Free Wind Song by Parris Afton Bonds

fact, Julie’s father had been a coal miner. But since the reservation mines had been shut down the year before, he was among the many who sat listlessly in front of his hogan. With the money from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the uranium royalty checks from the Navajo Nation, the men simply had no incentive to work. They had been hunters. Now food and shelter were provided for their families.
    Marshall flashed her a conspiratorial smile.
    “I needed that smile,” she told him while they sat waiting on a vinyl-covered couch that had holes like a sieve. “And a cigarette—but don’t tempt me.”
    “It’s been that bad a morning, eh?”
    “The BIA’s stringent rules about emergencies —they’re so damned frustrating, Marshall.”
    “You can imagine how the public health doctor feels when a child is brought in with trachoma or a mother with TB and he has to say, ‘Sorry, but we don’t have the money to send you to Phoenix.’ ”
    The hopelessness again. . . .
    The doctor came back with Julie. “Two fingers broken. I’ve splinted them, and they should be all right in four or five weeks.” He smiled at Abbie. “Your ice pack was quick thinking, Mrs. Dennis.” She laughed. “Brownie first aid, doctor.”
    “Were you really a Brownie?” Marshall asked later after he had helped Julie into the Jeep and come around to Abbie’s side.
    “You bet.”
    He braced his hands on the open window. “I can just picture you—knobby knees and pigtails.”
    “How did you guess?”
    He grinned. “That’s the kind that always grows into a beautiful, warm, intelligent woman.”
    She started the engine. “Marshall, come by for coffee sometime when you’re at Kaibeto.”
    He winked. “I’ve been waiting for the invitation.”
    * * * * *
    A haze of smoke permeated the Phoenix hotel bar. In the corner of the booth Cody propped his arm on one raised knee and watched the woman sitting next to him. She was nothing at all like Abbie Dennis. Shorter, with russet brown hair. Green eyes instead of blue. Too much makeup. Yet she had that same indefinable air of sophistication. But not quality, he thought, recalling Orville’s story about the orange juice can and Julie Begay’s broken hand.
    The woman—what was her name? Jacqueline? —leaned toward him, her overblown breasts swaying enticingly beneath the expensive dress of red taffeta, as she had meant them to. Her beringed fingers played with his horsehead belt buckle. “Is it true you won this riding bulls?”
    “Saddle broncs.”
    “Marvin says you were a world champion.”
    “National intercollegiate champion. It helped pay my way through college.”
    “Marvin says—”
    “Where is Marvin?”
    The Scottsdale dealer’s wife looked up at him innocently through thickly applied mascara. “I thought I told you. He isn’t going to join us until seven.”
    Marvin Klein, famous for the prestigious list of merchants he bought jewelry from, had been asking Cody for more than a year to let him handle Cody’s work. But it had been Abbie’s perceptive thrust—that he was hiding out from society—which had made him accept Klein’s wheedling to come to Phoenix to discuss a possible consignment.
    The consignment would mean an international market for his jewelry, something he had always rebeled against. He felt only revulsion for people who valued a piece of jewelry for its ostentatious price rather than its beauty. And he had learned early—at his mother’s knee, he thought with bitterness—that the women who moved in the upper echelons of society made that kind of judgment as a matter of course.
    Jacqueline’s finger slipped over the belt buckle to rub against his stomach muscles like a purring cat rubbing against a leg. “Actually, darling, I do all the primary negotiations for Marvin. Ever since I saw the pair of earrings you did for the wife of the president of the Philippines, I’ve been after Marvin to snap you up.”
    Cody’s gaze burned through the smoky