FATHER JOHN PARKED in front of the small house that might have erupted out of the plains, with siding the caramel color of the bare dirt yard. He left the engine running, the tape player on the seat beside him still playing the selection of Verdi arias he’d been listening to on the drive from the mission. The duet, Deh! la parola amara, was about to end when the front door opened. The bent figure of an old man stepped out of the shadows into the sunlight splashing over the stoop and motioned for him to come in. Father John turned off the engine and the tape player on the last haunting note.
“Hungry, Father?” Max Oldman wanted to know as Father John walked past him into the living room.
Father John laughed. Arapahos were always trying to feed him. “Elena made her usual delicious oatmeal this morning.”
“You’re a lucky man, Father. Even when Josephine was alive, I didn’t get delicious oatmeal every morning.” The elder headed across the small room, dodging a coffee table covered with newspapers and Styrofoam cups. There was a jump in his walk, as if he were dragging his left hip. He was close to eighty, Father John guessed, frail and calloused looking, with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck between the frayed collar of his blue shirt and the uneven line of his gray hair.
“Take a load off your feet.” Max flicked a bony hand at the sofa under the window before dropping into a recliner that still bore the imprint of his back and thighs.
Father John sat down. He pulled off his jacket and cowboy hat and piled them on the cushion beside him. “How are you holding up, grandfather?” he asked, using the term of respect for an Arapaho elder, moving slowly into the reason for the visit.
“Okay, I reckon.” The elder nodded, then he went on about the way fall was hanging on real pretty this year, the whole earth turning red and orange, with ripples of frost cutting across the open prairie. Then he was onto the wind storm a couple of weeks ago and the broken cottonwood branches. Had to get out the ladder and cut the branches off before they crashed down onto the roof.
Father John winced at the image of the old man up on a ladder. “Call me next time,” he said. “I’ll come over and help you.” He waited a moment until the time seemed right, then he said, “I’m sorry about Denise.”
A moist film glistened in the elder’s eyes. They were light colored for an Arapaho, hazel shading into green and lit with intelligence. They gave him a startling appearance, unexpected in the wrinkled brown face. “Sure tough to lose one of the younger generation. She was the granddaughter of my brother, you know.”
Father John nodded. That also made her Max’s granddaughter, in the Arapaho Way.
“Looks to me like you got your own problems, Father.” Max laid his arms over the armrest and tapped his fingers on the front edges. Long blue veins bulged on the top of his brown hands. “I hear that curator lady that was working for you went missing.”
“She’s the reason I wanted to talk to you,” Father John said.
“You think she got enough of Indian ways and took off?”
Father John said that he didn’t think so. He started to explain that Christine’s apartment had been ransacked, then realized by the impatient way Max was bobbing his head that he’d already heard the gossip.
“Don’t wish that white woman no harm,” Max said, head still bobbing. “But don’t surprise me that she ran herself into trouble. She was a pushy lady.”
“She came to see you?”
“That what you want to know about?”
Father John smiled at the old man. It wasn’t polite to push and prod. He was asking for a gift.
The elder shifted his frail body in the recliner, reached down along the side and pulled a handle. The footrest jumped up, and he crossed his legs and settled back. “The lady calls me last week and asks if she can come over and see me. Says she has respect for Chief Sharp Nose and being I come down from the chief, she’s got respect for me, too. Says she’s doing research and needs help. So I told her to come on out anytime she saw fit. Two hours later, she was sitting on that sofa, same place you’re sitting. Says she’s looking for old photographs. Called them vintage photographs. Says the photographs could be portraits of people in the photos at the Curtis exhibit.”
Father John leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “Did she say she was trying to identify Sharp Nose’s daughter in one of the photographs?”
An absorbed look came into the old man’s eyes, as if he were watching a movie inside his head. “Her name was Bashful Woman,” he said, a note of reverence sounding in his voice. “The curator lady said she wanted to give Bashful Woman proper recognition. She was gonna identify her so her story could be told, one way or another. Went on and on like that. I didn’t say nothing. Just sat here in my recliner and let her go on and nodded the way she’d think an old Indian like me oughtta nod.”
Father John laughed and waited while Max recrossed his legs and cleared his throat. Finally, the old man said, “Lady wants to know if I got any of them vintage photographs. Maybe one of Bashful Woman? Said she’ll get me maybe a thousand dollars for one. A thousand dollars for an old photo? That’s right, she said, and I oughtta be ready to sell right now. She knew galleries that was lining up to pay. Maybe I could use the money, she said, and she gives my place the old eyeball, like maybe things wasn’t up to her fancy standards. All I had to do was get my old photos. Well, I got real tired of her pushing. I said, ‘That’s all very well and good, lady, but I don’t got any of them vintage photos, and if I did have images of my ancestors, I guess I wouldn’t be selling them to no galleries.’ She didn’t like that none.”
Max cleared his throat again, and for a moment Father John thought that the story had ended. Then Max said, “That lady kept right on pushing. Wanted to know who else come down from Sharp Nose that might have old photos. I said, ‘Nobody, lady. Nobody’s gonna sell photos of the ancestors.’ I didn’t like getting impolite, but I figured she was gonna sit on my sofa all day. So I said, ‘That’s the end of the story, lady. That’s all I got to say.’ ”
“Thank you, grandfather,” Father John said. Quiet settled around them a moment, except for the faint ticking of a clock somewhere in the house. “I’m worried about her,” he went on. “The police and the FBI are looking for her, but she seems to have vanished into thin air. I keep thinking that maybe Christine’s disappearance and Denise’s murder are connected somehow.” He shrugged. It was a hunch, that was all, the old urge to find a pattern in random events. “Is it possible that Christine went to Denise looking for old photos?”
Max was shaking his head before Father John had finished the question. “Denise wasn’t gonna sell that lady nothing, so she would’ve been wasting her time. I sure wasn’t gonna send her to Denise. More than likely, somebody got real mad at T.J. for holding up jobs out at the gas fields. People need jobs around here, you know. I figure somebody was out to teach T.J. a lesson. Man’s pretty broken up. Blames himself ’cause Denise was the one who got killed when it was supposed to be him.”
He cleared his throat and peered into the space between them, as if a new thought had pushed into his mind. Then he said, “You probably heard, Father, things weren’t so hot between her and T.J. Now he’s gone off to the mountains to grieve. Vera’s been calling all over the rez, asking if people seen him anywhere, wanting him to come home. She don’t understand how it is with warriors. T.J.’s blaming himself ’cause it was his job to protect his wife. So he’s grieving hard. He’s asking the spirits for a vision so he can know what he’s gotta do next. He’s gone where nobody’s gonna find him, and he’ll come back when he’s good and ready.”
What the elder said made sense, Father John thought. It was logical. And yet, he had a sense of things left unsaid in the way that Max kept his eyes on the vacant space, as if there was more—something he didn’t want to put into words. Father John felt as if he’d run into an alley, certain of a way out only to find a brick wall that he couldn’t get around.
After a long moment, he gathered up his jacket and hat, got to his feet, and thanked the elder for the information he’d chosen to give. “Please don’t get up, grandfather,” he said as the old man fiddled with the handle to the footrest. “Stay where you are.”
“Come back anytime, Father,” Max said.
They might have spent the time discussing the weather, Father John thought, waving his hat toward the old man. He let himself through the door and hurried through a corridor of sunlight to the pickup, shrugging into his jacket as he went. A sense of futility weighed on him, a heavy load. He’d had a hunch, and the hunch was wrong: Max Oldman hadn’t sent Christine to Denise. Christine could have been on her way to meet any one of dozens of Sharp Nose descendents when she disappeared.