Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [4]
“Are you Indian?” she asked as she placed the cup on the table.
“Apache,” the woman answered.
“Am I in Arizona?” Trina asked, trying to remember the map she had read at her last stop, trying to remember what direction she was heading.
“Apache land” came the reply.
Trina recalled that out of Globe, she had started walking east on Highway 60, heading in the direction of New Mexico. From there, she was trying to get back to the last place she lived, get back to Texas. It had been dark, and then she remembered the truck and the group of men she had seen earlier that evening at the service station where she had stopped to eat a bowl of soup, how the brake lights on the truck flashed and how it moved in reverse, how the men smiled and rubbed their hands together when they saw it was her alone on the road.
“I left the highway, started walking through the desert,” she said, not sure why she was explaining herself to the woman since it appeared she did not speak English. “I don’t know how far I walked.”
“Apache land,” the woman repeated. “White Mountains,” she added. And then she got up from the table and walked into the other room. She returned with an old map and opened it for Trina to examine. Standing next to Trina, she pointed to the Apache Reservation, along the southeast corner of Arizona, in the Natanas Plateau. Trina had walked to the Salt River Canyon.
She smiled and reached over to Trina and patted her on the belly. She spoke words that Trina did not understand, and Trina assumed her hostess was asking her if she was hungry.
“Breakfast,” Trina said. “Yes, I would like something to eat.”
The woman grinned. She walked over to the icebox and pulled out a plate of bread and grabbed a jar of honey from a cupboard. She placed them in front of Trina and nodded.
Although she was embarrassed to be eating in front of the woman, eating what was probably the only food in the house, Trina could not stop herself. She ate three pieces of bread before she felt full. The woman only watched, nodding in approval. “I was so hungry,” she said, shaking her head, surprised at her appetite, surprised at how good the morning meal tasted. “I have some money. I can pay you for the bread.”
The woman shook her head as if she understood. “I fix you shoes,” she said. “To keep walking.”
Trina didn’t respond. She remembered she was wearing sneakers when she left Tucson. The red ones with the narrow soles. She watched as the woman left the room again, returning with a pair of buckskin moccasins, old ones with magazine paper stuffed in the heels. The strings were made of dark leather. “You take these,” she said and placed them on Trina’s lap. “You take these shoes to Pie Town.”
Trina was surprised. “Pie Town. I dreamed about Pie Town,” she said. “I dreamed I was going to Pie Town, New Mexico. I saw it on the map at Globe. It’s straight east on Highway 60, the one I was walking on.” She studied the old woman. “How did you know?” she asked. “How did you know about my dream? How did you know that was where I was going?”
And without answering, the old woman clapped her hands together, the bracelets sliding down her arms, opened her mouth wide, and laughed out loud.
Chapter Four
Oris Whitsett pulled up in his driveway, parked, and opened the door on the driver’s side. He slid his legs over and stood up. He was wearing an old dress shirt and nothing else but socks. He licked a finger, held it up to calculate the direction of the wind, and then nodded, lifting his chin in the direction of his next-door neighbor, who was watching.
Millie Watson, a widow since the 1980s, was rolling her emptied trash can from the edge of the road to the back of her house. She stopped when she saw Oris pull in. They had been friends for as many years as they had been neighbors in Pie Town, and that had been about half a century. “Oris,” she said rather politely. She glanced over his head toward the mountains. “Wind’s picked up from the north. Means a change in weather.