Death Without Company

by Craig Johnson

  I dropped Maggie off at the Durant State Bank and picked up Sancho at the office.

  St. Mathias is near the creek where the giant cottonwoods tower over the aged stone buildings that make up the abandoned portion of the Pope’s compound. They built a new church back in the sixties, a really ugly one, the one I always associated with Pancake Day, but the old rectory and chapel still stood by the creek where they always had.

  I froze as Saizarbitoria dipped his fingers in the water, knelt, and crossed himself. I stroked my beard and felt like a Viking, there to raid the place. I followed him down the aisle and passed through the sunlight that skipped onto the hardwood floor. The stone pillars stretched to a small gallery where there were ornate stained-glass windows. They were not the usual Jesus lineup but were odd, with strange depictions of biblical passages foreign to me; at least I couldn’t remember any parts of the Bible where Goliath stacked rocks or tiny angels flew around people’s heads.

  We shook hands with the amiable blond-bearded priest and followed as he led us to the kitchen where Father Baroja was seated at a table with some hot cocoa. He paid us little attention as Father Thallon put the kettle on and pulled out a few more mugs. “Jolie, you know you’re not supposed to operate the stove without Mrs. Krauss.” The old priest gave no response. “We had a little accident about a month ago.”

  I sat at the end of the table and studied the old man. He continued to look at his hot chocolate and pulled it a little closer as if we might take it away from him. He had a long face with a bulbous nose, dangling earlobes, and wrinkles that all congregated at his mouth. He looked like some ancient monk with a heavy wool cardigan that buttoned up around his neck. He could have been any of the hard men I’d seen on horseback in Mari Baroja’s photographs.

  Gene Thallon had warned us that Basque was not his second language, or his fifty-seventh for that matter, but that he knew that the language had four distinct dialects, and that the vast number of grammatical tenses included a subjective, two different potentials, an eventual, and a hypothetical. I looked over at my secret weapon and hoped we could get out of there before Father Thallon had us diagramming sentences.

  He brought over some cups for us and, with this ecumenical distribution of cocoa, the old priest loosened the guard on his own. It seemed rude to not say anything to the old guy, so I said hello.

  He studied me for a moment but dismissed me for the cocoa. I looked at Father Thallon. The young priest smiled. “He can be a little incommunicative at times.”

  “Kaixo, zer moduz?” Saizarbitoria casually sipped his own hot chocolate and glanced sideways at Jolie Baroja after speaking.

  “Zer da hau?” The gravel in the old priest’s voice could have filled a driveway.

  Sancho set his mug back down with a tight-lipped smile. “Bai?”

  Jolie Baroja’s head slipped to one side, and then he leaned in close to Santiago, placing a hand lightly on the young deputy’s arm. “Ongi-etorri . . .”

  They talked at an impressive rate for a solid five minutes before my translator turned back to me. “Was there anything specific you wanted to know?”

  “What was all that about?”

  “Cordialities. He thinks I’m a local, and I didn’t dissuade him.”

  “Good.” I had watched Sancho carefully, the way he actively listened to what the old man had to say, didn’t interrupt, and maintained eye contact. It was all textbook and well done. It looked as though he had adopted the role of friend and ally with the old priest, a posture that would enable Jolie to speak freely within the coded language they shared.

  I looked at Father Thallon, who had been watching the proceedings with great interest, and then back to Saizarbitoria. “Can you gently ask him about his cousin, any family contact he might have had?”

  The kid looked at me for an extra moment, then turned and renewed the conversation.

  “I had no idea you had deputies that could speak Basque.”

  I nodded. “We try and stay close to the constituency.”

  The old priest glanced back at me, and Sancho weighed his next words carefully. “He doesn’t like you.”

  I glanced at him and then back to Santiago. “He doesn’t even know me.”

  “He thinks he does.”

