DreadfulWater Shows Up by Thomas King

Author:Thomas King [King, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9781443403597
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Thumps did not drive to the townsite and the band offices. Claire would probably still be stuck in meetings, and the last thing Thumps wanted to do was to exchange artillery rounds with Roxanne. At the top of Old Man Coulee, he turned off and headed west. While no one on the reserve owned land outright, different families had occupied particular pieces for so long, no one questioned their right to be there. The high, hard ridge at the foot of the mountains, and the circle of bottom land that had been created as the Ironstone looped its way south, had always been Merchant land. It had been Claire’s great-great-grandfather’s summer place. Her great-grandfather had built a cabin there. Her grandfather had added a barn.

Her father had left the land, moved his family into the townsite, and gone to Los Angeles to find work. While he was away, the barn burned down, and the cabin collapsed under the weight of wind and weather. But when he returned, years later, the land was still there. He didn’t build anything but he did what his great-grandfather had done and moved his family onto the land each summer. When her father died, Claire did what her great-grandfather had done and built a house.

Claire’s house sat on high ground overlooking the river. It was a pre-fab house, a remnant of one of the many economic ventures that the tribe had been encouraged to try. The majority of these had been the bright ideas of some eager bureaucrat in Washington, ideas that were generally ill-conceived, always under-funded, and never supported any longer than the next election.

The house was a long rectangle wrapped in sky-blue-and-white aluminum siding, and it reminded Thumps of Floyd’s trailer, except that it was larger and didn’t have wheels. It was not a pretty house, nothing like the ones featured in the home-and-garden magazines, and Claire’s only attempt at landscaping had been to drop a pad of four large concrete slabs in front of the porch. The rest of the yard was dirt and long grass. Thumps had always thought that houses on the prairies looked tentative, as though they didn’t quite belong, as though they had paused on the land to rest a while before moving on.

He pulled his car to the west side of the house where no one could see it from the road. Normally, he would have left it out in plain sight so Claire wouldn’t be surprised when she came home, but there was the off-chance that Stick might show up, and if he saw the Volvo parked in front of the house, he might run.

As Thumps sat in his car and waited, his stomach began growling, and he suddenly realized that he had missed lunch. The cherry pie and coffee were long gone, and the shootout at Floyd’s trailer had delayed dinner. Now he was stuck in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to eat. Maybe Claire would feed him when she came home.

Thumps got out of the car and walked to the edge of the ridge.

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