by Farris, John
"How long would it have taken him on foot, then? From the edge of Wildwood, where the road ends."
"It takes me six hours, without a break. From the looks of Jacob, he can't move half that quick."
"What about the boots? You found some prints where your dog was killed?"
"Yeah. If it was Jacob, he's not wearin' the same boots today."
"Anything else need to be said, Arn?"
"I ain't apologizin' to him. Rather talk to the sheriff instead. Which I'll be doing, once Jacob gets to a telephone."
"Maybe not." Whit returned to Jacob. "Arn made a mistake and he knows it."
"I'm going to prosecute this time! He almost killed me!"
"This time? What happened last time?"
"He's threatened me. Told me to stay out of Wildwood or I'll be sorry. But I won't put up with this harassment any longer."
"My name's Whit Bowers. I'd like to know your name."
"Jacob . . . Schwarzman."
"Jacob, I was a colonel in the 82nd Airborne Division. Arn served under me for three years, through some tough campaigns. I'm sorry all of this happened, and I'd like to try to make it right for both of you. I don't want to see Arn cooling his heels in jail for the next six months."
"It's where he belongs," Jacob replied, but he seemed less concerned now with Arn than the condition of his photographs and correspondence. He was still breathing hard, but not as if it gave him pain.
"How long have you been in this part of the country, Jacob?"
"Why do you want to know that?"
"If you've spent much time with mountain people, you know they tend to be wary of strangers, and they have their own code of justice. Arn lost a valuable dog yesterday. He mistakenly concluded, that you were responsible—"
"I am not capable of doing such a terrible thing! I like animals—the four-legged variety, that is. Sir, I am a respected scholar in my field, though you may find that difficult to believe seeing me in this state. All that I desperately want is to be left alone. If his dog was killed, then he knows as well as I who must be responsible: let him take his anger out on the appropriate individual, if he dares."
"Who are you talking about, Jacob?"
"I have nothing more to say to you." He put a grimy hand to his cheek. His tongue was working. He winced, then stuck his tongue out. There was a piece of bloody tooth on the tip. Jacob fingered the fragment of tooth. "I must have broken it when I fell. It's only a miracle I've survived this outrageous and unprovoked assault. And my motorcycle—how am I supposed to get around? I have no money to repair the damages!"
"Jacob, would three hundred dollars fix your bike up, and pay your dental bill?"
Jacob found nothing in Whit's face to kindle suspicion. "Is he going to pay me?"
"No, I'm good for it." Whit took out his wallet, extracted a business card. Jacob took the card in his shaking fingers and tried to focus on it. "You're employed by Langford Industries?"
"Yes, I am."
"But—they own Wildwood." His bright blue eyes opened a little wider. He stuffed the business card into a pocket of his overalls as if he were stifling alarm. "Why are you here, Colonel Bowers?"
"Just looking over the property, Jacob. That's part of my job."
"What does that mean, looking over the property? What does your company have in mind?"
"Future development, a resort area in the vicinity of Tormentil Mountain."
Jacob fell back a step: "You can't do that!"
"Why not?"
"You have no idea of the difficulty—the disturbances such a development might cause. Oh, no, no, this is very unfortunate—"
"Jacob, I know everyone around here is eager to preserve the—the unspoiled nature of wilderness areas. What's your interest in Wildwood?"
"I live there. I appreciate the peace and solitude. They're essential for my—my life's work."
"What work is that?"
"I'm writing a book. That's all."
"From the photos I saw, you appear to have an interest in archaeology. Didn't you tell my son you studied at the Sorbonne?"
"Yes. I'm an archaeologist. And I have lived and studied in Paris. Also Berlin, before the Nazis, and at the University of Chicago." Jacob Schwarzman now seemed more agitated than abused. His shock at nearly having been rubbed out in a vehicular homicide had faded. He looked more objectively at his bike, which was far from a total wreck. "I—I suppose it can be fixed. I have so little money right now, the last of my grants ran out months ago. No one believes that I—never mind. If you were sincere in your offer to make good my loss—"
Whit counted out five twenties and two fifties from his wallet.
