Sacred Arrow

By Jan Kelly

Sacred Arrow finds Guy Thornton resurrecting the Rawlings cattle ranch with its trove of ancient petroglyphs into a profitable bison operation when Bane, a White Mountain Apache, abducts the ranch owner's five-year-old son. Accounts of Guy's rodeo years and his relationship with a Yavapai woman named Sally are woven through the story of the family's desperate efforts to rescue young Jack.
Book Four of The Arizona Series - novels intertwining Native American mythologies with western / adventure / romances set in the modern American West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jan Kelly
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005058746

Jan Kelly

Jan Kelly is a native Arizonan with an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University where she taught for thirty years. She has one daughter and lives with her husband in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Book preview

Prologue

Stories work on us, even the stories from long, long ago. Maybe especially these old stories told by old people. They are like arrows aimed at the heart. Some will bounce off; the bow drawn and released to no effect. These you will not think about afterwards. But sometimes the arrow hits home. These stories change you.

Perhaps you have been acting the coward, or hoarding, or whoring. Maybe you make yourself a burden to others in small and large ways. This may send someone after you—a teacher from inside your family, from outside, maybe even a stranger. There may be many other people there, listening to the story, but you are the one the arrow is for; you know that when it hits you.

These stories go deep. You don’t need anyone to say anything about how you have been acting. You’re hit, and now you know people have been watching, people have been talking. You have no choice but to think, now. No choice at all.

---

Drawn from Nick Thompson,

the Apache view of stories

Myths and Tales of

the White Mountain Apache

Chapter One

Winslow, northern Arizona

Summer 2005

Sunday was a rare day of rest at the J Bar Ranch in the canyon country south of Winslow, Arizona, and it made Kate anxious. She had finished rinsing and drying their cereal bowls, and she stood gazing out the kitchen window, the dish towel still draped over one shoulder, motionless on the outside but swirling on the inside. The empty, sun-drenched yard brought the rabbit in her out—the nickname she’d been given as a child. Maybe she was still dealing with the death of her father—the third generation of Jacks for which the ranch had been named. Maybe there was something else making her feel absolutely certain that disaster was right there, on the horizon, just out of sight, coming her way. Anyway, the quiet made the feeling worse.

On the other six days of the week there were at least three or four of the group home kids around, mucking stalls, grooming horses, or helping with the riding lessons Jane gave. Jane, the one-time runaway, the misfit turned business-woman, was now running herd on several of the neglected and abandoned youth who’d somehow landed where she’d started those many years ago when Kate and her husband, Richard, had taken her in. Ten years, was it? No, eleven—the year Grace was born. Kate pulled her eyes from the window to glance at her daughter and five-year-old son, yet another Jack, sitting at the table behind her, then she hung the towel on its hook and reached into the cupboard for the big mixing bowl.

If it weren’t a Sunday Guy would be around, going in and out of one of the corrals or the barn or heading out on the little ATV to move the buffalo from one section of the spread to another—or bison, actually; Kate always thought of them as buffalo, no matter how many times Guy corrected her. Her gaze drifted back out the window. He was constantly in motion, looking every bit the cowboy in his dusty jeans and sweat-stained hat, so tall. She couldn’t feed him enough to put any meat on those bones. Kate realized she was chewing on her lip and made herself stop—it was the same bad habit she’d yell at her son, Jack, for doing. It’s just the yard was so darn quiet, packed dirt, scraggly bushes, and lonely sky spreading out for miles and miles. There wasn’t much green this time of year to break up the tableland of the ranch.

They’d nearly sold the place after her dad died, but then Guy had showed up, and he’d turned things around enough to keep them going; they might even make a sizable profit this year. He’d driven down their dusty lane in his friend’s beat up old pickup the year before Jack was born, so six years, then, searching for the teenage girl he’d called Rose and who had turned into the young woman they all knew as Jane, no longer a runaway, no longer lost. He’d seen how much they needed him—the ranch needed him—and stayed. But he never wanted to restock with cattle; he said he’d quit that in his youth. Instead he sold first them and then the banker and then the fancy restaurant at the La Posada in town on bison, the new meat, he called it—lean and flavorful, packed with protein. At least that had been his brief but emphatic sales pitch.

