The Man Who Fell from the Sky Read online

  “I need fresh air.” Ruth lifted her head and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief that, Vicky suspected, he had handed to her.

  “I set up some lawn chairs out back.” Dallas Spotted Deer stepped over. Related to the Walking Bear family, one of Robert’s cousins, if Vicky remembered correctly. Everyone on the rez was related somehow, distant cousins of distant cousins, in-laws two or three times removed. Dallas had been at St. Francis School when she and Ruth were there. A middle-aged man now with red and blue ribbons woven into black braids that hung down the front of his yellow shirt, and a serious, pockmarked face.

  John O’Malley nodded a thank-you to the man as they started across the living room. Past the sympathy-filled faces, past the kitchen counters piled with food, past the women drawing themselves back to make room. A grandmother darted ahead and opened the door. They stepped out onto the stoop and down the three wooden steps, John O’Malley holding on to Ruth’s arm, guiding her toward a pair of lawn chairs. He handed her into one and motioned Vicky into the other. Then he found another chair stacked against the house and shook it open as he brought it over. He sat down across from them.

  “I’m sorry for breaking down like that, Father.” Ruth looked sideways. A barbed-wire fence ran between the bare-dirt yard and the pasture where two horses grazed on clumps of grass. The brown hills traced with green rose in the distance against a blue-white sky. She slipped off the flip-flops, tucked her feet under her, and kneaded at the fabric of her jeans skirt as if it were dough.

  “You don’t always have to be strong,” John O’Malley told her.

  Vicky looked away. She tried not to smile. There were times in the past when he had told her the same thing.

  “I wasn’t expecting Robert to die,” Ruth said. “When the fed knocked on the door and told me Robert had been found in the lake, I told him there must be some mistake. He said that Alan Fergus, runs a body shop in Lander, found Robert’s body.” She lifted her shoulders and dropped them in a defeated shrug. “The moccasin telegraph must’ve gotten the news before I did. Before I knew it, all kinds of people were at my door.”

  Mostly related to Robert, Vicky was thinking. A few distant relatives of Ruth’s, but everyone close to her had died or moved away years ago. And now—a new thought breaking through—with Robert gone, Ruth would be almost as alone as she was.

  “All the women brought food,” Ruth was saying. “It’s like they make a lot of food and wait for something terrible to happen.” She dabbed the wadded handkerchief at her eyes again. “The worst part is what they’re saying.”

  “What do you mean?” Vicky said.

  “If they aren’t saying it, they’re thinking it.” A stream of tears and black mascara ran down the woman’s cheeks. She pulled at the handkerchief in her hands without making an effort to wipe away the moisture. “Stories go around faster than lightning.”

  “What stories, Ruth?” John O’Malley leaned toward her. “Tell us.”

  “The fed started it, asking stupid questions. Made me sick to my stomach.” John O’Malley was quiet. Patient, Vicky thought, unbelievably patient. He had once told her he had learned patience from the Arapahos, learned to sit and wait while people ordered their thoughts and decided whether he was trustworthy enough to give their thoughts to him. She, on the other hand, had learned impatience from years in the white world, college, law school, the years in a big law firm followed by her own small firm. Learned to jump up, be quick, be alert, never let down her guard. Pace the floor to order her own thoughts; rise in the courtroom: Objection!

  Ruth unfolded her legs, wiggled her feet into the flip-flops, and shifted forward on her chair, pulling at the handkerchief in her hands. A pair of reddish curls hung loosely along her neck. She was struggling to say something, lips forming and reforming the words. Finally she said, “The fed wanted to know if Robert was depressed. Did he ever talk about taking his life? Had he ever tried to take his life? If he did decide to take his life, how do I think he might have gone about it? What was he saying? Robert walked into the lake, laid down, and died?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, as if she might squeeze out more tears. Then she tossed her head toward the pasture. “He had the ranch. Meant the world to him. Maybe it’s a nothing ranch, but we had meat on the table and Robert picked up jobs with the highway department every summer, and I got my job at the dental office. The Creator never saw fit to give us children, but Robert said we’d be okay, just the two of us.” She was staring out at the pasture. The breeze riffled the manes of the horses. “I’d say, anybody depressed around here, it was me. Same old, same old every day. No way out. Nothing ever changing. But I never thought he’d leave me like this.”

