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  “I have to,” she replied, and I didn’t think she was talking about the money. “The Gathering of Nations Powwow is this weekend and Hanna will be dancing. Would you like to come?”

  There are powwows all over the West, but the annual Gathering of Nations held in the Pit, UNM’s basketball arena, is the largest and most spectacular of all. People from all over the Americas attend. “I’d love to,” I said.

  “We’ll see you there,” Ramona answered.

  ******

  I hadn’t met with the Barkers for several months and I was interested to see how far they’d traveled down the grief road. Nancy looked about the same. She wore jeans and her T-shirt was so neat it might have been pressed. Her lipstick had been carefully applied. Her hair was smooth and in place. The engine was still running but no longer in overdrive. She wasn’t wearing the green ribbon over her heart and neither was Eric. Some of the mist around him had parted. He seemed more in focus. His clothes weren’t as rumpled and most of the time he was able to keep his eyes within the confines of my office. The view out the window this time of year was nothing but a stripped tree anyway.

  “Would you like water or coffee?” I asked.

  “Water,” Nancy replied.

  “Coffee. No sugar,” said Eric. “How are you doing?” he asked when I came back with the drinks.

  “Better. I think I’ve finally coughed out all the smoke.”

  “Have you quit smoking?” Nancy asked.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “What do you think of the OSHA report?” Nancy took a sip of her water.

  “They did find negligence on the part of the Forest Service.”

  Nancy finished her water and put the empty glass down on my desk without, I noticed, leaving a trace of lipstick on the rim. “Right, but what are they going to do about it?” It was a rhetorical question. She’d already read the report; she already knew the answer.

  But I went ahead and restated it. “They recommended some changes in Forest Service policy. The report indicates no criminal charges will be filed.”

  “So what do the negligent officials get then? A slap on the wrist?” she asked.

  “More or less,” I replied. “But OSHA did find negligence and that could help your case enormously. Have you talked to the other families? How do they feel?”

  “Vindicated,” said Eric.

  “You have a much better chance of winning than when we last spoke, but it will still be difficult emotionally.” The odds had improved, but the pain was still there. It was an inflated balloon that filled the office. The Barkers had the choice of keeping it pumped up or letting the air run out.

  “We know that,” said Eric.

  “Have you made a decision?” I asked, turning a pencil over and over in my fingers and listening to the fan on my computer hum.

  Eric cleared his throat, but Nancy was the one to speak first. “We’ve decided not to sue,” she said.

  “We don’t need the money,” said Eric, “and, as I told you before, suing won’t bring our daughter back.” His point of view had won. Whatever the determining factor had been, this was only one of a series of intermarital negotiations in a long and deep relationship. “What we really wanted was for the Forest Service to stop blaming the firefighters.”

  “To accept responsibility for their errors,” said Nancy.

  “And to take steps to see that this never happens again,” said Eric.

  “That, too,” Nancy agreed.

  “I hope you don’t think we’ve wasted your time, Neil.” Eric was watching me with his gray eyes.

  “No.” I said. “I think you made the right decision.” But when I looked out my window I saw a bundle of money sprout wings and fly away. I put down my pencil. The lawsuit issue had been resolved, but it wasn’t the only issue on my mind. The photographs and the firefighter boots were still in the bag beneath my desk. “You know the OSHA report also determined that there should have been aerial surveillance of the South Canyon fire and that the lookout would have been unable to see the blowup from her post. Ramona has been exonerated and reinstated by the Forest Service. She’ll be going back on the line next summer.”

  “Good for her,” Eric said.

  “The Gathering of Nations Powwow is next weekend and Ramona’s daughter is dancing. She asked me to come. I was wondering if you’d like to join us.”

  This silence was bigger and deeper. For me it would be the final resolution of both fires. Eric looked at Nancy with hope in his eyes. “What do you think, Nan?”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “Good,” I replied. “I have the boots here that Joni gave Ramona and some photos of Joni and the hotshots. Do you want them?”

