Now his dad was moving because of it? To New Mexico? Dad had always hated the desert; when they lived in California, you couldn’t get him to Palm Springs.
“Anyway,” said Ed Montez, “it’s time.”
“For what?”
“To learn, Darrel. If I don’t start learning something, I’m gonna shrivel up and die like a moth.”
The next time Darrel saw his father was when he finished his Marine hitch, decided he wanted more hair on his head, and didn’t re-up.
“Come out here, Darrel.”
“I was thinking L.A.”
“Why there?”
“Maybe go to school.”
“College?” said his dad, surprised.
“Yeah.”
“What you want to study?”
“Maybe computers,” Darrel had lied. He hadn’t a clue, knowing only that he wanted the freedom of sleeping late, meeting girls who weren’t hookers or Marine groupies. He wanted to have some fun.
“Computers are good,” said his dad. “The talismans of our age.”
“What?”
“Talismans,” said Ed Montez. “Symbols—totems.”
Darrel didn’t answer.
“It’s complicated, Darrel. Come on out, you can go to school here. UNM’s a good place, got a nice campus, and there’s all sorts of scholarships for Indians.”
“I like California.”
“I got no one,” said his dad.
When Darrel got off the plane in Albuquerque and saw the old man, he nearly fell over. Ed Montez had gone from Crew-Cut Noncom to Big Chief Whatever. His gray-streaked hair was center-parted and hung down past his shoulder blades, held in place by a beaded band.
His mop was a lot longer than Darrel’s own tresses had been when his dad had ridden him about looking like “a hippie bum.”
Dad’s civvy clothes had changed just as radically. No more golf shirt, pressed slacks, and spit-polished oxfords. Ed Montez wore a loose-fitting linen shirt over blue jeans and moccasins.
Wore a wispy chin beard.
He hugged Darrel—another change—took Darrel’s carry-on, and said, “I changed my name. I’m Edward Two Moons. Maybe you should think about a change.”
“Genealogy,” the old man explained as they made the one-hour drive to Santa Fe. So far the terrain was flat and dry, lots of empty stretches paralleling the highway, the occasional Indian casino.
Just like Palm Springs.
Seventy-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Darrel had no problem with that. His father was doing ninety and so was everyone else.
Dad lit up and blew smoke around the cabin of the Toyota pickup. “Aren’t you curious?”
“About what?”
“Genealogy.”
“I know what it means. You’ve been looking into your roots.”
“Our roots, son. On the drive over from Florida, I stopped in Salt Lake City, went over to the Mormon place, and did some serious studying. Found out some interesting things. Then when I got here, I did some more and it got even more interesting.”
“Like what?” said Darrel, even though he wasn’t sure he cared. Mostly, he was sneaking sidelong glances at the old man. Edward Two Moons? When he talked, the chin beard vibrated.
“Like our lineage goes straight back to the Santa Clara Pueblo. That’s on my side. Your mom was Apache and Mohawk, but that’s another story. I still got to look into that.”
“Okay,” said Darrel.
“Okay?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I thought,” said Ed, “that you’d be curious.”
“You always said it was in the past.”
“I’ve come to appreciate the past.” His father jammed his cigarette into his mouth, reached over with his right hand, and grasped Darrel’s wrist. Held on. Weird. The old man had never been one for touch.
“We’re related to Maria Montez, son. Straight line all the way back to her, not a doubt.”
“Who’s that?”
“Maybe the greatest Indian potter ever.” Ed let go, flipped his hand over. The palm was gray, coated with some kind of dust.
“This is clay, son. I’ve been learning the ancient art.”
“You?”
“Don’t be so surprised.”
The closest his parents had come to art were Christmas cards taped to the walls of temporary housing.
“We move around,” his mother had explained. “You put holes in the plaster, you have to patch them up. I may be dumb but I’m not stupid.”
“The process is really something,” his father went on. “Finding the right clay, digging it up, hand-shaping—we don’t use no wheels.”
