deal with what she did know, which was that she was definitely attracted to Frank, and was almost certain he was equally attracted to her. Part of her still thought of herself as that sixteen-year-old baby-sitter she’d been ten years ago, and of Frank as a mature man far older than she.
Now, though, nine years didn’t seem like so much.
The Arnold house wore a coat of fresh white paint, and Judith smiled as she remembered: Frank and Alice had painted their house every year, refusing to abandon it to the weather the way most people in Borrego did. And apparently even without Alice, Frank was still determined to keep the house as fresh-looking as it had been the day he bought it.
She parked the Honda, hurried up the path that cut through the well-tended lawn in front of the little house, and knocked on the door. After a moment it opened and Jed Arnold stood facing her, his expression all but unreadable, as if he’d made a conscious decision not to let anyone know what was going on in his mind.
“Jed!” Judith exclaimed. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk to you at Heather’s funeral, but—”
“It’s okay,” Jed replied, stepping back from Judith’s outstretched hand, but holding the door open so she could come into the house. “There were a lot of people there.” He closed the door behind her, then stood where he was, as if uncertain of what to do next. “Dad’s in the kitchen,” he finally said, a small grin beginning to play around the corners of his mouth. “He’s trying to cook a roast, but it doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing.” Jed’s grin broadened. “Maybe you’d better go in and see if you can pry him loose from the roast before he wrecks it.” Then, as Judith started through the living room toward the kitchen, he spoke again. “What am I supposed to call you?”
Judith turned and stared at him, then remembered her own embarrassment when she’d reached the age at which she felt foolish calling her parents’ friends Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so, but hadn’t quite dared to call them by their first names. There had been a couple of years when she simply hadn’t called them anything at all. Now she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “As long as it isn’t Judy, which I hate, or Miss Sheffield, which makes me feel like an old-maid schoolteacher.”
Jed’s expression turned impish. “But that’s what you are, isn’t it?”
Judith eyed him for a moment, her lips pursed. “And I suspect I hate that term almost as much as you hate ‘half-breed.’ Right?”
Jed’s mouth dropped open in shock, and for a split second his eyes glittered with anger. But a moment later he recognized her point, and his grin—the same one that had never failed to enchant Judith when she’d been a teenager—crept once more across his face. “You can play rough, can’t you?” he observed. “Jude. That’s what I’ll call you. Like in that old song Dad
’s always playing—you know, the Beatles?”
“The patron saint of lost causes.” Judith sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s better than ‘old-maid schoolteacher.’ And is ‘Jed’ all right with you?”
“It’s better than ‘half-breed,’ ” Jed offered, and finally put out his hand. Judith took it, then impulsively pulled him closer and hugged him.
“I really am glad to see you again,” she said.
Jed hesitated, then returned the hug. “I’m kind of glad you came back too,” he said. “I remember when I was a little kid, I always had more fun with you than with practically anybody.”
Frank appeared in the kitchen door. “What’s going on out here?” he asked, glancing almost anxiously at Jed.
“Nothing at all. We’re just talking about the old days Jed tells me your cooking hasn’t improved over the years.”
For a moment Frank looked stung, but then burst out laughing. “Well, if that’s the way you two feel, why don’t you cook dinner, and I’ll watch the end of the football game.” He peeled off the apron he was wearing, and tossed it to Jed.
A look passed between the father and son, a look Judith couldn’t quite read. In the tense silence that followed, she was afraid Jed might hurl the apron to the floor and walk out. He had stiffened for a moment, the apron held uncertainly in his hand. Then, as if making a conscious decision, he gripped the cloth tightly and returned his father’s grin. “You’re on,” he said. “Maybe for once we can have a decent meal around here.”
It was nearly midnight when Judith finally started back to the Morelands’ house, and before she left, she’d agreed to come back two nights later. The evening, after a strained beginning, had turned out all right, except for the uneasy feeling she’d had that somehow Alice Arnold was still in the house, watching them. The three of them had sat at the table talking long after the meal had been finished, at first hesitantly, then with increasing ease. Judith had formed the distinct impression that Frank and Jed spent little time talking to each other. Indeed, the two of them were almost like strangers living under the same roof, two people living such completely separate lives that they barely knew one another.
A tense moment had come when Judith suggested to Jed that the two of them go horseback riding the next day. Jed’s eyes had lit up, but then his excitement had faded.
“I don’t think I can,” he’d said. “I’m grounded for a couple of weeks.”
But Frank, after eyeing his son speculatively for a moment, had shaken his head. “It seems to me when I handed that grounding down, I meant to keep you away from some of your friends for a while. But I don’t see how it applies to Judith. If you want to go, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”
Only after Jed had finally gone to bed and she was alone with Frank had Judith brought the subject up again. “I didn’t mean to interfere between you and Jed,” she said. “If you want to keep him home tomorrow, it’s all right with me.”
Frank shook his head. “No, it’s okay. In fact, I’m not sure the punishment was the right thing to do in the first place I have a feeling he’d take off as soon as I went to work anyway. You just can’t control kids the way you used to. Something’s changed. I worry about him, Judith. I worry about all the kids around here. It’s not just Jed—it’s all of them. There’s something about them—they just don’t seem very happy.”