  “Yes,” Eric said.

  “Maybe there’ll be some of Joni we haven’t seen yet,” Nancy said hopefully.

  “Maybe so.” I handed them the package and we made arrangements to meet at a ticket booth outside the Pit. I walked them to the door and watched them head back to the East Mountains.

  “They gonna sue?” Anna asked the minute the door was closed.

  “They decided not to,” I replied.

  “Damn.” She shook her mane. “Why not?”

  “OSHA found negligence and the Barkers were satisfied with that.”

  “But the money could be so good!” Anna said. The federal government’s pockets went way deep. Anna had looked into them and seen a bigger office and maybe even an assistant, someone to answer the phone while she attended her hair. But I liked the size of my office and was satisfied with the shape of my hair.

  “Not that good,” I replied.

  ******

  Mike Marshall came to the powwow with the Barkers. The Kid accompanied me and I introduced everybody to each other at the ticket booth. The Kid and Mike were about the same age, but the Kid was taller and skinnier and he looked ten years older. Fire fighting is a tough job; border-crossing is a tough life. Mike’s burns had healed and his eyes had the keenness of a quarterback who sees better and farther than everyone else.

  We bought our tickets and found seats about halfway down the side of the arena. I figured that Ramona would be busy with her daughter’s dance but would find us somehow when she was ready. The Pit has a slope worthy of the black diamond marking an expert ski trail. Nancy ended up with the aisle seat. Eric was beside her, then me, the Kid, and Mike. A circle of men was drumming on the floor with a power that made conversation insignificant. It might have been the amplification; it might have been the acoustics in the Pit. I thought I had never heard such powerful drumming. Some men dressed in cowboy clothes were dancing a slow, shuffling dance. A couple of them looked like white dudes to me, but sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s white, what’s Indian, what’s a combination. I’d brought my Aunt Joan’s birding binoculars, but even after I glassed the whitest men I still couldn’t be sure.

  The announcer, a well-known Indian actor, said the grand entry would begin with two thousand dancers. They poured down the stairs and onto the floor wearing feathers, beads, shells, ribbons, skins, furs, silver, and fringe. Red, orange, gold, blue, magenta, and emerald green were a few of the colors. They wore headdresses and moccasins, loincloths and dresses, shawls and capes. Numerous nations were represented from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. The color was ecstatic. The activity was intense. Sioux, Crow, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Navajo were some of the North American tribes who danced down the stairs. The dancers flowed into the floor of the Pit, filled it, and began moving in a circular pattern.

  “It looks like thousands of parrots,” said the Kid. But the sound was better. Several groups had set their drums up on the floor and were passing the beat around.

  The grand entry dance continued for a long time in a swirling circle of rhythm and color. Eventually the dancers filed off the floor and were followed by one of those long pauses common to Native American celebrations. Mike and the Kid climbed over the seats and went looking for sodas and chili dogs. The Gathering of
Nations isn’t a religious ceremony. It’s a celebration of Indian solidarity and pride. The dances aren’t traditional. They are contests, and some dancers make their livings at powwows. There were dances for all different age groups from the very young to the very old. The costumes are determined by style of dance rather than by nation. Some of the younger women danced in a wild and energetic style with long, beaded shawls that swung and swooped like wings. There was another dance of women of all ages who wore dresses with long fringe hanging from the sleeves. This dance was slow, rhythmic, dignified. A little girl danced with a stately, white-haired woman. The child tried to keep to the old woman’s steady pace, but every now and then she broke free and leaped ahead. I examined the child through my binoculars and saw Hanna Franklin having the time of her life.

  The floor cleared between dances, but motion continued in the stands as people got up to visit and look for old friends. The Kid and Mike still hadn’t returned from the chili dog vendor search. The fringed women were followed by old men bent over walking sticks dancing a very slow dance. I spotted Ramona standing near the top of the stairs holding Hanna’s hand. Hanna’s hair was black and shining. Her eyes were enormous. Ramona wore faded jeans and a work shirt. I waved. She saw me and headed, smiling, toward our group. She stopped when she saw Nancy beside the aisle.

