“Meanwhile,” I said, “they’ve got time to kill. Maybe they’re using it to set up an alibi for themselves. At nine o’clock, when the house was supposed to blow, they could’ve been sitting in a bar somewhere?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Could be anywhere.”
He turned, looked out the windshield. He nodded. “Maybe,” he said.
Maybe was right.
It wasn’t much, but it was still a hope; and hope, just then, was something that both of us needed.
22
Here,” Daniel Begay told me.
How he knew, I’ll never understand. So far as I could tell, it was just one more scant rutted path leading off through the trees, as so many had before.
I drove past it. Fifty yards beyond, the main track widened enough for me to pull over and park the Subaru. When I turned off the headlights, the narrow world before us—the brown gullied track, the ragged tree trunks, the green fans of pine needles—suddenly winked out.
I couldn’t even see Daniel Begay sitting beside me. I asked him, “How far down that path is the cabin?”
“A hundred yards, they said.”
“I’m going on foot. You stay here with the car.”
“He doesn’t know you. And he thinks people are after him.”
“He’s right.”
“He could shoot you by mistake. You can’t speak Navajo, you can’t tell him you’re a friend.”
“I can tell him in English.”
“He won’t believe you in English.”
“Daniel, Pablo and Ramon might be there already. I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.”
“Me neither,” he said flatly. “I got to come.”
I considered it. After driving along the length of that winding road in the Subaru, I was more convinced than ever that Pablo and Roman couldn’t have covered it at night in a standard Ford.
There was always the possibility, of course, that I was wrong. I’d been wrong before.
But Daniel, for his part, was right: He spoke Navajo and I didn’t. And this was his country and not mine.
“Okay,” I said. “Come on.”
From the glove compartment I took the flashlight and the Smith and Wesson.
I had a feeling that sooner or later we’d need more firepower than we had. I found myself wishing, briefly, that I was one of those honchos who made a point of carrying plenty of spare ammunition. A couple of speedloaders, maybe a box of loose rounds in the trunk. Maybe a bandelier. If I had been, I could’ve loaded the other pistol, the Charter Arms we’d taken from Luis this afternoon. It was empty now; I’d wasted all the bullets demonstrating what a bruiser I was.
We opened the doors quietly and stepped out of the car. The air was bleak and bitter. In the spring, with the thaw, it would smell of pine and wildflowers. Now it smelled of frozen earth, like a grave.
I eased my door shut and turned on the flashlight.
“No,” said Daniel Begay softly as he came around the front of the station wagon. “No light. Your eyes will get used to the dark.”
Once again, he was right. I turned off the flashlight, stuck it in the pocket of my windbreaker.
After a few minutes, the shapes of individual trees began to form themselves, leaning away from the murk. There was no moon, but the sky was splashed with hard-white stars, and by their light I could just make out the road, a darker blur against the surrounding night.
“Okay?” said Daniel Begay.
“Okay.” The pistol was in my hand. “Let’s go.”
We set off down the road. The dirt was hard-packed, crusted here and there with thin brittle patches of ice that snapped under foot.
From time to time I stumbled and sent rocks rattling. Twice I turned my ankle on invisible ruts. Daniel Begay moved along, cane swinging silently, as though he were pacing down Fifth Avenue in broad daylight.
We reached the pathway leading to Peter Yazzie’s cabin.
“Flashlight?” said Daniel Begay.
I slipped it from my pocket, handed it to him.
He turned it on, narrowed his eyes, and aimed the beam toward the path.
It didn’t take an Indian to see from the tire marks that someone had driven off the main road onto the path. “Two cars,” he said, and turned off the flashlight. “One big, a truck. The other smaller. The smaller one came later.”
“The Ford?” I felt the flashlight as he touched it gently to my arm. I took it, put it back in my pocket.
“Too small,” he said. “A Jeep, maybe.”
“Your nephew’s friends?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe the Mexicans rented one.”
That was a possibility I’d been arguing with myself. It seemed to me that renting a four-wheel was something they’d avoid—they wouldn’t want any record left of their visit to this area.
So it seemed to me. Maybe it seemed different to Pablo and Ramon.
“Come,” said Daniel Begay:
Off to the right, an owl hooted. My fingers tightened on the butt of the pistol.
It was darker in here, branches thicker overhead, trees crowding us on either side as the path sloped gently down the flank of the mountain. A battalion could have been hidden on either side of us and we’d never have seen them.
We moved slowly. The only sound was the scuffle of my boots against the ground, the occasional crunch of ice.