  I stood and gestured for the younger priest to lead on. “Well, we know when we’re not wanted.” He paused for only a moment and then led me back into the cathedral. It was small by modern standards, but exquisite. It had been pieced together by the sturdy and articulate hands of not only the Basque but also the Scottish, Polish, Czech, and German faithful. They had been tough men who had brought the old ways with them along with the skills to build beauty such as this. I followed the king’s-bridge truss system of hand-adzed beams that held the roof and admired the wide-plank floors with no board less than a foot wide; the altar and the adjoining walls were local moss stone with the lichens flourishing in the cool of the open stillness.

  I took a sip of my cocoa. “Must be tough with all these Basquos around.”

  “It’s difficult, especially with the older parishioners; they’re still not sure if I’m going to last.” He smiled. “They have a saying, the Basque. That just because the cat has kittens in the oven, it doesn’t make them biscuits.”

  I laughed and looked at him. “You’re probably wondering why we’re here. We’re interested in his relationship with his cousin, Mari. Did you know her?”

  Thallon nodded. “Mari? Yes, I did know her. I visited with her last Friday. A terrible shame.”

  I nodded. “Do you know any of the rest of the family?”

  “I’ve met the granddaughter, the one that owns the bakery. Lana?”

  “Seems like a good kid.” The priest remained silent. “Have you met either of the twins?”

  “I’ve met Carol; she’s come over to meet with Father Baroja a number of times.”

  “How many times?”

  He thought. “A half a dozen or so, over a lengthy period. I would imagine that it’s very difficult to visit more often from Florida.”

  “Can you remember when she was here last?”

  He thought some more and exhaled very slowly. “About two years ago, I think.”

  I thought about it. “Was Father Baroja very close with Mari?”

  “No.”

  “That was a pretty definitive answer.”

  “I think there was some tension there.” He glanced back toward the chapel as Saizarbitoria entered from the doorway.

  Sancho asked about the church, the congregation, and the community. As they talked, my attention was drawn back to the stained-glass windows. The stone church wouldn’t get long beams of sunshine today; only short blasts of golden light that illuminated first one window, then another. I watched the seemingly random pattern and wondered if I concentrated would I get the message. Probably not.

  When I looked back, Father Thallon was looking at me. “They have a name for you, you know.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The Basques around these parts, they have a name for you.”

  Saizarbitoria was all ears. “They do?”

  We waited a moment, before the priest said it very carefully. “Jentillak.” They both laughed.

  I adjusted the heat in the truck and looked at the Basquo. “Well?”

  “What do you want to know first? There’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  “When is the last time he spoke with his cousin?”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine.”

  I stared at the fog on the inside of my windshield. “That takes care of a lot of the other questions.”

  “That was the last time he saw her alive.”

  I turned up the defroster. “And what does that mean?”

  “She comes to him in his dreams.” He misinterpreted my stare. “He said that she visits him when he sleeps, that she asks for forgiveness. The dreams he described were very vivid, very detailed.” He turned and smiled at me; he was a handsome kid. “I think the old
man may have some demons.”

  I thought about my own dreams, about the house and the scarf. “Don’t we all.”

  He adjusted his jacket and mindlessly fingered the knob of the glove box. “He said she was immoral. That he had tried to save her his whole life, that the family considered her their greatest failure.”

  I drove across the unplowed snowpack of Durant’s side streets. Santiago studied the road ahead. “The old priest doesn’t like you because he thinks you’re Lucian.”

  Of course. I nodded and thought about it. “Well, he and Lucian probably didn’t get along.” I thought about filling the kid in, but it still seemed early, so I changed tack. “The old guy seems pretty sharp?”

  He paused, the way I was learning that he did whenever you did something to him and he wanted you to know that he knew it. “Well, yeah, kind of.” Santiago sniffed and glanced back at the dash as the windshield began to clear. “He told me to be careful, that there were laminak in the room.”

  I turned to look at him. “Laminak?”

  He chewed his lip. “Fairies.”

  I sighed and made a turn. I had the Old Cheyenne, he had the fairies, and it was all in how you looked at it. “Anything else?”