"This is about all the cash I have on me. I have some traveler's checks I can exchange today. I'll leave another hundred in cash at the bank in an envelope with your name on it. Will that be satisfactory?"
Jacob accepted the crisp bills with a certain famished delicacy, like a starving aristocrat determined not to slaver at the sight of food. He folded them once and put them into his shirt pocket.
"Thank you, Colonel Bowers."
"Just call me Whit. I'd like to have the chance to visit with you before I go back to New York. Buy you a beer."
"Yes. Well, I—perhaps we'll be seeing each other," Jacob said with no pretence of enthusiasm. He glanced at Arn. As for him—will you assure me that you will use your influence, see to it that I am not bothered again? It's very disrupting to my—my work, my train of thought. As I said before, I truly desire to be left alone."
"I'll see to it, Jacob. And thanks foryour cooperation."
Whit walked back to Arn and said in passing, "Let's go." In the station wagon he unwrapped a stick of spearmint gum and watched Jacob setting his bike upright.
When Arn got in behind the wheel he said, "How much did you pay him?"
"Three hundred bucks."
"Shit, he could buy him one almost new for that."
"Maybe he will. I don't care what he does with the money. He could also have had you jailed and sued you besides. Aggravated assault, among other charges. You need that kind of grief, Sergeant Hardass?"
Arn grinned at this almost forgotten familiarity.
"What makes you think he won't anyway?"
"Because there's honor in the man. And because he's a stranger here, and you're not."
"So everythin's ducky," Arn said in a flat tone. His hound was whining. Arn started the Pontiac and drove out of the sawmill yard. At the blinking yellow light he paused before making a sedate left turn to go to the vet's and pulled another photo from the pocket of his jacket.
"Here's one ole Jacob missed. You want it for a souvenir?"
Whit looked at a well-lighted study of an elongated art object from a distant era, a composite animal. It had the long, arched neck, flattened head, and forked tongue of a serpent, yet it walked on four feet, two of which resembled the claws of an eagle. Its tail was long, with a tuft at the end. The body appeared to be covered with scales. It seemed more jaunty than threatening, a toy designed for the nursery of a long-ago elite child.
"Ever seen anything like that before?" Arn asked him.
"No.
"I have. About two years ago."
"What museum was that?"
"Never been inside a museum in my life," Arn said. He chuckled then, but there wasn't much amusement in his face. "The one I saw was alive."
Chapter Eleven
The car in which Faren Rutledge and Terry Bowers drove to the Boundary, which was what the local people called the Qualla Cherokee Reservation, was a black '38 Ford coupe that needed paint, a new clutch, and a rear window. A piece of plywood cut with a coping saw to the dimension of the window space created a hazardous blind spot for the driver. Faren used a side mirror taken from a postwar wreck to see behind them, but there wasn't much traffic and those cars and trucks that Terry observed as they sputtered down the main street of the village of Cherokee didn't look much better than the twenty-year-old Ford. The big pastel showboats, most of them
with trailer hitches that could pull a locomotive uphill, hadn't begun to arrive in great numbers as yet.
Cherokee, situated in a valley at the confluence of the Soco and Oconaluftee rivers, was a junky jumble five blocks long, a dismal amusement park in a splendid natural setting. There were a couple of respectable churches, clapboard and brick, but the rest of the town was geared to flotsam commerce, the quick dollar. Except for a grocery store and bank, Indian motifs dominated: all of them, Faren pointed out, inappropriate—from the Warbonnet Motel (the primitive Cherokee were good fighters, with a strict code of honor, but had never gone to war on horseback, with their chiefs in elaborate feathered headdresses), to the Wigwam Village (wigwams, or teepees, were characteristic of nomadic Plains Indians, not the settled Southeastern tribes). Their first stop was Wigwam Village, which had a gravel lot big enough to accommodate a few hundred cars with trailers. The facade consisted of a saw-toothed billboard representing a teepee cluster; a fourteen-foot plaster Apache with a tomahawk in his hand stood astride the main entrance. The fierce war paint on his brown face, the recently retouched whites of his eyes, made him appear crazed.