  Vicky caught John O’Malley’s eye for a second. All she knew about Robert’s death had come over the moccasin telegraph. First, to Annie, her secretary. Then Annie had brought it to her. But maybe there was more, facts the telegraph hadn’t yet picked up. She could read the same thought in John’s face.

  He took one of Ruth’s hands in his own and waited until she turned back to him. “Nobody knows yet what happened.”

  “The coroner will order an autopsy and issue a report.” Vicky tried to match John O’Malley’s calm, assuring tone. “We’ll know the truth then.” She was thinking the report could take several weeks.

  “That’s not all the questions the fed asked. Robert have any enemies? Altercations with friends or strangers? Anybody like to see him dead?”

  “The fed has to look at every possibility.” Vicky was thinking that the local FBI agent, Ted Gianelli, was a thorough investigator. No stone would be left unturned. Eventually Ruth would appreciate his thoroughness.

  “Nothing would have happened if Cutter had been with him.” Ruth turned toward Vicky. “You remember Jimmy Walking Bear? He went to St. Francis School with us. Got the name Cutter on a Texas ranch, where he was the best at cutting out cattle during roundup.”

  Vicky tried for the third time this afternoon to reach back to the years at St. Francis School, all the brown-faced, black-haired kids bent over papers and books at desks arranged in perfect rows, and a nun—Sister Mary Rita, perhaps—or one of the priests explaining a mathematical problem, writing assignments on the blackboard, rapping a ruler on the desk to stop the giggling in the back of the classroom. There were several priests at the mission who taught classes then. Good teachers, the Jesuits. She tried to picture a boy named Jimmy Walking Bear, but all the gangly, pimply boys blurred in her mind.

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember him,” she said.

  Ruth waved one hand, as if she were shooing off a mosquito. “Robert’s cousin. Two or three times removed, but still a relative. Anyway when Cutter was about eleven, his father packed up the family and moved to Oklahoma. So Cutter grew up not knowing his own people, where he came from. He came back to the rez a couple months ago looking for family. First thing he did was find Robert. They formed a real tight bond. I wish Robert had taken him hunting, but Robert never took anybody hunting . . .”

  “Hunting?”

  Ruth gave a small smile of memory, unlike the fake, plastered smile she had worn earlier. “Treasure. Robert was hunting treasure. Long as I’ve known him, he talked about finding the treasure Butch Cassidy buried up in the mountains around Bull Lake when he was hiding out here after a robbery. Robert heard the stories when he was a kid and they clamped on to him, wouldn’t let him go. It was his hobby, hunting for that treasure. He worked all week on the highway, laying down asphalt in the hot sun, and on Friday he’d head up into the mountains where it was cool and he could relax and hunt for treasure. He liked to go alone, be by himself for a few days. I never knew for certain when he would come home. If he was onto something, he’d camp up there and keep working all weekend. So I wasn’t worried when he didn’t come home last night. I figured he thought he found something.”

  She stopped and bit at her lip a moment. “
I never expected him to find treasure. If you want to know the truth, neither did Robert. It was the looking that was fun. Until . . .” She left off again and squinted into space, trying to fix a memory. “When his grandfather Luther died, Robert found a leather case in the old man’s barn. Inside was a map. Well, Robert got real excited. Said Butch Cassidy left a map behind, just like Luther always said. With all those movie people on the rez making a documentary about Butch Cassidy, Robert figured there’d be a stampede of people hunting for Butch’s treasure. So he took time off his job and went up into the mountains every day. Said he was getting close.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “He was always getting close.”

  The screened door opened and people began to flow onto the stoop, down the steps, and across the yard, heading for the lone cottonwood tree and the shade splashed over the dirt. Several women hovered over Ruth, wanting to know how she was doing. Was there anything they could get her?