  “I think that about covers it.”

  I pulled out onto the main drag and started for the office, barely being missed by an inattentive truck driver. He slowed after he saw the lights and the stars. “All right, what the hell does Jentillak mean?”

  He smiled to himself, happy to know something I didn’t. “There are these dolmens, like Neolithic monuments, all over the mountains back in the Basque lands.” He continued to smile. “The Jentillak are a people that once lived alongside the Basque. One day a strange storm cloud was seen in the east and the wisest of the Jentillak recognized it as an omen that their time had ended. They marched off into the earth, under a dolmen still there in the Arratzaran valley in Navarra.” I glanced at him, and he savored the moment. “Jentillak means giant.”

  I drove along silently and thought about it. “Giant, huh?”

  “Yeah.” He looked back out. “There was a Jentillak who was left behind whose name was Olentzero, and he explained that they had all left because Kixmi had been born.”

  I nodded. “Who was this Kixmi character?”

  Santiago looked out into the slight sifting of snow and Christmas lights. “Jesus.”

  I dropped Sancho off at the office just as Vic was heading out to a chimney fire on the south side of town. I waved as Saizarbitoria jumped in her unit, and she flipped me off.

  It was a quiet day at Durant Memorial, with only a few cars in the lot. “ Janine, is Isaac Bloomfield still wandering around in here?”

  She traced a finger down the register and smiled. “You’re in luck, he’s making his late morning rounds.”

  I thought about the eight-five-year-old man who had been knocked unconscious only two days ago. “His rounds?”

  She nodded. “He has been stalling out in the B Ward dayroom about this time.”

  I leaned against her counter and rested my chin in the palm of my hand, happy to discover the Doc was human. “Well, we’re none of us getting any younger.”

  She smiled. “That’s not why he stalls out.”

  Lana still looked like a Hindu, but she had obviously gotten supplies from home since she now wore flaming red silk pajamas, a white terry-cloth bathrobe, and pink bunny slippers. The most recent copy of Saveur magazine lay open in her lap. “Looks like you’re settling in.” It was a kooky smile, but a warm one nonetheless.

  “I’ve decided to treat this like a spa vacation.”

  Isaac was seated on the ottoman next to the bunny slippers, the picture of the attending physician. “Well, Doc, what’s the prognosis?”

  He continued to smile at her and, if I were a betting man, I would have labeled him as smitten. “If we can get the patient to stop playing with her head, we can probably save it.”

  I stood by the plastic chair. “Stop playing with your head, or it’ll end up looking like my ear.” I glanced over at the Doc. “Or his head.”

  “I like your ear and his head.”

  Okay, I was kind of smitten, too. “Lana, I need to talk to the Doc. Will you excuse us?”

  Isaac and I codgered our way out to the hallway, where I stopped. I didn’t see any reason to drag the Doc any farther than I had to. “How’s Lucian?”

  “Asleep in the lounge; it’s where we’ve both been staying.”

  I nodded. “Isaac, I need to ask you a question, and the situation being what it is, I don’t have a lot of time for niceties.”

  He leaned against the smooth wall of the hallway and crossed his arms. “Yes, Walter?”

  I hitched my thumbs in my gun belt and then shifted them to my jacket. It was enough that I wore a gun around Isaac; there wasn’t any need to broadcast the fact. “This human suppository, Charlie Nurburn, did he leave any illegitimate children that you know of?”

  He sighed deeply. “This concerns the case at hand?”

  “You know, a lot of people have been asking me that lately.” I waited to see if police prerogative would override medical confidentiality. I hated leaning on the old guy, but I needed some answers and, after all, we were talking about ancient history.

  “There were a number of women.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Perhaps an Indian woman.”

  “I’m still listening.”

  He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the corner of his smock. “I don’t know her name, or if I did, it has been too long, Walter.”

  “When?”

