Medicine Man

Arley looked steadily at both her sisters. Only Gwen seemed uncomfortable. Neither of them had the right to ask—especially Grace, whose own marriage had ended more abruptly than Arley’s had. None of the sisters knew the reason for its sudden demise, and Grace apparently had no intention of enlightening any of them. She had an entirely different view of the right to privacy when hers was at stake. All Arley knew for certain was that Grace’s husband had left, and Grace hardly seemed to notice.

At the moment, however, Arley had no desire to trade barbs about their assorted personal failures. For once, she opted to let the sisterly meddling slide.

Almost.

“You know, Grace, I’m getting a little tired of that question tonight,” she said. “Did Scott put you up to it?”

“You don’t even know that guy, Arley.”

“Grace, I was only talking to him. I’m not taking him home with me. And I do know him. His name is Will Baron. He works with Kate. I ran into him once last summer. He was nice to Scottie, okay?”

“You’re not that innocent,” Grace said, and Arley laughed.

“You sound like a pop song lyric.”

“You know how you are, Arley—and if you don’t, we do. You’re not trying to make Scott jealous with that soldier, are you?”

“Grace, please! I told you—we were just talking. He’s an interesting person. He’s from Arizona. He’s half Navajo.” She looked over her shoulder to where Will had been standing. He was no longer there.

“Well, Scott obviously didn’t like it.”

“What Scott likes or doesn’t like is not my problem. Yours, either. He had no business being here in the first place.”

“I said not to invite him,” Gwen offered in spite of the look Grace gave her. “Nobody listened.”

“He was invited?” Arley said incredulously, and several people turned to look in their direction.

“I invited him,” Grace said. “To the reception. I was trying to head off trouble. It was purely a token gesture—a courtesy to our Scottie’s father.”

“Grace! Why didn’t you tell me!”

“It was just a test, Arley! I didn’t think he’d have the nerve to actually show up. But he did, and now we know once and for all that he’s—”

“This is none of your business, Grace!” Arley interrupted, as if that had ever deterred her oldest sister. Grace’s determination was legendary in the family. It had probably cost her a husband, and it was about to cost her a sister, as well.

“It is if you don’t have enough sense to realize he might use anything you do to try to get Scottie away from you.”

“What?” Arley said, startled.

“You heard me. You know how Scott is, how his family is—or you should by now. I wouldn’t put it past him or them. And he’s not above doing something just to get back at you.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I didn’t do anything wrong!”

“It doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t, Arley! That was then. I’m talking about right now. He’s the kind of man who needs to save face. One of these days he’s going to want to follow his grandfather and father into politics. He’s going to need to trump that unfortunate adultery indiscretion. What better way than to try to prove you’re an unfit mother and always were?”

Arley gave a sharp sigh. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You don’t have to talk. Just listen for once. You never should have married Scott McGowan in the first place—but we got Scottie out of it, and I want us to keep him. Or would you rather his father had custody—in which case Scottie would probably grow up just like him.”

“Grace, stop!” Gwen said, putting her hand on Grace’s arm. “You’re scaring her.”

“I want to scare her.”

Arley looked at both of them and shook her head.

“I’m not talking about this anymore,” she said and walked away. She was too tired to battle Grace. Her head hurt. Her feet hurt. She just wanted to get her little boy and go back to Fayetteville.

“’Bye, Arley,” Gwen called after her.

Arley waved her hand in the air to show she heard, not wanting to hurt Gwen’s feelings just because she was upset with Grace. Grace could be annoying in the best of circumstances, more so when she was right. Scott McGowan wasn’t above trying to get custody of Scottie—even if he didn’t deserve it. He had made it his life’s work to acquire things he didn’t deserve—passing grades in college, business promotions, Arley Meehan. And he hadn’t deserved her, not her love or her faithfulness or her willingness to believe in him far beyond what anyone with any sense would have done.