And then, fifty or sixty yards into the forest, I heard something else. Off to my right, not more than two or three yards away. The unmistakable metallic click of a gun’s hammer being cocked.
I froze. So did Daniel Begay. We couldn’t see whoever was out there, but obviously he could see us.
Daniel said something in Navajo.
From out of the darkness came a quiet voice: “Hosteen Begay?”
“Chee?” Daniel said.
I heard a faint rustle of underbrush, and then a man stepped onto the path.
In the dimness I couldn’t distinguish his features, but he was short, only a bit taller than Daniel Begay. He moved with a tight, alert springiness, like someone young, in his twenties or early thirties. The rifle he held—a Winchester lever action, it appeared to be—was pointed directly at my stomach.
“This is my friend,” Daniel said, indicating me with a small nod. “Joshua Croft.”
The rifle barrel lowered and the man nodded. “Gary Chee,” he said.
I nodded back and realized that my mouth was dry. A slug from a 30-30 Winchester can bring down a grizzly bear.
“Is he there?” Daniel Begay asked Chee.
“His truck, but not him. There are tracks.” He said something swift and guttural in Navajo.
Daniel Begay turned to me. “There’s a place near here. A few miles away, in the forest. A religious place, you understand? A shrine. The tracks go toward there. He went by himself.”
I asked Chee, “No sign of anybody else?”
“No.”
I asked Daniel Begay, “Do you think he’ll be coming back to the cabin?”
“Maybe.”
Chee said, “There’s food in the cabin. I looked with my flashlight. He’s coming back.”
Daniel Begay asked him, “You’re alone?”
“My brother drove over to the Wide Ruins road. In case they come that way.”
Daniel Begay nodded, turned to me. “The road back there, it goes on to the road to Wide Ruins.”
He turned back to Gary Chee. “Your car is still here.” It wasn’t a question: he’d seen two sets of tracks coming in, none going out.
Chee nodded.
Daniel told him. “Drive back to the Hollister road. When they come, you follow behind. Far behind. Don’t let them see you, okay? When they get near here, honk your horn. Then leave the car and track them on foot. Be very careful.”
No one asked my opinion and I didn’t offer it. Daniel Begay’s ancestors had been doing this sort of thing when mine were grumbling about the lord of the manor.
Chee nodded
. He said something in Navajo.
Daniel nodded, spoke some Navajo back to him.
Chee nodded again, turned to me, nodded good-bye, and turned and set off down the path, toward the cabin, a vague black form disappearing into a deeper blackness.
I asked Daniel Begay, “What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if he should kill them.”
I couldn’t make out his features, but I didn’t think they’d tell me anything if I could.
He said, “I told him, yes, if he had no choice.”
Before we reached the cabin, Gary Chee drove past us in an ancient canvas-topped Jeep, heading back the way we’d come. Only his parking lights were on.
The cabin was small, perhaps fifteen feet by fifteen, built of chinked pine logs and covered with a low roof sloping from front to back. It sat at a slight angle to the path, its wooden door and two small windows facing a clearing where an old long-bed pickup was parked. Around it, and behind, tall ponderosas loomed like gigantic cowled monks, mute and still, black against a star-filled sky.
When we got there, Daniel Begay and I had another argument. He wanted to go off into the woods, alone, to find Peter Yazzie. To talk to him. I thought this was unwise: dangerous at night, especially for an older man with a bad leg.
“At least let me come along,” I said.
He shook his head. “It’s a shrine,” he told me. “A holy place. You’re not allowed. You’re not allowed, even, to know where it is. I’m sorry.”
And so, as usual, Daniel Begay won.
He went off into the woods. I stumbled back through the darkness to the Subaru. I was feeling better now—we’d arrived ahead of Pablo and Ramon—but I still held the gun and I still listened carefully for sounds I didn’t want to hear.
I drove the station wagon onto the road again and then slowly forward sixty or seventy yards until I found another side trail. This one looked like nobody had used it in months—the entrance was fringed with summer brush, stripped bare now, spidery and black. I drove the wagon over it, winced as something rocky scraped at the undercarriage, then drove on another thirty feet or so, stopping where the track made a turn that concealed the car from the main road.
I always keep a few things on the floor behind the front seat. The result of a Boy Scout background. I took the sleeping bag and the canteen, and the bag of sandwiches. I carried the bag and the strap of the canteen in my left hand and the sleeping bag tucked under my left arm. Which left my gun hand free while I walked back to the cabin.
