Stone Butterfly
Page 1
For
T. David and Nam McDonald
Bangkok, Thailand,
Morgan Norris
Blackwell, Oklahoma,
Mary and Sandra Hale
San Diego, California,
and
Jack Arrington
Mesilla Park, New Mexico
Contents
Prologue: Madison County, Alabama, June 29, 1922
Chapter One: Colorado, Southern Ute Reservation
Chapter Two: Tonapah Flats, Utah
Chapter Three: Thunder Woman
Chapter Four: The Proposition
Chapter Five: Colorado, Southern Ute Reservation
Chapter Six: The Foreman and the Outlaw
Chapter Seven: Tonapah Flats, Utah
Chapter Eight: Crossing Over to the Other Side
Chapter Nine: Quite a Sight to See Before Breakfast
Chapter Ten: Mishap at Hatchet Gap
Chapter Eleven: A Discreet Inquiry
Chapter Twelve: To Fly Away
Chapter Thirteen: The Fed
Chapter Fourteen: The Journey
Chapter Fifteen: Bad News
Chapter Sixteen: More Bad News
Chapter Seventeen: Cortez, Colorado
Chapter Eighteen: The Cousin
Chapter Nineteen: John Law Comes Calling
Chapter Twenty: The Gap
Chapter Twenty-One: The Way Daisy Sees Things
Chapter Twenty-Two: Deputy Tate Takes the Call
Chapter Twenty-Three: Memories
Chapter Twenty-Four: Rx: Vitamin P
Chapter Twenty-Five: Already Too Late
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Dead-End Kid
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Worry, Worry, Worry…
Chapter Twenty-Eight: In the Canyon
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Problem
Chapter Thirty: A Simple Matter of Expertly Applied Manipulation
Chapter Thirty-One: The Shaman’s Game
Chapter Thirty-Two: Wrong Number
Chapter Thirty-Three: Making the Deal
Chapter Thirty-Four: Crime and Punishment
Chapter Thirty-Five: The Traveler Returns
Chapter Thirty-Six: What Happened Early on a Damp Morning in the Spruce Woods
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Some Days It’s Just One Dang Thing Right After Another
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Incident at the Columbine Gate
Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Unexpected Guest
Chapter Forty: The Watcher
Chapter Forty-One: The Columbine Foreman’s Report
Chapter Forty-Two: Aces Over Eights
Chapter Forty-Three: Lila Mae Tries Again
Chapter Forty-Four: Absent
Chapter Forty-Five: Unfinished Business
Chapter Forty-Six: Six Days Later in Cañón del Espíritu
Chapter Forty-Seven: The Orphan
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Madison County, Alabama, June 29, 1922
Mother, Daughter, Dog
Momma carries freshly churned butter—a half-gallon lard can in each hand. Floppy sandals poppity-pop on the sand.
Little bare feet tripping after go patter-patter.
The trailing blue-tick hound makes no sound.
As on all their weekly treks to town, where butter was bartered for those few necessities not produced on the Nestor farm, mother, daughter, and dog marched single file along a narrow pathway through chigger-infested blackberry bushes and broad-leafed poison pokeweed. The trail snaked along the slippery bank of the Flint River for nearly a mile before intersecting the gravel road to Sulphur Springs. It was not yet nine o’clock, and the heavy atmosphere was already steamy-hot. “Try to keep up, Daff.”
“Yes’m.” Daphne scratched at an itchy sore on her elbow.
Without a glance over her shoulder, she added: “And stop pickin’ at that scab!”
“Yes’m.” Granny Nestor says that all mommas has eyes in the backs of their heads. The child squinted hard to see the spot. They must be under her hair.
Momma rolled her visible eyes. Lord, I don’t know why I even bother—it just goes in one ear and out the other. She cast a nervous glance at the brackish, slow-moving waters. This place is alive with cottonmouths and copperheads and God only knows what else. What Else was approaching her left ear. The target of the assault heard the tiny engine whine, felt the fat black mosquito land on her neck. Well, I ain’t gonna put a bucket down to smack you, so you might as well go ahead and get it over with. The stab came swiftly, was followed by a victorious drumroll of thunder. Momma frowned at a somber shroud of low-hanging cloud. There’s rain in that; enough to soak us to the skin. She quickened her pace. “Get a move on!”