Even so, she could truthfully say that she hadn’t been a complete idiot where Scott was concerned, regardless of what her sisters and everyone else might think. There was no denying that she had loved him, loved his wildness and his charm, so much so that she had been willing to ignore her growing lack of respect for him for a long time. But the day eventually came when she couldn’t pretend anymore, when she couldn’t let her emotions get dragged back and forth with every promise made and every promise broken. She had to walk away—for her son’s sake, if nothing else. She had managed to do it—permanently—in spite of Scott’s renewed “repentance” when he realized that, for once, he was going to suffer the consequences of his behavior.

“Arley!” someone called behind her—her uncle Patrick.

“You’re not leaving already, are you—and without a goodbye for your old uncle?”

“I’m ready for hearth and home, Uncle Patrick.”

“Well, I know the feeling. It was a fine wedding, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling a ridiculous urge to cry.

“You hug that darling boy for me—and mind how you go.”

“I’m a careful driver, Uncle Patrick.”

“It’s not the driving I was meaning.”

She looked into his kind blue eyes. “You’ve been talking to Grace.”

“Have not,” he said. “I’ve been using my God-given eyes. And I’m not liking what I see, my girl. You and I both know Scott McGowan can get himself up to no good.”

She sighed heavily. “Well, I am on the high side of suspicious,” she said, and her uncle laughed.

“And that’s a definite improvement—if you don’t mind my saying so.”

She didn’t. The remark coming from him didn’t bother her nearly as much as it would have if it had come from one of her sisters.

A large number of guests seemed to be making their way back into the pub.

“No rest for the wicked,” Uncle Patrick said. “Are you sure you don’t want to rejoin the festivities?”

“I’m sure. I’ll bring Scottie to see you soon. He’s got some new additions to his rock collection he wants to show you.”

“The sooner, the better,” he said, giving her one of his bear hugs, the kind that always made her feel better but this time brought her even closer to tears.

“Tell Grace and Gwen I’ve gone, if—when—they ask, will you?”

He looked at her a long moment. “I will.”

She forced a smile and walked away. A group of soldiers walked ahead of her, laughing, talking and harassing each other the way soldiers always seemed to do. Will Baron wasn’t among them. It annoyed Arley a great deal that Grace thought Arley might be using Will to get back at Scott. She wasn’t. She just welcomed a little diversion. She was so tired of being worried and scared.

And lonely.

Scottie was nearly asleep when she picked him up at the great-aunts’ house. He managed to walk to the car under his own power, but he was too sleepy to buckle himself into his safety seat.

“Mommy?” he murmured as she secured the belt and slipped his favorite pillow next to his head—a beagle dog pillow he’d named Dot, his threadbare sleeping, waking, stress and anxiety companion. She stood for a moment, then caressed his cheek before she closed the car door. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for her son.

Nothing.

It began to rain when she was halfway home. She drove carefully along the back roads leading to Fayetteville. Traffic was heavier than she expected. The countryside was illuminated by lightning from time to time, but there were no strong winds or heavy downpours. Scottie was afraid of thunder; she was glad he was sleeping. He had too many things to be afraid of these days, most of all that his father didn’t love him. He was so eager whenever Scott deigned to come around, trying to impress him with his rock collection, his drawings and papers from school, or how fast he could run and how high he could jump—anything that might elicit some indication that he had his father’s undivided attention, just for a moment. That was sad enough, and what was even sadder was that, for a time, Arley had been just like him.

She was better now, though. Surprisingly better. Even before the wedding reception, she had felt more comfortable about things than she had in a long time. All in all, her life was going…reasonably well. She hadn’t caused any embarrassing moments for Kate—thanks to Will Baron—and it was much more apparent to her now that she was no longer afraid that she couldn’t live without Scott McGowan. Regardless of her sisters’ misgivings, she was actually managing—except with money. She needed a better and permanent job instead of being sent pillar to post by the temp agency, and she was going to keep taking courses at the community college and filling out applications until she got one.

She smiled to herself. Scottie liked that; as soon as school started, both of them would have to do homework at the kitchen table.