It was still a small herd, but growing. The first year’s sales had been enough to help them afford the construction of the row of guest rooms behind the house. That, and the fees they charged the tourists and the archeologists and their students who came to study the centuries-old rock art Guy’d discovered in one of the canyons that sliced through their land. So they were no longer a failing cattle ranch; they were diversified—at least that was what her husband, Richard, said.

Stop kicking my chair, Jack, she heard her daughter scold as she gathered a couple of lemons, eggs and butter from the ‘fridge, or I’ll smack you. I mean it.

Grace had been even more annoyed than usual with her brother all morning, and Kate couldn’t blame her—he had a bad case of the fidgets today, just like her. She found the hand mixer and plugged it in, then went to the pantry and filled her arms—flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, sugar—and then the counter by the sink.

You’re such a brat, Grace snarled at her brother. His answer was a devilish snicker.

Kate sighed, glanced over her shoulder at the kids again, then leaned a hip against the kitchen counter. It was just too quiet for her on Sundays. Jane and Guy had fed and watered the horses early and then disappeared. Jane went back to bed—at least that’s where Kate imagined her holed up, behind the drawn curtains at the farthest end of the row of guest houses; Kate didn’t see her on most Sundays until suppertime. Guy had emerged from his own small kitchenette at the other end of the row a couple of hours ago and rattled past the house and down the long driveway in his old pickup, headed for town, she assumed. He didn’t talk much—about anything, but especially about what he was doing or where he was off to on a Sunday. Except maybe to Grace. Kate knew they talked because Grace would tell her stuff out of the blue, some story Guy had told her or something he’d taught her, usually about the horses, more lately about the bison.

And even before Guy took off, Richard had read the front section of the paper—wars, earthquakes, terrorists, tsunamis, obese kids, steroids, hurricanes—it was all bad news, in her view, and to be avoided. Then he’d pulled out the comics for the kids—Grace and Jack had taken turns reading them out loud as they’d eaten their cereal—and kissed her goodbye. Richard always tried to make the rec center’s 10 a.m. weekend opening to use their lap pool before all the kids showed up—the pee-ers, he called them.

Now the kids were busy at the kitchen table with their magic markers, blunted scissors, glue and construction paper. Their babysitter, Aunt Missy, was having a birthday party that afternoon—the big 3-0—and Kate had asked the kids to make their cards while she whipped up another of her grandmother Elizabeth’s famous lemon cakes—if she could just stop all this staring out the window and fretting, that is. She dug a butter knife out of the silverware drawer and was drawing its back edge over the measuring cup’s rim when she heard Shane start barking.

Kate returned to the kitchen window; no one in the driveway or on the dirt lane coming in, no dust in the air. She set the cup of flour down on the counter and went to the window in the little pantry off the kitchen. There was Shane across the yard, tail wagging, snuffling at the door of Tio Fred’s old adobe bunkhouse. Maybe a desert rat or a gopher had gotten in there, Kate decided; the bunkhouse had been empty for years. Besides Jane’s dusty old bed that Guy would camp out on occasionally when the guest houses were busy, all that was in there with the antique rope-spring bunks and wood stove was a bunch of junk; busted chairs, rusty tools, gardening gear.

But Kate decided she’d better take a look. Shane was an overly-friendly, ball-crazed Golden Retriever who’d never shown an interest in hunting of any kind, and he was still yipping and scratching at that door. Gracie, you keep an eye on Jack, okay? she asked, and her oldest looked up from her elaborate drawing of an owl with the word bubble already inscribed: Who-who-who’s having a birthday? Jack finally had his concentration face on—lips pursed, forehead creased—and was so focused on keeping his colors inside the lines of the dinosaur he’d drawn that he didn’t even seem to hear her.