“Yes’m.” It seemed that no matter how fast Daphne’s chubby legs chugged along, she was always a dozen steps behind. This, she reasoned, was mainly on account of Momma walks too fast and My legs is too short for me to keep up. But there was more to it than that; the inquisitive child often felt compelled to stop and pick up a pearly fragment of mussel shell, or pluck a pretty brown-eyed Susan, or make an ugly face at a daddy longlegs. She was a busy little pilgrim.
The young mother shuddered at a sinister wriggle-rustling in the grass. “Watch out where you’re steppin’, Daff. And don’t touch nothin’—no fuzzy worms, no ugly-bugs—you hear me?”
“Yes’m.” But even as she spoke, the child spotted a temptation. Oh! Pretty—pretty—pretty! Pink as a wild rose, glistening with pearly dew, it glittered like a jewel fallen from heaven. But most striking of all, a network of crimson veins webbed its translucent wings. Daphne poked her big toe at the exquisite apparition, expecting it to fly away. It did not. Poor thingy—you must be sick. The child squatted, gently picked it up, whispered: “I’ll take you home to Granny Nestor—she’ll make you all well.” She thought it best not to mention that Granny’s prescription for every ailment—be it toothache, dizzy spell, or painful boil—was a tablespoon of castor oil, followed quickly with a soda cracker. With a furtive glance at the back of her mother’s head, the ardent collector slipped this latest acquisition into her apron pocket with an assortment of other treasured objects—like the shiny silver dime Grandpa Nestor had given her for the tent meeting collection plate, a once-lively June bug (recently deceased), and the bloodred Indian arrowhead she had picked up here just last week.
Near a lichen-encrusted log, a largemouth bass broke the river’s still surface to take an unwary minnow. Momma just knew it was a cottonmouth that had dropped off a tree branch. She prayed: Please, Lord—fix it so we can live someplace where there ain’t so many snakes and skeeters.
The tot bent over to snatch up a small jade-green frog. The thing was clammy-cold in her hand. I think Miss Froggy’s dead. She was about to straighten up when—
The hound (who enjoyed such sport) cold-nosed her on the behind.
“Eeep!” she yelped, and hurried to catch up with Momma.
Heavy with a second child, the nineteen-year-old turned to scowl. “What’ve you been up to, Daff?”
“Nothin’, Momma.”
“Nothin’ my hind leg!” Momma raised a lard-bucket like she might take a swat at the girl. “After I told you a hunnerd times not to, did you pick up some dead thing and hide it in your apern pocket?”
“Oh, no—cross my eyes and hope to die!” Daphne’s left eye focused on the tip of her freckled nose, the right one stared straight at her mother.
Momma cringed. “Please Daff—don’t do that.” She added the standard warning: “Someday they’ll stick thataway.”
“When they do, I won’t be able to see where I’m a-goin’.” Imitating Grandpa Nestor (who would get up at night without lighting a coal oil lamp), Daphne bounced off a cottonwood trunk. �
��Oh, Jimminy—what was that I jus’ bumped into—a ellyphant’s leg?”
“Now you stop that silliness!” To keep from laughing, Momma called up terrible images of pain and death, which also provided inspiration for a dire warning: “And you’d better start payin’ some attention to what I tell you—you keep on pickin’ up them creepy-crawlies, one of ’em is gonna bite you and you’ll swell up and die!”
The eyes uncrossed, an impish smile exposed a too-cute gap in a row of miniature teeth, a chubby hand closed around the stone-cold amphibian in her apron pocket. “I only stopped to look at a little bitsy frog, but she hopped an’ hopped away”—Daphne demonstrated with little arcs of her hand—“and I heard a splish-splash when she jumped inta the river and got et by a great big garfish.” To illustrate how the voracious gar had chomped the frog, the girl clicked her tiny teeth together.
Momma shook her head. This child is just like her daddy and all her daddy’s folks from up yonder in Butler County—she can’t open her mouth without lyin’ a blue streak. I wonder what on earth will ever become of her.