Her mind suddenly wandered to the summer afternoon when she’d met Will Baron. She had hardly been at her best that day. She had been frantic to find Kate because of something Scott had or hadn’t done, and because Scottie had misbehaved at the private kindergarten Scott was still paying for him to attend. She had felt totally overwhelmed by it all. She went looking for Kate at home and then at Mrs. Bee’s house next door, and she found Will Baron in the sweltering upstairs hallway on an errand of his own. He may or may not have recognized the degree of her distress, but he had definitely recognized Scottie’s. As they were leaving, he had taken a blue-green stone out of his pocket—a piece of turquoise—and had given it to Scottie for his collection.

He was kind to her son.

And that was the reason she remembered him. Yes, he was nice-looking. Yes, his eyes smiled long before his face did, and he smelled good. But it was because of Scottie that she’d asked Kate later about the paratrooper in Mrs. Bee’s upstairs hallway. There was something intriguing about him, something that made her willing to brave Grace’s criticism and the embarrassment Scott had caused her at the reception in order to talk to him again.

But that’s all it was. A little conversation. She had told her sisters the truth when she said that Will Baron was an interesting person. He was, and it had been a long time since Arley had had any social interaction with anyone beyond her immediate family. There was no harm in it. None. The fact that Kate had invited him to the wedding in the first place should be recommendation enough for Gwen and the ever-suspicious Grace.

But Arley had no expectations that she would see Will Baron again. She rarely went on post—except for futile job interviews, and those were few and far between. She rarely went anywhere, for that matter, except to work at whatever paying position the temp agency found for her, and to the grocery store and to Scottie’s school—and a fast-food restaurant as a treat for him as often as she could afford it. She had met Kate for lunch once or twice, taken Scottie to the post hospital, to the ward where Kate worked when the “get well” dogs were coming to visit, and she hadn’t seen Will Baron any of those times. It wasn’t likely that she’d run into him—unless she did something to make it happen. Which she wouldn’t. She didn’t need Grace’s input to be concerned about Scott and his possible long-range plans where his son was concerned. It was just that Scottie had never been his priority—he thought nothing of skipping a visitation if it conflicted with his social plans—and she knew Scott McGowan well enough to know that actually wanting to be a real father might have nothing to do with his trying to get custody.

She reached to turn on the car radio for company. After a while, she drove out of a rain shower and then right back into another one—the story of her life, thus far. She didn’t regret staying for the wedding reception, in spite of Grace’s lecture and her skirmish with Scott. But if she wasn’t careful, the reason she didn’t regret it could become a full-blown family issue. The Meehan sisters tended to each other’s business. She herself had been an all-too-willing participant in the Grace-led sister alliance to keep Kate from making what they had all thought was a huge mistake in becoming involved with a disabled paratrooper—a man younger than she was, no less. And Kate was considered the “sensible” one. Heaven only knew what would happen if it even looked like Arley the Handful might follow Kate’s example with another member of the military, especially if it might cause problems with Scott.

But she was too tired to worry about it.

It was late when she finally arrived at her apartment, and it was still raining. As she carried the sleeping Scottie to the door, a white car she didn’t recognize crept slowly past and turned around.

Maybe we’ll run into each other again.

It wasn’t an invitation. Will wasn’t quite sure what it was—except another reason for his disharmony, which had more to do with his current state of mind than with the postwedding raucousness of the barracks tonight. Everybody was wound tight. Music seemed to be coming from behind every closed door, all of it different and all of it meant to effect the same end. He and his fellow soldiers were expecting to travel—sooner instead of later—and they were all looking for the right mind-set, the pumped-up killer high that would get them through it. He understood the dynamics perfectly. He’d never made a jump without doing the warrior chant all the way to the ground, in spite of his recent cynicism about following the Beauty Way.

He lay on his bed in the dark and tried to disengage himself from the thoughts swirling in his mind. Harmony was essential for anyone who intended to follow Navajo teachings. If he were still a hataalii….

If.