  “I should see about the coffee.” Ruth jumped to her feet.

  “We’ll take care of it.” The women wheeled about and started back up the steps. The screened door slammed behind them.

  “I have to check on the elders.” The lawn chair toppled over as Ruth started past.

  Father John stood up. “We’ll come with you.”

  He was so tall, Vicky was thinking as she stood next to him. She barely reached the top of his shoulder. He looked slim and fit, yet he filled so much space.

  “I must be strong,” Ruth was muttering under her breath as she started for the house. “I must show them I am strong.”

  Vicky followed Ruth up the steps and into the kitchen, conscious of the sound of John O’Malley’s footsteps behind her.

  3

  TRAFFIC HAD COME to a dead stop on Ethete Road. The asphalt glowed in the afternoon sun, and dust whirled about the line of vehicles ahead. Father John pulled in behind a white SUV. The minute he stopped, the heat started to accumulate inside the cab of the old Toyota pickup. The prologue to Pagliacci blared from the CD player on the seat beside him. It was the last week in May, the Moon When the Ponies Shed Their Shaggy Hair, as the Arapahos marked the passing time. The weather already turning warm. He shuddered to think of how far up the thermometer the temperature might crawl in July.

  He got out and tried to see past the SUV. What looked like a bunch of cowboys came galloping across the prairie on the right, raising great billows of dust that hung like brown clouds against the sky. Arranged alongside the riders were cameras on black tripods and, behind the cameras, groups of men and women. Other cameramen in Jeeps followed the horses, holding out cameras. A row of pickups stood at the edge of the road. Beyond the pickups, what looked like a village sprang out of the prairie: a circle of campers, RVs, more pickups.

  He got back inside the Toyota, turned up the CD player, and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. So this was where the Butch Cassidy documentary was being filmed today. Cowboys galloping at full speed, probably portraying the getaway after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the rest of the Wild Bunch had robbed a bank or a train. Now the cowboys rode back the way they had come, moving at a slower trot, which, he suspected, meant they would film the scene again. He drummed his fingers harder and wished he had paid attention to the list of filming sites in the Gazette. He considered turning around and taking the long way back to Seventeen-Mile Road and the mission, but he had pulled in close to the SUV and a blue pickup had pulled in behind him. It would take some maneuvering to turn around. He decided to wait. One more getaway and maybe the road would open up. The prologue of the opera came to a crashing end. He opened the door to let in more air, but it was hot air, all of it.

  He thought of Ruth. She would need to summon strength for the days and months ahead, maybe the years. He had counseled so many people who had lost their life partners, trying to help them find the way forward. But what did he know? He tried to imagine what it would be like to lose someone who was a part of yourself. Like losing an arm. Sometimes, when he was going on about trusting in God, taking one day at a time, and all the other platitudes, he wondered how any of it could ever help.

  For an instant, he let the thoughts of Vicky circling the edges of his mind come into focus. There had been times when she had been close to death, and he remembered the icy grip that had taken hold of him. He wondered how he would have managed if, in fact, she were no longer part of the world. He pushed the thought away. Seeing her today had been reassuring and comforting, even in a house of grief.

  He got out again and stretched. The cowboys were galloping over the prairie, but this time other cowboys galloped behind, brandishing guns. A series of pops split the air. Lawmen after Cassidy and his gang. But did they ever catch up with him? He tried to remember the bits and pieces he had read about the Wild Bunch, the movie he had watched years ago. Who knew if the stories were based on historical fact? He realized another cowboy was coming along the line of vehicles, talking to the drivers. He waited as the man stepped back from the SUV and started toward him.

  “Sorry for the inconvenience.” The cowboy had pale blue eyes and sun-reddened skin. “Director wants one more shot.” He gestured toward the prairie and the riders reining horses into a line. “Always a danger the horses might break away and run across the road, so tribal police say we have to keep the roads clear. Give us a few more minutes.”

  The man had started for the pickup behind when he turned back. “Say, you wouldn’t be that mission priest we’ve heard about.”

  “I don’t know what you may have heard, but I’m Father John O’Malley, pastor at St. Francis.”