Quite a lot, as it turned out.
In time, plump little Daphne would grow up to be tall and willowy as a Texas sunflower, semi-pretty, and moderately clever.
On her sixteenth birthday, she left Alabama for the land of the Shining Mountains, entered the State of Colorado with great expectations, the state of holy matrimony with a Grand Junction banker who collected Burmese star sapphires and died—as she wrote to her mother “…on account of being run over by a green International Harvester lumber truck loaded with jack pine pallets.” Daphne wept as Thaddeus Silver was buried in the First Methodist Church cemetery, wore black silk and a downcast expression for eleven months before drifting westerly into Utah and reciting the vows of marriage with Mr. Raymond Oates, who was building up a fine herd of Herefords by burning his brand on other stockmen’s cattle. Each of these marriages produced a son, but sad to say—neither Ben Silver nor Raymond Oates, Jr. would exhibit the least manifestation of brotherly affection. Or even half brotherly affection.
This is how the troubles got started that (decades later) would plague Southern Ute Tribal Investigator Charlie Moon, an upright and amiable citizen, and his aunt Daisy Perika, who is anything but. (Amiable and upright, that is.) How does one describe the tribal elder?
Conniving is a word that comes to mind.
Irascible is another.
And then, there is her little eccentricity: Daisy talks to dead people.
Chapter One
Colorado, Southern Ute Reservation
In the Shadow of Three Sisters Mesa
This being his weekly visit to his aged relative, Daisy Perika’s long, lean nephew was seated at her kitchen table. It was evident that his entire attention was focused on the tribe’s weekly newspaper, more particularly a column by a Granite Creek astrologer-psychic, wherein the seer predicted that (following an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude) the Lost Civilization of Atlantis would surface in the South Pacific! Though it was absolutely certain that the calamity would occur on February 10 at 9:15 A.M. Mountain Standard Time, the stars and planets were somewhat foggy on the precise year of the event—which might be 2007, or perhaps 2077—depending upon whether or not Saturn decided to visit the House of Uranus whilst that latter planet was in diametric juxtaposition to the Twenty-sixth Planet, which had not yet been discovered. The whole thing was a sham, of course.
(Clarifying note: Reference is not made to the astrologer’s immodest prophecy—but rather to the more unpretentious sham currently being committed by Charlie Moon, whose apparent interest in the newspaper was a pretense.)
As it happened, Moon had heard the tramp’s shuffle-footed approach when the intruder was a good hundred yards away, and the full-time rancher, part-time tribal investigator thought it would be entertaining to see how his aunt would deal with this unwelcome guest. In happy anticipation of the fireworks to come, he turned another page of the Southern Ute Drum and waited for the fun to begin. In about six seconds, he estimated. And began to count them off. One thousand and one. One thousand and two.
If Daisy had not been concentrating all her attention on the preparation of a morning meal for herself and her nephew, she might have been aware of Yadkin Dixon’s arrival. Or perhaps not—the hungry man was intentionally making a stealthy approach.
One thousand and three. One thousand and four.
The way Mr. Dixon saw it, a hard-hearted old woman who kicked at chipmunks and heaved stones at pretty, flitting bluebirds could not be expected to deal kindly with a self-educated economist who firmly believed in the concept of a free lunch. Or free breakfast, as the case might be.
One thousand and five. One thousand and six.
The first evidence of his unwanted presence was the tap-tap of a knuckle on the kitchen window—and his long, horsy face gawking at her through the glass. After a startled twitch, the Ute woman quickly turned away. In Daisy’s Book of Bad Things, this particular pestilence fell into that same insufferable category as the dull ache that plagued her left hip on a rainy day. Her remedy was: Ignore the hateful thing, it would eventually go away.
Her attempt to pretend that Dixon did not exist was wasted on the thick-skinned beggar who camped out somewhere in the vicinity of her home. The persistent fellow was not about to leave without some nourishment to occupy that hollow space betwixt the Coors pewter belt buckle and his spine.
Shamming on unashamedly, Moon pretended to be engrossed in an article entitled “Treating Hemorrhoids with Acupuncture.” Ouch.
