Eagle, Kathleen (8 page)

"Why
not? You can't hurt anything here. Come on." Crybaby was ready to follow
them through the door. "Not you, dog, and don't you be crying about it.
Wet woman and wet dog are two completely different matters."

"How
so? A puddle's a puddle."

"Ain't
talking about the runoff aspect," he quipped as he closed the door on the
dog and the sunshine.

He
turned to his guest, who stood sodden in the shadows, breasts tightly enfolded
in her arms, eyes big, feet bare, shorts droopy. She looked every bit as
forlorn and bedraggled as the dog he'd banned from their company. He felt a
strong urge to do something for her, something both masterful and courteous,
something like taking her clothes off, wrapping her in a soft blanket, rubbing
her dry.

He
cleared his throat, jerked his chin. "Through there. The towels are on the
shelf."

"I
know the way." She started toward the bathroom, then stopped. "That
summer," she said quietly, pausing in the hallway to look back at him.
Stripped of her usual dignity, she looked heartbreakingly young and utterly vulnerable.
"You never brought me here, and I always wondered why."

He
thought about saying
Look around,
but it occurred to him that looking
around now wasn't the same thing. The colorless little place was pretty much
the same, but he was seeing it differently. Maybe he was wearing a different
head.

"Why
didn't you take me home to meet
your
family?" he returned.

There
in the shadows she smiled. It was, if he was not mistaken, a sad smile. "I
guess we never got that far, did we?"

"Guess
not." They'd gone pretty far, and he'd come pretty far since, but
courteous
and masterful
he had not quite attained. "And I guess you
are
making
a puddle."

He
went to his old room—where he'd been sleeping as he had years ago, with his
head jammed against the wall and his feet hanging off the bed—and found her
some clothes. He decided a T-shirt would look too much like a nightgown, so he
chose a long-sleeved dress shirt. It was too bad he hadn't switched to boxer
shorts. She'd look good in those. His father's jeans would fit her better than
his own, but the old man's room was closed off for now, and his clothes were
not to be worn again.

He
knocked on the door after the water stopped running. "I'll trade you my
dry clothes for your wet ones," he said, and they made the exchange
through the door. "I'll hang these out on the line."

She
thanked him, and later when she joined him in the kitchen, she handed him his
jeans. "I gave up on trying to keep these on. But this is enough, huh? I'm
decent."

"Definitely
decent. That shirt never looked that good on me." It hung down around her
knees, and with the sleeves rolled up, it could have been a dress. "Put a
belt on it, and we'll go out to lunch." He handed her the can of pop she'd
left behind. "You turned me down yesterday, and I generally don't ask more
than once, but here you are, and here it is lunchtime, and my cupboard's pretty
bare."

"That's
one of the reasons I stopped by, actually. To apologize. I didn't mean to be
rude yesterday, but after dealing with..." Her gesture drifted with her
words.

"Is
that part of a dealer's job? Dealing with big-time losers?"

"No,
not usually. I was handy. I have some experience with... counseling. You know,
as a teacher." She was fiddling with his shirt's buttons. They were the
ones she was wearing, but still they were his, and she was unbuttoning and
rebuttoning that one in the middle of her chest. She could button up to her
chin if she wanted to, but he'd still be thinking that her bra and panties were
hanging out there on the clothesline. He'd put them there himself.

"Actually,
I
can offer
you
lunch," she said, the idea just occurring to
her. "I put a few things in the refrigerator, and there's some other stuff
in the car."

He
wasn't hungry. "I'll go get it. What do you need?"

"Just
bring both bags. Do you have any mayonnaise?"

"Nope."

"Mustard?"

He
pointed to the small cupboard next to the refrigerator. "Check up there.
You find anything that hasn't been opened, I guess we can use it."

He
turned away from that funny little look she was giving him and headed out the
back door. You didn't use the old man's personal stuff, like his clothes. Reese
figured the food he'd been using qualified as personal. She'd probably call it
superstition. When he returned to the Cities, he'd probably call it the same
thing. But not here he wouldn't, and not now.

When
he came back with the groceries, he asked her if she'd found anything, and she
said she hadn't looked. "No need to disturb anything that was here,"
she said. "I brought plenty."

They
made easy talk while they built sandwiches together. He suggested putting the
cottage cheese with canned fruit, and she recalled that her mother had called
that "heavenly hash," but she thought most people used whipped cream
instead of cottage cheese. He couldn't remember her saying much about her
mother before. She was right; they'd pretty much kept family out of it then.
All they'd wanted was each other, the way he remembered it. Anything else had
been too complicated. But now he found it easy to ask about her parents, and
she told him they had been divorced for a long time and that her mother had moved
to Ohio, where her sister lived. Didn't sound like Helen was too tight with any
of them, and he wondered about that. But he didn't ask. Maybe she'd tell him
sometime.

They
held their paper plates in their laps while they ate. The kitchen table had been
turned into a miniature Little Bighorn battlefield. Reese had walked around the
thing and shaken his head for days, unable to believe his dad had been playing
cowboys and Indians. He'd built the hills and draws of that haunted valley in
southern Montana on a sheet of plywood, and he'd peopled the area with tiny
plastic rivals. The terrain had been carefully molded out of plaster on some
kind of base—chicken wire, Reese assumed. The care the old man had taken with
the project was evident in the detail, and except for the little horsemen, it
was all homemade.