We?
Darrel kept his mouth shut. They were fifteen miles out of Santa Fe, and the terrain had changed. Higher altitude, pretty mountains all around. Greener, with little pink and tan and gold houses that reflected the light. The sky was huge and blue, bluer than Darrel had ever seen. A billboard advertised duty-free gasoline at the Pojoaque Pueblo. Another one said custom adobe homes were going up in a place called Eldorado.
Not bad, but still not California.
“No wheels,” his father reiterated. “The shaping’s all by hand, which is pretty tough, let me tell you. Then comes the firing and it really gets complicated. Some people use a kiln, but I use an outdoor fire because the spirits are stronger outdoors. You make a wood fire, the heat’s gotta be perfect. If something’s wrong, everything can crack and all your work’s for nothing. You want to get different colors, you use cow dung. Got to snatch it out of the fire at exactly the right time, put it back in—it’s complicated.”
“Sounds like it.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I make?”
“What d’you make?”
“Bears,” said his dad. “And they come out pretty good. Look pretty much like bears.”
“Great.” Clay, dung. Outdoor spirits. His dad’s hair—Jesus, it was really long. Was this some kind of dream?
“I live to make bears, Darrel. All those years I didn’t do it was time wasted.”
“You served your country.”
Ed Montez laughed and smoked and pushed his truck to nearly a hundred.
“Dad, are you living in the pueblo?”
“I wish. Whatever land rights we got at Santa Clara are long gone. But I go out there for lessons. It’s not a bad drive. I managed to hook up with Sally Montez. She’s Maria’s great-great-granddaughter. Great potter, won first prize at the Indian Market show two years in a row. She uses dung to get a black and red combo. Last year she got the flu, didn’t have it together, so she only got honorable mention. But still, that’s pretty impressive.”
“Where are you living, Dad?”
“Condo. Army pension pays the rent and then some. Got myself two bedrooms, so there’s plenty of room for you. Got cable ’cause the dish don’t do well with all the wind.”
Living with his father—his new father—took some getting used to.
Edward Two Moons’s two-bedroom condo on the south side was more honestly described as a “one plus study.” Darrel’s space was an eight-by-nine room walled with bookshelves and filled by a sleeper couch that unfolded to a double bed.
Books on the shelves—that was something new. American history, Indian history. Art. Lots on art.
Incense burner in his dad’s room and for a second Darrel wondered: Dope?
But the old man just liked burning incense when he read.
No ceramic bears in sight. Darrel didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know.
One thing was the same: His dad got up at six a.m. every day, weekends included.
No more one-handed push-ups, though. Former gunnery sergeant Ed Montez greeted each day with an hour of silent meditation. Followed by another hour of bending and stretching to one of a dozen yoga tapes.
Dad taking instructions from women in leotards.
After yoga came a long walk and a half-hour bath, fry bread and black coffee for breakfast
, though by then, it was closer to lunchtime.
By two p.m., the old man was ready for his drive out to the Santa Clara Pueblo, where the cheery, corpulent Sally Montez sat in her studio out back of her spacious adobe house and fashioned gorgeous, jewel-inlaid, black-clay masterpieces. The front room of the house was a shop run by Sally’s husband, Bob. He was Sally’s second cousin; Sally hadn’t needed to change her name.
As Sally made pots, Dad hunched at a nearby table, brow furrowed, chewing his cheek as he fashioned his bears.
Families of them, in various poses.
The first time he saw the tiny animals, Darrel thought of Goldilocks. Then he thought: No way. They didn’t even look like bears. More like pigs. Or hedgehogs. Or nothing recognizable.
Dad was no sculptor and Sally Montez knew it. But she smiled and said, “Yes, Ed, you’re coming along.”
She wasn’t doing it for the money; Dad wasn’t paying her a dime. Just because she was nice. So was Bob. And their kids. And most of the people Darrel met on the pueblo.
He started to wonder.