He wasn’t certain if the family knew that he’d all but lost the vocation he’d fought so hard for the privilege of learning. He had dedicated years of his life to becoming a Navajo healer, to learning the complexities of the mindset and the chants and rituals to achieve a kinship with Mother Earth and Father Sky. But what little “serenity” Arley had accused him of having completely eluded him now and had for a long time. He had had such big plans—once—assuming that he managed not to suffer any unfortunate consequences from being posted in harm’s way and that his enlistment ended as scheduled. He was going to return to the reservation in triumph, where he would meld all the knowledge he had gleaned from both his worlds. He would use the medical skills he had acquired in the military to be a true help to Sloan, the aunt who had raised him and who was a nurse in the tribal health clinic, and he would continue to be a hataalii. He would skillfully practice both disciplines, all for the betterment of The People.

There had been a time when he’d been so sure, when he had actually thought that he could be both an army medic and a practitioner of the Navajo healing arts. He had told Arley the truth. He really could remember things—the chants and the details of the sand paintings necessary for the healing ceremonies with the precision the Holy People required. And he could remember all the medical procedures he’d been taught. He could even manage a high-powered weapon and urgent wound assessment on a computerized dummy in the dark and not let it go into cardiac arrest or bleed out. As far as he knew, no patient in either venue had ever suffered from a misstep that he could recall—except for the dummy, and that was early on. He had believed that all he had to do was not let himself get distracted. His desire to make all four of his “mothers” proud of him was strong, and so was his sense of obligation.

But somewhere he had lost his way, lost something integral he couldn’t name; in the process, he had lost himself. He couldn’t blame the army. He couldn’t blame anyone. He had felt his sense of purpose and understanding, of belonging, slipping away from him long before he’d enlisted.

All he had left was a kind of perpetual discord in his heart and in his mind—and an unwelcome and unwise interest in Arley Meehan.

And he was definitely interested. He had been interested the first time he saw her, and he was still interested enough to want to go to a wedding on the outside chance that he would at least catch a glimpse of her, in spite of having no place in his disjointed life for personal involvements, especially the kind she represented. She had a child, and he was only passing through, regardless of his own tenuous family tie to the state. She was so pretty, so lively. Of all the guests at the wedding, she was the one he had wanted most to talk to, but it wasn’t just that. She wasn’t like anyone he had ever met. Aside from her obvious attributes, she was…astute. Right away, she had seen the advantage of his being posted in the state where the father he knew practically nothing about had been born. He doubted that anyone in his family had guessed that he had signed his enlistment papers thinking that he could eventually end up in central North Carolina.

He drew a sharp breath. If he were more like his half brother Patrick, he wouldn’t let himself get all strung up in the reasons for, and the potential consequences of, his behavior. He would just go for it. He would see Arley Meehan as someone to help him pass the time—period. He would do something about it and not be concerned about anything but the pure pleasure of it.

But he wasn’t like Patrick. He wasn’t even like himself anymore.

I don’t know who the hell I am or where I belong, he thought.

And he was running out of time to find out. He’d made all the arrangements he was supposed to make—his affairs were in order. When he’d been home last Christmas, he’d even allowed the Blessing Way to be performed on his behalf, an all-night Navajo ceremony that was supposed to make it possible for him to go to war with the blessing of the Holy People, even if he didn’t actually believe in them anymore.

But he hadn’t gone looking for the better understanding of his long-dead white father he used to think he wanted.

The Baron home place, the big house with a rambling front porch he knew only from photographs, still belonged to Sloan, and it was perpetually rented. He hadn’t wanted to see it for the first time under those circumstances—with strange people living in it—or so he told himself. Besides that, it was located at the far end of his travel limit, and he had used that as an excuse, as well. Somebody in his squad would probably know a short cut, even if it involved driving through a surprised farmer’s corn field, but he hadn’t asked. Clearly, standing in the middle of his father’s past in theory was very different from actually doing it. If he were completely honest, he would admit that he hadn’t delved into the Baron family history because he was afraid to. He was unsettled enough as it was and not ready to find that his white heritage fit him no better than his Navajo heritage did.