He
couldn't picture his father constructing this thing, and that bothered him.
He'd had about three things to play with when he was a kid—one big round ball
and two little ones—and his father had warned him not to mess with the little
ones too much. Once when Ray was tanked, he'd made the comment in front of some
of Reese's friends, telling them that was why they all had zits. Reese
remembered how hot that flush of shame had felt. But this meticulously constructed
plaything was not the work of a drunk. Maybe the old man had made it for his
grandchildren, a visual aid for one of his favorite adventure stories. Reese
wondered whether he would take up such a hobby when he got old.
If
he
got old, which wasn't too likely. But if he did, he'd have no one to play with
but himself.

Christ,
what a thought. It actually made him laugh.

And
then he realized that Helen was giving him that funny look again, like maybe it
wasn't safe to be around him. She had just been telling him how Roy had given
her a personal tour of his valley of the Little Bighorn the night he died, and
she obviously didn't think that information was too funny.

"The
Greasy Grass," she amended. "Not the Little Bighorn."

"That's
more like it," Reese said, and he encouraged her to recount the old man's
"blow-by-blow" description of the famous battle, even though he'd
heard it before. Hell, he'd watched the video a time or two. Or twenty-two. He
liked the way the old man regaled the "experts," had them hanging on
every word, heads bobbing.

She
pointed out some of the tiny figures to him—Crazy Horse, Gall, Sitting Bull,
and Iron Necklace, who, she informed him, was his great-grandfather. He watched
her slip into her teacher mode, heard the enthusiasm in her voice, saw it in
her gestures, but the words were his father's. He knew them so well.

"He
worked for the railroad years ago," Reese mused. "He admired the
model-train setups you'd see on display at Christmas, but he wasn't one to
spend money on toys. I don't know when he got into this little hobby."

"He
told me he saw one of those models in a magazine. He said they had it all
wrong, so he started making his own." She set a fallen horse back on its
feet in Major Reno's entrenchment position near the river. "Sidney would
love this."

"Sidney?"

She
glanced up quickly, as though he'd jerked her back from somewhere else. She was
entitled, he thought. He'd been elsewhere, too.

She
covered with a shrug. "My son."

"He
still likes toy soldiers?"

"He
likes history. We never pass up a museum. He... he reads a lot."

"Sports
and books," Reese said. He tried to imagine a ten-year-old-boy version of
her pretty face. "Good combination. Bet he's a smart kid." And then,
impulsively, he added, "You can have this thing if you can figure out a
way to move it."

"Oh,
you shouldn't part with this, Reese. Roy put so much into it. Did you see that
History Channel program where they interviewed him?"

"I
did."

"I
have it on tape. Would you like a copy?"

"Thanks.
I have it, too." He tipped his chair back and tossed his half-f plate
on the counter behind him. "He put the whole place in my name. I don't
know what he thought I'd do with it. Carter lives close by, and he has kids. So
does Rose. I don't know what the ol' man was thinking, leaving it to me."

"He
must have had a reason."

"Perversity."
Reese laughed. "Is that a reason, or just an old habit?"

Helen
shook her head. Her fingers drifted over the tiny figures on what she'd
described as Last Stand Hill. "I don't think your father's death was an
accident."

The
flat, spiritless way she said it chilled him. "What makes you say
that?"

She
sighed and straightened slowly, as though she was lifting a burden up to him.
"He was very outspoken about a number of controversial issues around here,
and lately he'd been rattling the cages of some pretty big gorillas."

"This
is South Dakota. There isn't a gorilla in the whole state."
Believe
that, and I'll meet you at the top of the Empire State Building.

"The
issues concerned the casinos."

"Oh,
yeah.
Those
cages." Back to the government's latest new deal for
Indian country. "The old man didn't have a problem with putting up the
casinos."

"No,
but he had some problems with the way they're being run, and he was vocal about
what ought to be done. He was gaining a lot of support. Which means he was also
making enemies."

Enemies.
Reese dragged his gaze from the doomed plastics on the hill to the tiny tipis
across the river. "Did he mention any enemies in particular?"

"No."

"Did
you get the impression he was afraid?"

"No.
He wasn't afraid. He said that a man his age could afford to speak out because
he'd lived his life. He didn't think he had a lot to lose."

"Speak
out about..."

"Ten
Star," she supplied. "The casino management company. Your father was
opposed to renewing their contract."

"So
you think they ran him down? Seems like a sloppy way to off somebody if you're
in the business of offing people." He leaned forward in his chair,
studying her now. "That's not what you're suggesting, is it? A hit man hit
my old man?"

"No,
I'm not suggesting that. I'm just saying—"

"You
know what I thought when they called to tell me? First thought, first picture
in my head, was an old drunk wandering around in the road and getting
hit." It was her turn to be surprised by an off-the-wall suggestion.
"I know. He quit drinking years ago," Reese admitted. "Why did I
assume, even for an instant, that he'd fallen off the wagon?"

Helen
shook her head, as though she couldn't imagine.

"And
I didn't want you to know that about him or about me, so why am I laying it on
you now?" He laughed, wagged his head as he glanced away from her, from
his father's last big project, the one he ought to be giving him some kind of
credit for. "Carter didn't know him then, either, and Rose mostly stayed
with relatives. Back then, it was just me and the old man and his bottle.
Jesus, he's
dead,
and here I am dragging that up." He stared at the
back door, and he felt like a kid again, watching and waiting for that door to
open, worrying over what kind of shape the man who opened it would be in.
"That's not what I want to remember about him, but that was my first damn
thought."

She
laid her hand on his thigh, just above his knee. No big deal, just a little
consolation between friends, but it drove him to his feet. He hated sympathy.
He wanted her hands on him, but not in sympathy, and he was disgusted with
himself for angling for it now.