  “The director would like a word with you.” He glanced over at the horses again. “Todd Paxton. Looks like he’ll be tied up the rest of the day. Could he give you a call?”

  Father John pulled out the little notebook and pen he kept in his shirt pocket, wrote on the top page both the mission telephone number and that of his cell phone, and handed it to the cowboy.

  “Todd thinks you might be able to help us out.” He gave a nod of appreciation and walked back to the driver’s window of the blue pickup.

  Father John slid behind the steering wheel. He wondered how much help he could be to the director of a documentary film on Butch Cassidy. About as much help as he had been to Ruth.

  * * *

  ANOTHER TWENTY MINUTES passed, the opera well into Act I, Don, din, don, din, and the vehicles ahead started forward. Father John pressed lightly on the accelerator as the old pickup growled and shook and finally settled into twenty miles an hour. Ahead actors in cowboy hats milled about; horses grazed on sparse outcroppings of grass. Like a giant machine, the crowd started rolling in the direction of a blue and white truck with a metal curtain raised on one side, revealing what looked like a counter in a diner.

  Finally he was past the movie site, the pickup shuddering as it picked up speed, the SUV already far ahead, glinting in the sun. He turned onto Blue Sky Highway and picked up Seventeen-Mile Road heading east, thinking about Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch and what the reservation must have looked like more than a hundred years ago. The same endless stretch of prairie, the same brown foothills stretched low on the western horizon, probably some of the same log cabins around the rez. The same feeling, he suspected, of openness, expansion and—what was it? Freedom.

  The blue billboard with St. Francis Mission in large, white letters loomed over the road ahead. He slowed past the billboard and turned into the tunnel of cottonwoods. Branches scraped the top of the pickup; white downy fluff painted the road. He could feel the rear tires slipping, and he slowed down. He had been trying to forget that the tires were bald. No money this month for replacements. He would have to remember to drive carefully.

  He turned onto Circle Drive, the mission all around him. On the west, the redbrick residence; at the far end of the circle, the gray stone school building he had turned into the Arapaho Museum; and lined up to the ea
st, the white stucco church decorated with bright red, yellow, and blue geometric symbols of the Arapaho—lines for the path of life, triangles for the buffalo, tipis for the people—the dirt road that led to Eagle Hall and the guesthouse, and on the other side of the road, the large two-story yellow stucco administration building sheltering among the cottonwoods that crept away from the tunnel. Bishop Harry stood at the foot of the concrete steps tossing a Frisbee to Walks-On. The dog leapt on his three legs through the tall grass in the center of Circle Drive, then paddled back like a swimmer pushing through the waves. He started for the bishop, pivoted on his single hind leg, and came at a full run toward the pickup. Father John stepped on the brakes. A spray of gravel and dirt peppered the pickup’s rear end. He leaned across the CD player, opened the passenger door, and helped the dog crawl onto the seat, the Frisbee still clenched in his jaws. He closed the door and, running his hand over the dog’s soft coat, drove to the front of the administration building, and pulled in next to the bishop.

  Bishop Harry Coughlin, gray hair going white, pale blue eyes, a permanent band of sunburn across his nose and cheeks, walked over to the pickup and opened the door. “You interrupted a good game of Frisbee just when I was winning.”

  “Against Walks-On?” Father John turned off the opera, got out of the pickup, and waited for the dog to lumber across the seat and jump down. He closed the door. He was thinking that this old man—this competitive Frisbee player—had to be close to eighty years old, but he had never asked the bishop’s age. The bishop seemed healthy and strong despite the two heart attacks and surgeries that had sent him to St. Francis, supposedly to rest. Another subject Father John never brought up. The bishop had spent thirty years looking after thousands of Catholics in Patna, India, and on the first day he arrived at the mission he had made it clear he did not know how to rest and would die if he tried. As simple as that. Father John had cleared out the back office, occupied at various times by various assistants. A parishioner donated a used laptop, and Father John found one of the kids on the Eagles, the baseball team he coached, to set it up. The bishop had settled in.