  Nancy stood up, smoothed her hair, cleared her throat. “Hanna has grown so much,” she said.

  “Isn’t she something?” Ramona replied.

  Hanna hadn’t forgotten my visit to the trailer yet and gave me a wary look.

  “She’s beautiful,” Nancy said. “I loved your dance, Hanna.”

  “Thank you,” Hanna said, hiding behind her mother’s legs.

  “It’s so good to see you, Ramona,” Nancy said.

  “It’s good to see you, Mrs. Barker,” Ramona replied. She looked down to hide the emotions that blew like clouds across her face.

  “We’re very glad you got your job back,” Eric said.

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nancy said. “I’m sorry about everything.”

  “I… I miss her very much,” Ramona said.

  “I know.” The two women hugged and cried. Eric carefully studied the old men who were finishing up their dance.

  “There’s Mike!” Hanna pointed up the stairs where Mike and the Kid were talking to a long-legged Anglo woman in blue jeans and a leather vest.

  “Hey, Hanna,” Mike yelled, but he continued talking to the woman.

  The Kid climbed down to rejoin us carrying a box of chili dogs and Cokes. “Who’s that Mike’s talking to?” I asked him.

  “A woman he knows from skiing,” he said. The Kid passed around the chili dogs and Hanna took two, one in each hand. The drums started again. The beat picked up and fancy dancers came onto the floor, young men in brilliant feathers with great legs and long black hair that rippled down their backs. They whooped and leaped, dancing for the victories, dancing for the losses, dancing for the living, dancing for the dead.

  “Hey, Neil. I’m glad you came.” Ramona extended her hand and it felt cool and smooth and liquid in mine.

  THE END

  Enjoy a free preview of A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #8

  Ditch Rider

  1

  I HAVE THE only house on Mirador Road with a courtyard. It’s my buffer between the living room and the street. My neighbors live in cinderblock houses and trailers; their only buffers are the cars and trucks parked in their scraped-bare yards. In my hood the smaller the house the greater the number of vehicles parked in front of it. The neighbors have chain-link fences and an occasional rosebush or plum tree. I have a weed that grew into a Siberian elm and shades my courtyard in summer. In the winter the bare branches mark time on the wall with their shadows. My courtyard has a banco (an adobe bench) growing out of the wall, a brick floor and a struggling rosebush planted by a previous owner. The adobe wall snakes across a wooden door that has a chevron pattern to the boards. There’s enough space between the V’s to see the outline of who’s coming, but not the details. When the bell rings, it can be someone trying to sell me black-market t-shirts or just checking to see if anyone’s home. Or else it’s Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons on the conversion trail. This time it was a small person with a halo of blonde hair.

  “Who’s there?” I asked before flipping the latch.

  “Cheyanne.”

  She sounded harmless, so I opened the door. My visitor had a mane of blonde curls pulled high above her head and tumbling down her back. She wore shorts and an extra-large Chicago Bulls t-shirt. Her skin was the color of vanilla ice cream, something you notice in my neighborhood. Her fingernails were painted blue, her lipstick was black. She held a candy bar in one hand. The other hand cradled a baby wrapped in a blanket.

  “I’m selling candy for my school,” she said, showing me the candy bar. Her nails were bitten down and there was white space at the cuticle where the blue had grown out. “WORLD’S FINEST CHOCOLATE,” the candy bar wrapper read. “FUND RAISERS—THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.” Behind the girl a boy on a bike pedaled slowly down the street.

  “How much?” I asked her.

  “A dollar.”

  “A dollar for that?” The candy bar was no wider than two pencils, no longer than Cheyanne’s finger.

  She shrugged. “It’s for the school.”

  “What school?”