Dad didn’t mention the name-change thing again until six months after Darrel moved in. The two of them were sitting on a bench in the Plaza, eating ice cream on a gorgeous summer day. Darrel had enrolled in UNM as a business major, gotten a 3.6 his first semester, met some girls, had some fun.
“Proud of you, son,” said Ed, handing the transcript back to Darrel. “Did I ever tell you the origin of my name?”
“Your new name?”
“My only name, son. The here and now is all that counts.”
His hair had grown another four inches. The old man still smoked, and his skin looked like ancient leather. But the hair was thick and youthful and glossy, even with the gray streaks. Long enough for a serious braid. Today it was braided.
“The night I decided,” he said, “there were two moons in the sky. Not really, it’s just the way I perceived it. ’Cause of the monsoon. I was in the condo, cooking dinner, and there was one of those monsoons—you haven’t seen one yet, but you will eventually. The sky just opens up and bam. Sheets of rain. It can be a real dry day, bone-dry, then all of a sudden things change.” He blinked, and for a second his mouth got weak. “You have arroyos turning into rushing streams. It’s pretty impressive, son.”
Ed licked his butter pecan cone. “Anyway, there I was cooking and the rain started coming down. I finished up, sat there wondering where life was gonna take me.” Another blink. “I started thinking about your mom. I never talked much about how I felt about her, but, trust me, I felt about her.”
He turned away, and Darrel watched some tourists file past the Indian jewelers and potters sitting in the alcove of the Palace of Governors. The Plaza across the street was filled with art kiosks and a bandstand with an open mike for amateur singers. Who said folksinging was a lost art? Or maybe that was good folksinging.
“Thinking about your mom made me low but also a little high. Not like in drunk. Encouraged. All of a sudden I knew I was doing the right thing by coming to this place. I’m looking out the window and the glass is all wet and all you can see of the sky is black and a big, blurry moon. Only this time, it was two moons—the wet glass bent the light in a way that created this image. Am I making myself clear?”
“Refraction,” said Darrel. He’d taken Physical Science for Non-Science Majors, pulled a B.
Ed regarded his son with pride. “Exactly. Refraction. Not two totally separate moons, more like one on top of the other, maybe two-thirds overlapping. It was beautiful. And this strong feeling came over me. Your mom was communicating with me. ’Cause that’s what we were like. Together all the time, but we were separate people, just enough overlap to make it work. We were fifteen when we met, had to wait until we were seventeen to get married ’cause her dad was an alcoholic hard case and he hated my guts.”
“I thought Grandpa liked you.”
“He came to like me,” said Ed. “By the time you knew him, he liked everyone.”
Darrel’s memories of his grandfather were bland and pleasant. Alcoholic hard case? What other surprises did his father have in store?
“Anyway, the two moons were obviously your mom and me, and I decided then and there to honor her by taking the name. Consulted a lawyer here in town, went over to the courthouse, and did it. It’s official and legal, son, in the eyes of the state of New Mexico. More important, it’s sacred-holy in my eyes.”
A year after Darrel moved in with his father, Edward Two Moons was diagnosed with bilateral small-cell carcinoma of the lung. The cancer had spread to his liver, and the doctors said to go home and enjoy the time he had left.
The first few months were okay, just a dry, persistent cough and some shortness of breath. Dad read a lot about the old Indian religion and seemed at peace. Darrel faked being relaxed, but his eyes hurt all the time.
The last month was rough, all of it spent at the hospital. Darrel sat by his father’s bed and listened to his father breathe. Watched the monitors idly and got friendly with some nurses. No tears came, just a deep ache in his belly. He lost fifteen pounds.
But he didn’t feel weak. Just the opposite, as if drawing upon some kind of reserve.
The last day of his life, Edward Two Moons slept. Except for one time, middle of the night, when he sat up, gasping, looking scared.
Darrel rushed over and held him. Tried to ease him back down, but Dad wanted to remain upright and he fought it.