Judith thought back to the kids she’d been teaching—or at least trying to teach—for the last couple of years. Troubled, suspicious young people. Certainly they had not seemed happy. “The world’s a much more complicated place now, Frank,” she said softly. “When you were a kid, you pretty much knew what was going to happen when you grew up. You’d get married, have kids, get a job, and life would go on just as it always had. But what do these kids have to look forward to? Jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer, even for the ones who graduate from college. And they might get married, but where are they going to live? How much does a house right here in Borrego cost now?”
Frank shrugged. “I don’t know—forty, maybe fifty thousand.”
“And what did you pay for this one?”
“Seventeen five,” Frank admitted. “And I had to borrow the down payment.”
“And the kids know all that,” she told him. “They know what things cost, and they know they’re probably never going to be able to afford the things their parents have. So life doesn’t seem fair to them. And you know what? They’re right!”
“So what do you propose to do about it?” Frank had asked. They were outside by then, and she was already sitting behind the wheel of her car.
“I don’t know,” she’d replied.
Now, as she left the town behind and drove out into the desert, then turned left on the narrow track that led to the Morelands’ house at the foot of the mesa, she reflected on her own words.
Every year, it seemed, the problems of the teenagers seemed to grow steadily worse.
And every year, no one seemed to come up with a solution.
Except that, unknown to Judith, there was one person in Borrego who had come up with a solution.
Indeed, that person had already applied that solution to Heather Fredericks.
And her death had finally proven that the solution worked.
Chapter 6
Judith and Jed rode in silence for a while the next morning, Judith relaxing in the saddle as all the old pleasures of riding through the desert came back to her. The morning was still cool, and the air, redolent with sage and juniper, filled her nostrils, reminding her once more of the difference between the air here and the smog-choked atmosphere she had left behind in Los Angeles. She was still lost in her reverie when Ginger, the mare she was riding, suddenly shied, uttered a frightened whinny, then rose up on her hind legs. Leaning forward and clutching at the horse, Judith held her seat, then spotted the rattlesnake, coiled tightly in the partial shelter of a rock a few feet ahead, its tail held erect and buzzing menacingly while its wedge-shaped head weaved dangerously back and forth.
Its tongue, flicking in and out of its mouth, looked almost like a living antenna, searching for its prey.
“Easy, Ginger,” Judith murmured, her head close to the horse’s ear. “Just take it easy.”
The horse twisted, then came down on all fours once again. Judith allowed it to skitter off to the right, away from the snake, then brought it to a halt. When she looked again, the snake was gone.
“You okay?” she heard Jed ask.
“I’m fine. I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.” She scrutinized Jed carefully. “Didn’t you see it? The snake?”
Jed looked puzzled, and shook his head. “Why? Should I have?”
Judith opened her mouth to speak again, then changed her mind. Taking Ginger’s reins firmly in hand, she brought the horse around, then urged it into a reluctant trot until they reached the foot of the steep trail that led up the mesa. When Jed caught up, she held her own horse aside until Blackie had passed, then let Ginger fall in behind the gelding.
Moving slowly, picking their way carefully over the rocky path that in some places had all but eroded away from the face of the mesa, the two horses moved steadily upward. Only when they reached the top did Judith allow herself the pleasure of turning to look out over the vista below.
The buildings of the town looked tiny from the mesa; indeed the town itself seemed almost lost in the vast grandeur of the desert that spread below, its expanse seeming to go on forever, broken only by the mesas dotted across its broad reach and the gullies of the washes that snaked aimlessly across it. Far in the distance an enormous rock rose up out of the desert like a watchtower, impossibly slender, standing alone in regal isolation.
“Did you ever climb it?” Judith asked.
Jed cocked his head, then grinned crookedly. “You remember everything, don’t you?” he asked. But before Judith could reply, he shook his head. “I guess I sort of forgot about it. Anyway, I don’t think I want to try it anymore. I’m not really crazy about he
ights.”
“You?” Judith asked. “You used to run up and down the edge of the canyon as if it were only an irrigation ditch. It scared me half to death. I was always afraid you’d fall, and I’d be the one who’d have to tell your folks what happened.”
Once again that odd cloud passed behind Jed’s eyes, and now she made up her mind. “Come on,” she said, pulling Ginger’s head around and guiding the horse along a trail that cut straight down the middle of the long mesa, “I’ve decided where I want to go.”
Half an hour later they came within view of the ancient village of Kokatí, and Judith reined Ginger to a halt. “Thank God,” she breathed softly as Jed drew up abreast of her. “I was afraid they’d done to Kokatí what they’ve done to the Hopi towns.”
Jed glanced at her questioningly, and she told him about the collections of squalid tin-roofed tarpaper shacks that had sprung up behind the villages that had stood for centuries on the rims of the three Hopi mesas. “I was afraid it might have happened here too,” she finished. “But it hasn’t. It looks just as I remember it.”
With obvious distaste, Jed regarded the village in which his mother had grown up. “This is where you wanted to come?” he asked, his tone revealing his disbelief.
Judith nodded. “I love it,” she said. “I always have. Even when I was a little girl I used to love to come up here. I always used to think there must be magic in the pueblo.”
“The only magic would be if everybody smartened up and moved out,” Jed groused. “I don’t see how they can live up here at all—they have to haul water up from the lake, and they don’t even have electricity.”
“But that’s their choice,” Judith replied. “If they wanted to, they could bring power up from the dam. Max says the offer’s been good since the day his father built the dam, but they’ve always turned it down.”
“Stupid …” Jed mumbled.
“Maybe. But maybe not. Did you ever stop to think about what this place would look like if they took Max up on the power?”