"I apologize for this," Faren said sadly as Terry gazed up at the grotesque statue. "The injustice is, my people don't make much, if anything, from the indignity, the insult, the rotten exploitation. All of the 'handicrafts' these stores sell are turned out in factories in Toledo or someplace. I think some of it comes from the Philippines now. And Mexico. Most of the businesses around here have absentee owners, with white Cherokees managing them."
"What's a white Cherokee?"
"Mixed blood. Often very mixed. A few of them can claim maybe a sixteenth of Cherokee blood, but how they do brag about their 'Indian heritage,' as if they had any idea of what it means." Faren hadn't brought any samples of her pottery with her, but she had a big zippered portfolio under one arm. She wore a denim skirt and fringed brown leather jacket, an apricot-colored Ship 'n Shore blouse with a garotte-tied cream scarf. A gold barrette holding her hair back over one ear was like a hawk in flight, with enameled talons and beak. "Well," she said with a sigh, "I'd better get to haggling. You can just santer around town on your own if you want to."
"No, I'll stay here." He liked being near Faren. He liked her deep but thoughtful silences, and had begun to try to think of things to say that would coax from her depths a quick smile, like a small white animal making a dash from a burrow. And when she impulsively but needfully hugged him, the happiness he felt was astonishing. It flooded him to the roots of his hair.
While Faren was cornered with the Wigwam Village manager, a frizzy-haired, toothpick-chewing man with lips like the ass on an orangutan, Terry prowled the nearly deserted fluorescent-lighted aisles of the gift shop, keeping an eye on Faren's negotiations. The manager had an annoying (to Terry) habit of playing familiarly with the fringe on one sleeve of Faren's jacket and patting her on the shoulder while she went through her book of drawings and color photographs with him. When he wasn't keeping watch on Faren, Terry gazed with indifference at ineptly made bow and arrow sets, fake peace pipes, felt-and-feather headdresses, mildly naughty hillbilly postcards. There was music in the store, sourceless, the volume unchanging no matter where he went. Elvis Presley singing in a slush-filled voice, "Don't Be Cruel (to a Heart That's True)." He was succeeded by Pat Boone. And, Jesus, Rosemary Clooney. Terry was relieved when Faren called to him as she briskly headed for the door.
"How did you do?" he asked her outside in the parking lot. The day was warming up. He unzipped his jacket and took it off, carried it hooked on his thumb and over one shoulder like Johnny Halliday, the French Presley; Terry had Halliday's style down pretty well.
"He'll stock a few of my things, the signed pieces, if I agree to give him some 'authentic' Navajo and Pueblo ollas to sell along with them."
"Will you?"
"Sure. I need the money. People like the Southwest tribal stuff, it's colorful; all the thunderbirds and feathered serpents and Mimbres archetypes look more 'Indian' than what I do. I'll also be required to come in twice a week wearing a buckskin dress and one of those lazy-stitch beaded headbands, stand around for a couple of hours. I don't mind. As long as the shit sells." Terry didn't say anything. She nudged him with an elbow. "Don't you think I'd make a good Navajo princess? Or does my French bother you?"
"Mom swears all the time." He shrugged. "So do I."
"How do you say shit in French? I've forgotten. I was terrible in French."
"Merde."
"That's right. Why don't we leave the car here and walk? We're just going down the street."
"To the Totem Pole Craft Shop or the Cherokee Trading Company?"
"Both. Are you bored?"
A husky Indian driving a muddy Jeep honked as they started down the street, and Faren waved casually back at him.
"What's your mother like?" she asked Terry. "I know she writes."
Terry balanced his way along a whitewashed log for a few moments, as if simultaneously trying to achieve balance in his feelings about his mother.
"Usually she's a lot of fun; we're always going places, having parties. She never leaves me home. She says she wants me to meet people who do things in life. Then, other times . . . she has problems. Gets stuck in her work, throws her typewriter across the room. Lies in bed for two or three days staring holes in the ceiling. Then if she talks to me at all, she criticizes everything I say or do. I guess it's because she's not happy with herself. Mom says when you have a creative mind sometimes it backs up on you like a sewer."