After ignoring the beggar for a full two seconds, Daisy gave up the game. Like death and taxes that were here to stay, Mr. Dixon was not going away. She wiped her hands on a polka-dot apron, jerked the back door open.
Before she had a chance to say something uncivil, Dixon tipped a tattered slouch hat. “Good morning, ma’am—and God bless you.” Though a greeting of this sort tended to disarm his ordinary marks, he might as well have expected a cheerful “Howdy-do” to charm a grinning-skull tattoo off the hairy hide of a whiskey-soaked Hell’s Angel.
Daisy marched outside, wagged a finger in his face. “Don’t you start ma’am-ing me, you two-legged coyote.” Ugh—he smells like last week’s fish. She glared at the filthy white man. “What d’you want this time?” As if I don’t know.
Charlie Moon also knew. And unseen by those outside, he had made his way to the cookstove, plopped several fat sausage links into a cast-iron skillet.
Mr. Dixon assumed a pitiful tone. “I wondered if you could spare a poor, homeless person a few leftovers from your table.” His hopeful smile exposed yellowed teeth that resembled hard little kernels of un-popped corn. “Some cold, pasty oatmeal—or a few potato peels?”
“I gave you something to eat just last week.” Daisy tried to recall the details and did. “It was a cheese sandwich, big enough to choke a bull moose.” Though somewhat rusty from lack of use, Daisy’s conscience gently reminded her that the months-old cheese was fuzzy with blue mold and on top of that the bread was hard enough to break a brass monkey’s teeth and— Being one who did not accept criticism gracefully, she interrupted the inner voice: I scraped the fur off that cheese. And even if the sliced bread was a little stale, you can’t expect a dirt-poor widow woman to give her last slice of fresh bread to a man who hasn’t used a toothbrush since that goober-pea farmer from Georgia was president.
Blissfully unaware of Daisy’s internal dialogue, the hungry man rubbed his stomach. “Alas, I have long since digested that delectable delicacy.” Dixon assumed a saintly expression he had recently seen on a stained-glass window at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Durango, where he had also tapped the Rector’s Emergency Discretionary Fund for bus fare to Topeka so that he might attend his dear old mother’s funeral (while Dear Old Mother was on a Caribbean cruise with her latest husband). “I would be grateful for some broken soda crackers. Or a shriveled-up apple core.”
Moon cracked three brown-shell eggs
on the edge of the skillet, smiled appreciatively at the man’s line of talk. It was always a pleasure to witness a highly skilled professional going about his work.
Daisy was not about to leave the subject of the white vagrant’s last visit. “And after I fed you that sandwich, what did you do?” Like a well-rehearsed attorney, the prosecutor-persecutor answered her own question. “You thanked me by stealing a brand-new ax from my pile of piñon wood!”
The beggar—who was short of everything but pride—stiffened his back and lied: “I did no such thing.”
Her nostrils flared dangerously. “Don’t tell me that, you snake-eyed sneak-thief—I was watching you from that window.” To identify the physical evidence that supported her accusation, the witness for the prosecution pointed to indicate the aforesaid window.
Little wheels turned in his head, tiny ratchets clicked and clacked, and so on and so forth. Figuratively, of course. “I might have picked up your ax.” Dixon’s highly plastic features effortlessly assumed the injured expression of one who—though painfully wounded by a malicious and false accusation—would not take offense. “But even if I did—all I ever intended was to borrow it for a few hours.”
The hard-faced woman had a ready answer for that. “Then why didn’t you bring it back?”
Having fended off many serious allegations over the years, Dixon did not miss a beat. “It is my faulty memory.” He leaned forward, fixed his feisty accuser with an earnest gaze. “Ever since I was struck north of Clarksville, Tennessee, by that speeding L&N freight train that was pulling eighteen boxcars and a green caboose, I can hardly remember anything—even my name.” He paused for a moment, evidently involved in an intense mental effort to recall what the initials Y-D stood for, only to be defeated by the arduous task. “But be assured that as soon as I return to my modest encampment, I shall search for your—uh—dear me, you see—it has slipped away from me already.” A cherubic smile. “Tell me again—what it was that is missing—a hammer from your toolshed?”