A memory of Arley’s young son suddenly came into his mind. He had immediately recognized the look in the boy’s eyes. It came for being caught up in a whirlwind of uncontrollable adult events and being afraid to deal with it alone. He had seen the same expression all too often in the mirror when he was a boy, when Sloan and the tribe were squabbling over who he belonged to and who could raise him.

He sighed again in the dark. He had to stop thinking about Arley Meehan and her little boy and the problem she was apparently having with the man who had once been her husband. He had troubles of his own. He had to keep the family from worrying. It was natural that they would be worried about his likely imminent deployment, but they didn’t know about his loss of direction. He’d told them nothing of his misgivings, and there was nothing he could do to reassure them.

So how homesick are you?

Maybe more than he had realized, he thought as he felt his harmony dissipate even further in a sudden wave of longing for home. He missed his patched-up, mismatched family. He missed the desert, the place where he almost belonged. He missed…something unnameable, something a brief conversation with a pretty young woman had made him suddenly aware might be unavailable to him.

He took a quiet breath, trying to concentrate on the calm place deep inside him, the one he was only able to find after he had decided to be truly Navajo. The words of the Hozhonji song swirled in his mind. The song had great power. It spoke of helpmates and pairs and beauty.

The happiness of all things.

It was a blessing he would have said for Arley’s sister and her new husband if the wedding had taken place in Window Rock instead of North Carolina, and if he were still himself.

Maybe we’ll run into each other again.

Chapter Three

“Have you called home in the last couple of weeks, E.T.?” Copus asked pointedly.

“Yeah,” Will answered, getting better and better at deciphering Copus’s science fiction analogies.

“Written any letters?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Mailed them?”

“Copus—”

“You’re sure you haven’t been neglecting the keeping-in-touch-with-the-family-in-a-timely-manner thing.”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, it ain’t that, then.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The lieutenant is looking for you, son,” Copus said ominously. “I got it straight from the horse’s mouth—a couple of stalls removed. Any minute now, he’s going to be wanting to see you ASAP.”

Will accepted the prediction without comment. He was mildly curious, but he kept stacking long packages of unsterile 4x4 gauze on the supply closet shelf. The unit phone was ringing in the background—making no impression whatsoever on the obviously non-busy Copus.

“Could I at least get a ‘hooah’ so I know you heard me?” Copus said.

“Hooah.”

“Son, how do you do that?” Copus asked.

“Do what?”

“That. Anybody else would be all over me wanting to know what he wants. You don’t even blink.”

“I blink,” Will said. He moved down to the next shelf and continued restocking supplies.

“Yeah, but you don’t ask.”

“Not much point—since you don’t know.”

“Yeah, well, it just so happens, I got a theory or two. And, lucky for you, I’m willing to share them. Assuming that I’m handsomely rewarded for my trouble, of course.”

“Forget it.”

“No, now wait. See, I’m willing to help you out here—get you prepared. But I got to have something for my trouble.”

Will glanced at him. Copus was ready to levitate off the floor at the prospect of snagging a few bucks from the unsuspecting but curious.

“No,” Will said.

“Well, then, what do you think he wants?”

“Beats me.”

“Could be he wants you to give him some pointers,” Copus said.

“I don’t have any pointers.”

“Sure you do, son. You could tell him how to jump-start his love life.” Copus grinned from ear to ear in appreciation of his own stellar wit and his not-so-subtle assessment of Will’s nonexistent female conquests.

“If he wanted pointers for his love life, he’d be looking for you, not me,” Will said.

“Then maybe you could give him some advice on how to live dangerously.”

“He’s in the army. He’s probably already got that worked out.”

Will moved to another shelf.

“Okay, William,” Copus said. “You want to try to figure out what he wants or not?”

“Not,” Will said without much hope.

“We could make a friendly little wager—how’s about that?”

“Copus, I’m not losing what little money I’ve got on some dumb-ass bet.”