Darrel complied and his father finally relaxed. Lights from the monitors turned his face sickly green. His lips were moving, but no sound was coming out. Struggling to say something. Darrel looked him straight in the eye, but by now his father wasn’t seeing anything.
Darrel held him tight and put his ear next to his father’s lips.
Dry rasping came out. Then:
“Change. Son. Is. Good.”
Then he sank back to sleep. An hour later, he was gone.
The day after the funeral, Darrel went over to the courthouse and filed papers for a name change.
5
Katz thought about Olafson’s murder on the drive home.
Doc and Darrel had talked about anger, and maybe they were right. But if anger was the prime motivation, you’d have predicted multiple blows, not one massive crusher.
A surprised burglar would fit with that. So did the open storage room.
Some sort of confrontation, Olafson announcing he was calling the police, turning his back on the bad guy.
Stupid move. Olafson’s comments about suing Bart and Emma Skaggs reeked of arrogance. Maybe he’d gotten overconfident and had not taken the burglar seriously.
The oversize chrome hammer implied the bad guy hadn’t come prepared to kill. Did the selection of weapon imply some sort of symbolic deal—killed by art, like Darrel had said—or just opportunism?
Katz had lived with symbols. That’s what you got when you married an artist.
A would-be artist.
First the sculptures, then the shitty paintings.
Be kind. Valerie had some talent. Just not enough.
He put her out of his mind and returned to the case. Came up with nothing new but was still thinking when he reached his space and parked and entered. The room was just as he’d left it: pin-neat. He pulled down the Murphy bed, ate, and watched TV and thought some more.
He lived in a three-hundred-square-foot tin-roofed outbuilding behind the Rolling Stone Marble and Granite Yard on South Cerillos. It had a front room and a preformed fiberglass lav. Warmth courtesy of a space heater, air-conditioning courtesy of opening the windows. He cooked on a hot plate, kept his few belongings in a steel locker. The view was stone slabs stacked vertically and forklifts.
Temporary lodgings that had stretched to permanent. Semipermanent, since maybe one day he’d find a real house. There was no reason to right now, because the rent was minimal and he had no one to impress. Back in New York, the same dough wouldn’t have gotten him a cot in a basement.
; He was the middle son of a dentist and a hygienist, the brother of two other tooth jockeys, raised in Great Neck, a onetime jock but no student, the black sheep of a resolutely middle-class family. After dropping out of SUNY Binghamton, he’d worked as a bartender in Manhattan for five years before returning to John Jay and earning a degree in criminal justice.
During his five years with NYPD, he’d ridden a patrol car in Bed-Stuy, done some dope-undercover, some jail duty, finished up at the Two-Four in the city, working the western border of Central Park from 59th to 86th. Nice job, covering the park. Until it wasn’t.
He continued to moonlight as a bartender, was socking away enough money to buy a Corvette, though he had no idea where he’d park it or when he’d use it. He was mixing ridiculous fruit martinis at a place in the Village the night he met Valerie. At first, he hadn’t thought much of her. It was her girlfriend Mona who’d caught his eye; back then he’d been into breasts and blondes. Later, when he learned how crazy Mona was, he was thankful he hadn’t gotten involved with her. Not that things had turned out so great with Valerie, but you couldn’t put that down to her being nuts.
Just . . .
No sense lingering.
He read a paperback for a while—a police novel that bore no resemblance to any reality he knew, which was exactly what he needed. Drowsy within minutes, he placed the book on the floor, turned off the light, and stretched out.
The sun would be up soon, and by seven a.m., Al Kilcannon and the workers in the stone yard would be shouting and laughing and getting the machinery going. Sometimes Al brought his dogs and they barked like crazy. Katz had his earplugs ready on the nightstand.
But maybe he wouldn’t use them. Maybe he should just get up, dress warm, and take a run, be ready to meet Darrel at Denny’s.
Waking up in this dump could be depressing. He didn’t miss Valerie, but he did miss greeting the morning with a warm body next to him.
Double Homicide Page 15