The dog barked again, short yaps like questions, and Kate banged out the screen door, crossed the porch, and followed the sound across the tree-shaded yard, past the cement pad where her dad’s trailer had stood. Shane was scratching at the bottom of the splintered wooden door as Kate came up; she looked down and noticed with surprise the butter knife still in her hand.

What, Shane? What are you after in there? she asked. Then the hard part was turning the knob to open the door with her free hand and scooting in without the dog following. She shut the door practically on his nose and felt her head jerked back—someone had her by the hair. Someone behind her, smelling of sweat, and now a gritty hand smashed over her mouth before she’d even thought about screaming—but who would hear? The kids? She didn’t want them running down here.

They wrestled briefly, silent compared to the dog’s scratching and whining at the door. Then Kate jabbed at him with the butter knife, hard, harder, then she palm-slapped it with the other hand and felt the skin give and the dull blade punch into his gut.

An animal yowl came out of him then. He let her go and dropped his hands to his belly. He was naked, brown and dirty, wild-eyed under a matt of short black hair. Kate backed away and saw with some satisfaction the bright blood through his fingers. "Ánágot’iití!" he said, then he looked at her knife and seemed confused.

Kate wiped the back of a hand across her mouth, spit. She was in a half-crouch, in side-to-side motion, breathing hard. But looking at him made her lower the knife to her side—he was just a boy, no, a small man, then, his hair standing up all over his head like it had been shaved once, months ago, and had grown out, shaggy and unkempt. He was between her and the door, doubling over now, moaning, and trying unsuccessfully to hide his privates with the hand that wasn’t over the wound in his stomach.

Kate straightened and tried to stop panting. Now she wasn’t afraid, she realized. All that foreboding, the worry about all the things that might happen, could happen, had left her. She moved the butter knife to her left hand and reached up to yank at the dingy yellow curtain from the window over the dresser; the rod came clattering down with it. The dog was barking, barking, barking at the door. Here, she said over its noise, thinking the young man would use it to staunch the flow of blood—there wasn’t much; she intentionally hadn’t sunk the blade, just poked him—but instead the man was fumbling the cloth around his skinny waist like a skirt. He looked up from under a thick brow line—small, dark, nearly black eyes—and backed toward the door, the cloth hitched together by his free hand at one hip.

Who are you? she finally thought to ask, but he just shook his head. What are you doing here? she tried next. Again the lowered head shake. Are you hungry? she asked him then.

He looked up, licked his lips, and his eyes burned into hers.

Chapter Two

Cave Creek, southern Arizona

Fall 1993

Guy didn’t need half the stuff he’d crammed into the old suitcase he’d brought from San Diego out to Desert Arabians with him those four or five years ago—he should just start a little bonfire in the dirt patch off the porch and burn it all. The suit he’d worn to parade show horses around the ring would be of no use at all wherever he was going; the magazines were months old, and there really was no reason for him to be reading Breeders’ World anymore, anyway; the glasses he’d stuffed in there were broken at the bridge and taped together crooked so they made him dizzy. It seemed that one of the good things that’d come out of Guy’s months living in the desert with an old O’odham woman—and, he was starting to realize there were several—was an improvement in his vision. He still had to squint to focus the words on a street sign, for example, anything at a distance, but he could read and ponder over what people’s expressions meant just fine without them.

That pondering is what he was engaged in at the moment. Lily looked either ready to cry or about to explode in anger. He waited to see which, but her forehead stayed furrowed, her blue eyes just kept flashing venom at him, her lips remained a narrow line. So he repeated: No checks. Cash. That was the deal.

Then her tears started; the blonde curls that framed her face shook with her weeping. All this did was convince Guy that the check she’d tried to hand him really wasn’t any good. No bank would have cashed it for him, anyway; he’d cleaned out the little that had been left in his checking account days ago. I can’t . . . right now, she blubbered. You’ll have to wait.