  “Taylor Middle.”

  “All right. I’ll take two.” One for me. One for my live-in lover, the Kid. “Come on in. I’ll get you the money.”

  She kicked the door shut behind her, followed me across the courtyard and into the living room looking around at my beehive-shaped adobe fireplace and at the vigas in my ceiling. I went in search of my purse.

  “Baaad house,” she said when I came back with the money.

  “Thanks.” I gave her two dollars. She gave me two candy bars. “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “In the double-wide down the street. You have a computer?”

  She’d noticed the Equus that the Kid, a mechanic, had taken in trade for fixing somebody’s truck. I’d been trying to do research for my law practice when Cheyanne rang the doorbell. “Yeah.”

  The surf box was on the screen. “You’re on the Internet. Cool. My girlfriend’s dad has a computer but he won’t let her on the Internet. He says she’ll cost him too much money.”

  “I was trying to use it for work myself.”

  “Whatta you do?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Downtown, right?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I see you go by in the morning.” She stared at the computer. Her fingers seemed hungry for the keyboard like a musician’s drawn to the sax or piano. “Would you mind…?”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  She put the baby down on the sofa.

  “Boy or girl?” I asked.

  “Girl. Her name is Miranda.”

  She sat down at the computer. Her fingernails skipped across the keys and pulled Teen Chat up on the screen. “Any hueros out there?” she typed, sending her message onto the information highway.

  “You know what hueros are?” she asked.

  “White dudes,” I said.

  “Right.” She laughed. “You, me and my mom, we’re the only hueras who live on this block. Did you know that?”

  I’d suspected, but I hadn’t actually known. Leave it to the kids to know who everybody was in the hood.

  “That’s a fine guy you got living here. He reminds me of Carlos Leon.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The dude Madonna’s had a baby with.”

  Older, younger, lighter, darker. As far as I was concerned, that was where any resemblance to Carlos and Madonna ended. No baby on my horizon. No big bucks or personal trainers, either.

  The private room message came up on the screen, the place one teen can talk to another privately. “What’s your name?” it asked.

  “Cheyanne,” s
he typed.

  “What do you look like?”

  “I have blonde hair.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.” Going on sixteen. Maybe. The baby on the sofa began to cry. Cheyanne continued to type, but the baby wasn’t going to be ignored. Her cries escalated in volume. Cheyanne spun around. “Shut up, you little brat,” she screamed. “Can’t you see I’m having fun?” The baby couldn’t see or didn’t care. Cheyanne left the keyboard and stomped across the room. She lifted Miranda and held her high like she was preparing to give the baby a good, hard shake.

  “Don’t even consider it,” I warned.

  “You’re right. I’d never get away with it.” She unwrapped the blanket, flipped the baby onto its stomach, turned a key in its back and shut the crying off.

  “That’s a doll?”

  “Kinda. They give us these babies in school, see. We have to feed ’em, take care of ’em when they cry, and not rough ’em up. One day they’ll have one that pees, and then we’ll have to change the diaper. It’s got a computer inside so if we don’t take care of it the teacher will know. It’s supposed to make us not want a real kid.”

  “Is it working?”

  “I guess. Some of these dolls act like babies born on drugs. They’re smaller than the other babies. They cry for fifty minutes and they shake all the time. Even when you hold them they shake. They’re real expensive, so we don’t get to take them home.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Thirteen.”

  “What grade?”

  “Eighth.”

  Eighth grade wasn’t what it used to be, and neither was thirteen. I’d thought I was bad when I was thirteen, but that was many years ago and bad isn’t what it used to be either. Having taken care of Miranda’s programmed needs, Cheyanne went back to the computer and found the box of Digital Schoolhouse CD’s that had come with the system. I hadn’t opened the box because it sounded educational.

  “You have Schoolhouse!” Cheyanne said. “Cool! Would you mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You’re sure? I mean, I’m not overstaying my welcome, am I? My mom says not to do that.”