A Different Blue(14)

pleasant combination. The door to Cheryl's room was shut. I wondered at her ability to sleep in

the heat and sighed as I emptied the ashtrays and wiped up the beer spilled on the coffee table.

Cheryl obviously had company. A pair of men's jeans lay in a crumpled pile and Cheryl's black

bra and work shirt were tossed alongside them. Nice. The sooner I got out of there, the better.

I stripped my jeans off and pulled on a pair of cut-off sweats and a tank-top, pulling my hair

up in a sloppy ponytail. Shoving my feet into flip-flops, I left the apartment ten minutes after

I had arrived.

I rented a storage unit behind the complex for fifty bucks a month. It had lights and power, and

it was my own little workshop. It had a couple of work tables fashioned from sawhorses and long

sheets of plywood. I had a large dremel, various sizes of mallets and chisels, files and

grinders, and an oscillating fan that moved the hot air and sawdust around in lazy circles.

Projects in various stages, from a discard pile to completed pieces of twisting, gleaming art

decorated the perimeter of the space. I had found a thick, gnarled branch of Mesquite on my

travels the day before, and I was eager to see what it looked like under the layers of thorny

bark that I had yet to strip off. Most people who worked with wood liked to use soft woods

because they were easy to carve and whittle, easy to shape into their own creation. Nobody

carved with mesquite or mountain mahogany or juniper. The wood was too hard. The ranchers out

west considered mesquite a weed. You couldn't use a sharp knife to shape it, that was for sure.

I had to use a big chisel and a mallet to strip off the bark. When the wood was laid bare, I

would usually spend a great deal of time just looking at it before I did anything. I had learned

that from Jimmy.

Jimmy Echohawk had been a quiet man, quiet to the point of not talking for days at a time. It

was amazing that I had any language skills at all when I came to live with Cheryl. Thank you,

PBS. When I was two years old, my mother – at least we assume it was her – left me in the

front seat of his truck and drove away. I didn't remember my mother at all, beyond a vague

memory of dark hair and a blue blanket. Jimmy was a Pawnee Indian and had very little that he

called his own. He had an old pickup truck and a camp trailer that he pulled along behind it,

and that's where we lived. We never stayed in one place for very long, and we never had company,

except for each other. He said he had family on a reservation in Oklahoma, but I never met any

of them. He taught me how to carve, and the skill had saved me, both financially, and

emotionally, many times. I lost myself in it now, working until the early hours of morning when

I knew Cheryl would be gone to work, along with her mystery man, and the apartment would be

empty.





Chapter Three





“When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he knew what it would mean.” Mr. Wilson was looking

at us all somberly, as if Julius Caesar was his homey and he had just crossed the Rubics Cube

yesterday. I sighed and tossed back my hair, slouching even further into my seat.

“It was considered treason to bring a standing army into Italy proper. The senators in Rome

were intimidated by Caesar's power and his popularity. They wanted to control him, see, and it

was fine if he was winning battles for Rome, conquering the Celtic and Germanic tribes, but they