But he’d already been waiting almost three weeks, during which he’d worked his tail off, both inside and outside of the office in the show horse barn. Lily had a new fiancé now who wanted nothing to do with horses, and when Guy had returned from the desert with a damaged Tristan, she’d decided to unload all her show stock. So in addition to helping Manny and Luis feed, water, exercise, and groom their charges, he’d been busy cancelling boarding contracts and calling all the buyers he could think of, showing them around, and brokering the sale and removal of every one of Lily’s Arabians. There was several thousand dollars of salary and commission coming to him from those labors, and he was going to need every penny of it because he had no prospects, no idea even of where he was off to—he just knew he was going.

The buyer from San Diego had snatched up all of their Russian line, including their prized stallion, Tristan, even though he’d made a big deal out of the horse’s injuries. There’s no scars on his genes, Guy had assured the young man squinting at Tristan through his fancy sunglasses, pen and clipboard in hand. The truth was the grayish slice that ran along the horse’s off flank pained Guy as much as if it had been his own thigh that had been gashed in the desert floods Tristan had survived earlier that summer. The other scrapes had pretty much healed, but that one deep gash was a show horse’s career-ender. And it had ended Guy’s training career right along with it. It broke his heart to part with the young stallion—Guy had raised him, trained him, pinned all his dreams on him. But then he had found him too late. And no one had found the runaway girl who had taken him; no one had even tried.

Add another week’s wages, then, he admonished Lily sternly, unmoved by her tears. And the day you get your money, I get mine.

She didn’t answer, but she let her shoulders slump and wiped at her nose with a tissue—why do women always seem to have those things handy, he’d wondered more than once. And he’d left her there in her own front hallway and taken his packed suitcase back up the driveway to leave it standing just inside the door of the trainer’s house, the house Lily had built for him, back when her first husband, Frank, had been bank-rolling their dreams of making it big in the Arabian show horse industry. Lily’s new fiancé wanted nothing to do with the risks of such an undertaking or Guy—that much was clear. Guy had only glimpsed him roaring in and out of the driveway in his shiny, red Corvette. He was younger than Frank had been, but other than that, it didn’t seem like Lily’s taste in men had changed. Guy took a glass out of the cupboard, filled it at the kitchen sink, and stared back up the lane at the white, columned house Lily had also had Frank build her.

In fact, Guy was starting to understand just what an anomaly their own dalliance had been; Lily liked her men rich, well-established, and impeccably-groomed. Guy was near broke, essentially homeless. He thought of his O’odham partner, Manny, as his one and only real friend, and was, even to his own mind, definitely scruffy-looking. His dusty-brown hair was always hat-squished and in need of barbering; his lanky frame was clothed in bleached-out shirts and worn jeans that fit badly due to all the weight he’d lost in the months he’d lived with the old O’odham woman in the desert; and his chin seemed perpetually stubbled with a patchy beard. If he added his habitual silence to the mix, Guy could understand why Lily sought better company. He would have too if he was her.

His one good trait—and it came with its own kind of consequences, Guy was starting to realize—was the burn the old woman had given him; tribe spirit, she had called it. Before his time with her Guy had been angry, selfish to the core, a mean drunk and a frequent one—as often as he could afford it. But one of Grandmother’s last acts was to touch his chest, near the center—his hand automatically went up to his heart where he would feel the sudden, searing heat—and it had changed him. Suffering such strong emotion was unfamiliar to him but not unwelcome. He was feeling things now, and he hadn’t even known that he hadn’t been before.

Guy gulped the water and set the empty glass on the counter. He’d said his farewells to Manny so many times it embarrassed him, but if he wasn’t leaving yet, he might as well go back down to the tack room and help his friend finish the last tasks involved in shutting the stables down. Manny would be leaving, himself, before the end of this day. He was taking his wife and two kids to Disneyland on a short vacation before starting his new job out at the WestWorld Equestrian Center—they’d just got their new tent up. It was going to be a big operation, not just horse shows and rodeos; a whole lot of stuff was going to be going on down there, and Manny would be in the thick of it, helping run the show.