  “Early fifties. I could check my private journals and give you an exact date, perhaps a name.” I studied the small indentations at the Doc’s nose, where the same glasses had sat for a half a century. “I have those journals here.”

  I straightened a little. “Here at the hospital?”

  “In my office here.”

  I laughed because it was all I could think to do. “Why would you have those specific journals on hand?” He looked ashamed but not particularly guilty.

  “I was transcribing some historic familial selections for the young lady.”

  “Lana?”

  He smiled and shook his head at himself. “Foolish, yes?”

  I smiled back at the charming old man and gently put my arm around his narrow shoulders. “Isaac, everything to do with women is foolish and, therefore, absolutely essential.”

  11

  “I need to do a little cleaning up.”

  His diaries were piled on the desk and looked like old ledger books, the kind that businesses used to use for accounts and which the Lakota used for painting. He sat in the only chair, and I propped myself against an unoccupied corner of the desk.

  I watched as Isaac deftly slipped a journal from the stack. It was the oldest of the tomes, and I was beginning to feel like some cleric in training. “My notes are not as complete as I hoped but perhaps something is relevant.” The thin finger with the yellowed nail traveled along the lines like the carriage on a typewriter, pausing here and then there; finally, it stopped.

  “Something?”

  “It was when I first started the clinic north of here near the reservation.” He looked up at me, his fingertip still on the spot. “December eighth, 1950, a boy, six pounds, two ounces.” He looked back at the ledger. “No name was given to the child at that time.”

  “You think this baby was Charlie Nurburn’s?”

  He carefully placed the book on the surface of the desk as if the years were in danger of tumbling out, and I thought about all the time that had been collected between the lines. “Acme was a hamlet up near Tongue River, small, even then. Once they stopped producing coal, it became even smaller.” He looked up at me with a thin smile. “It is difficult to hide things in small places.”

  “What was the mother’s name?”

  He watched me through his overlapped eyelids, which were magnified through the bifoc
als. He checked the ledger. “Ellen Walks Over Ice.”

  I hadn’t moved since he had spoken. “Ellen Walks Over Ice . . . not Anna Walks Over Ice?”

  He looked at the ledger again. “Ellen.” His eyes locked with mine. “Anna Walks Over Ice is the woman that works at the Durant Home.”

  I looked back at him for only a moment. “Can I borrow your phone, Doc?” He looked around, finally giving up on the landline and handing me the cell phone from his smock pocket. Isaac didn’t have any staff, so he could have anything he wanted. “Isaac, what’s the number for the home?” The phone made a loud beeping noise. “I think you have messages.”

  “I’ll check them after you make your call. The phone was in my car, and your new deputy, the young man, was kind enough to return it to me. I get most of my messages through my answering service, but sometimes people don’t want to talk to anyone but me.” He took the mobile, dialed the number for me, and handed it back.

  Jennifer Felson answered. “Jennifer, is Anna Walks Over Ice working today?”

  “Let me check.” I waited as she dropped the phone, picked it up, rustled some papers, and declared Anna Walks Over Ice missing for the day.

  “She’s sick?”

  “She’s an Indian. Sometimes they don’t show up, and mostly they don’t call.” Racial slurs aside, most Indians did have their own sense of time; these priorities had worked fine for centuries, so I guess they saw little reason to change. “She doesn’t speak much English anyway.”

  I dialed the number for the Red Pony and asked Isaac which button to push. “Ha-ho, it is another wonderful day at the Red Pony bar and continual soiree.”

  “Hey, do you know where Anna Walks Over Ice lives?”

  “No, but I can find out.”

  “Can you check on her for me?” He said he would, and then I asked him if he’d ever heard of Ellen Walks Over Ice. He said no, but that they were a large Crow family. He would ask Lonnie and then get back to me.

  “Call me at the office.”

  I handed the tiny phone back to Isaac and watched as he hit a few buttons and held it to his ear. He looked at the journal as he listened. “I have her age listed as late teens, possibly early twenties.”