"I'll have to get one of her books and read it. Although I've never been much of a reader; can't seem to find the time. Of course, I won't let a day go by without dipping into the Bible. Force of habit. Mom and Dad Hamilton had me reading the Bible out loud before I was old enough to go to school."
At supper last night Faren had talked about her foster parents, the Quaker couple, who had been childless themselves and getting along in years when they adopted Faren. She had photographs of them in her parlor: two remarkably similar, somber people whose features were hard to distinguish, either from too little contrast or as if they dwelled the last years of their lives on a spiritual plane the camera had difficulty capturing. They had died when Faren was in college. A small inheritance had seen her through.
"Are you a Quaker?" Terry asked her now.
"No. Wouldn't be dressed like this if I were. I suppose the philosophy of the Friends was always alien to my nature. I don't exactly favor turning the other cheek. Gave them both fits when I'd come home from school bruised and bloody after slugging it out with a nitwit kid who called me red nigger or Pocahontas or something. When I joined a church a few years back, I guess you'd say I went as far in the other direction as I could."
"Why, are you a Buddhist?"
Faren laughed. "Lord, not that far. Begging bowls don't suit my style either. No, a Quaker meeting is kind of a quiet, private affair. I joined the Church of God, which is singing and shouting and getting the spirit any way you can. But I've kind of gotten away from them, too, lately. I don't go as regular as I ought to—that means at least three times a week, up to six hours on Sunday. Well, look here, the gallery's open. Come on in, maybe Hick's around."
They had paused in front of a narrow two-story building, with an art gallery below, a dentist's office upstairs. Faren bounded up two steps and into the gallery.
"Who's Hick?" Terry asked, following her in.
"Hickory Smith, my brother. Half brother, anyway. At least that's how we sorted it out when we met a few years ago. Hey, Hick! Anybody here?"
There was a series of photographs on one wall, artfully arranged under spotlights. Some were in black and white, some had a sepia overcast that reminded Terry of tinted daguerreotypes he had seen in Parisian antique shops. Terry studied a portrait of a Cherokee man about Faren's age. He wore a dark suit and an old-fashioned shirt without a collar. Thick mustache overhanging the angles of his jaw, arms folded, in appearance as stilted as if
he had been stood up from his coffin to be photographed, the dark dark pupils of his eyes ghosting from the flashpan.
"That's Hick," Faren said. "A self-portrait. He took these other pictures too." A tumbledown barn, some elderly Indians gathered council-style on a porch, every man distinctively hatted. "He's got a big box camera on a tripod, goes way back: tries to get the old-timey look. Nowadays that's art, or so he tells me. Hick paints too; says he wants to do me and someday when I'm not so busy I'll sit for him."
A small unsmiling girl in jeans and soiled moccasins with little round bells on them came out of a back room and spoke to Faren in a language Terry assumed was Cherokee. The girl wore granny specs and had paint daubs on her blue workshirt, a long streak of white in her hair that also looked like paint, but probably she'd been born with the streak. There was a girl from Dublin in his school who had red hair and a white streak like that, the Irish called it "Veronica's veil," and it was supposed to -mean something special, he didn't know what. Except for her eyes, which were black as watermelon seeds, the girl talking to Faren seemed more Caucasian than Indian; but she was fluent in Cherokee, a language that sounded Oriental to Terry's ears. Faren answered her, and asked a question. The girl shook her head a couple of times. Then she talked for nearly five minutes nonstop, explaining something, wringing her hands in a softly supplicating manner as if to overcome Faren's unvoiced resistance. Finally Faren nodded. Abruptly the girl turned and went jingling back to the room she had come out of and Faren just stood there, gazing at the floor, in a kind of reverie.
"Something wrong?" Terry asked her.
Faren's head came up, her face was animated again.
"Oh, no; Hick's not here. There's a meeting of some of the ministers of the Churches of God in this area. It'll last all day and half the night. That's where he is. Hick's a preacher too."
"Took her a long time to tell you that."
"It wasn't just about Hick. Trudy asked me would I do her a favor, and I guess I can't refuse. We'll go later, there's no hurry. Let's see if I can peddle some more pots before we knock off for lunch."