Guy was happy for his friend, who was going somewhere. Whereas he—well, he had his suitcase packed. Guy rubbed at that spot on his chest before he left his post at the sink, wondering where or when or even if he’d ever unpack it.

Chapter Three

Grace - Winslow, northern Arizona

Summer 2005

Iwas wondering what state I’d find Guy in as I pushed my way into the Brown Bar Saloon, kind of anxious about it, actually, and in a hurry to get my errand over with, but I still had to stop just inside the door to let my eyes adjust. I could hear the bartender lady they call Mom yapping. Stupid old men. Why would they want some mom serving them their alcohol? And she wasn’t one, either, as far as I knew. Anyway, she was behind the bar, talking loud to one of the regulars sitting at the far end of the counter. I made my way to the back, where Guy would be, with my hands out in front of me like some sleepwalker, and still managed to whomp my knee on a chair before I got close enough to make him out. He liked his back to a wall, he’d told me, so he could see trouble coming. Well, the trouble was me, this time.

He looked up when I knocked into the chair. I could see his hair sticking up all over the place now, and the row of empty beer bottles lined up in front of him. I did a quick count—five, already, and it wasn’t even noon. He’d been busy.

Hey, Ace, he said. That’s what he calls me. I wish everybody did, but so far it’s just him. Well, and my little brother, Jack, but that’s because when he was younger he couldn’t talk right.

We gotta go, Guy, I told him. Mom sent me. When he glanced up at the bartender I added, "Not her. Come on. We gotta go. My mom sent me. Jane’s waiting in the car."

Even the mention of her name made him wince, else it was the effort of leaning back in his chair to pull his wallet out of his front pocket. He’d quit wearing it in a back pocket after getting thrown from a horse this one time. He’d landed right on it, he’d told me, and the painful, square bruise on his butt had cured him of the habit. He finally fished it out but his fingers must not have been working so good because he just handed it to me.

I counted the bottles again—just like my mother, I’m always over-thinking things—and pulled out a twenty as I walked back to the bar.

You’re too young to be buying beer, sweetie, Mom said, moving her bulk past all the bottles, liquors of all different kinds of shapes and colors, lining the wall behind her.

"It’s his money," I assured her, but the way she grinned at me as she took the bill let me know she was just pulling my leg. She kind of waved it at Guy before she rang it into the cash register, which I guess was a way of communicating that he wasn’t getting any change, and by then he was rising, reaching for his hat, and wavering toward us. I handed him his wallet back before I led the way out into the bright sunshine, and squinting, made my way to the car. Jane didn’t even look at me—or him. She just started the car and stared straight out the windshield.

Guy’d stopped to jam his hat on his head, then he took it off again and crawled into the back seat. I took that to mean I got to ride shotgun. Maybe he didn’t want to get too close to Jane, afraid she’d see how boozed up he was, but he wasn’t fooling anyone—the whole car reeked of beer as we drove back to the ranch. Only once I saw Jane glance at him in the rear view mirror. He was sitting way forward and resting his head against the back of my seat.

Put your fucking seat belt on, she admonished him, and I did as she’d requested but Guy didn’t move; maybe he was sleeping.

Jane muttered something I couldn’t catch and made her mad face. No, it was more of a disgusted face, like the smell of him—or just him, in general—kind of made her nauseous. It’s strange because before he found her working at the J Bar—I was just a kid back then, Jack’s age, so it must have been five or six years ago—she’d told me all about him, and I’d loved her stories, about how tall and lean and handsome he was, and so smart about horses, just so totally cool. Frankly, I still felt that way about him. I mean, it wasn’t that much fun to go fetch him out of the bar—and this was certainly not the first time. But even with all the drinking he’d started doing lately, he was still our resident expert on all things equine—yep, he taught me that word—and now the bison, too. He had a way with all the animals; he was definitely Shane’s favorite, even though the stupid mutt was supposed to be my dog. But Guy sure as heck didn’t have a way with Jane anymore.

"Jesus, Guy, you