The front door was locked, dead-bolted, but I didn’t want to wait inside there anyway. Pablo and Ramon might drive directly down the pathway, park their car, and knock on the door, just like Avon ladies. As I’d told Daniel, so far as we knew they didn’t realize we were in the neighborhood. But if Grober had snipped Pablo’s wires, cutting him off from Luis, from everyone, Pablo might be getting edgy about now. And edginess might make him tricky.
I wanted a spot that gave me a good all-around view of the approaches to the cabin. A good field of fire.
I found it on a small rise below a ponderosa pine twenty yards south of the cabin. From here I could see the path, which ran east to west; could see the front of the building and its southern sides. Unless Pablo and Ramon knew exactly where I was, if they came anywhere near the cabin they’d have to show themselves.
They wouldn’t know where I was. In the shade of the ponderosa, so long as I remained still, I’d be invisible.
I spread out the sleeping bag on the far side of the rise, unzipped it partway, and climbed in, boots and windbreaker and all. I tugged the canteen and the sandwiches in after me—I might be here for a while, and I didn’t want them freezing.
The ground was hard and lumpy, the air was painfully cold. I wasn’t comfortable. But the goose-down bag was rated at zero degrees, Everest stuff, and I knew I could make it through the night. I settled in and began my wait.
The waiting is the hardest part. Lying there immobile as time becomes elastic and the seconds yawn slowly past. Growing drowsy, inattentive, until suddenly you jump, startled, at the rustle of bush, the gasp of wood creaking in the cold.
I ate a sandwich. Turkey and cheese. Hard to tell which was which. I drank some water.
Overhead, between the branches, I could see a patch of black sky clotted with stars. More stars in those few square feet than in an entire city sky. Each a sun; most with planets whistling round. And possibly, on some of those, oxygen, carbon, plants, animals, possibly even people. Maybe up there they were managing things better than we were down here.
Plenty of time to think when you’re lying out in the cold.
I thought about Alice Wright and wondered what it was she’d told her murderer. Wondered why she’d told him anything.
I thought about William Yazzie and remembered him huddled in that pathetic lifeless heap before the oven. Remembered the suppurating open wounds along his weathered flesh. The knife slashes, the black congealing blood.
I thought about Daniel Begay. On his say-so, a Navajo cop had let us race illegally across the Reservation. After a phone call from his nephew, made on his behalf, a roomful of people were prepared to swear they’d never seen us. At his direction, with no hesitation, a young Navajo had set off to follow two very dangerous men. Asking only of Daniel whether it was okay to kill them.
Some people on the Navajo police, he’d told me, wouldn’t mind seeing him in trouble. Why?
Who was he anyway?
From time to time, too, I thought about Rita. Remembered her crying, something I’d never seen her do before. Not even when she was shot. Not even when she learned her husband had died.
I wondered if she were all right. Wondered if she were awake right now, staring in the darkened room at the stiff angular silhouette of the wheel chair.
And I thought, quite a lot, about Pablo and Ramon.
Who had turned their key? Who had sent them up here?
If they arrived here before we left, or before Daniel Begay’s Navajo-cop-nephew showed, I knew I’d probably have to kill them. Or try to. They likely wouldn’t leave me any choice.
I don’t care for the idea of taking a life. No one’s ever mistaken me for God.
I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. I told myself they wouldn’t start up the dirt road until dawn. Told myself they’d be coming from the west, the same way Daniel and I had, come. Told myself that in the Ford they’d take at least two or three hours to get here. Told myself that Daniel Begay would be back soon with Peter Yazzie, and that all of us could take off to the east, toward the Wide Ruins road, before Pablo and Ramon turned up. Told myself that if they did turn up sooner, Gary Chee’s horn would warn us.
I was wrong about almost all of this.
23
Rita said, “What’s the matter, Joshua?”
I said, “I’m getting too old for this shit, Rita.”
We were walking near Diablo Canyon along the bank of the Rio Grande. Wild grasses whispered at our ankles; the river giggled and chortled. To the northeast, beyond the brown expanse of water, beyond the tawny sandbars and the shimmering eddies where sunlight flashed, beyond the green blur of cottonwoods, a single flat white cloud lay impaled on the gray peaks of Bandelier.
My shoulders were hunched, my hands were in my pockets. Rita held onto my arm. She wore a blue silk blouse, a long black skirt.
She smiled. “Too old?”
“You know you’re too old,” I said, “when everyone you meet reminds you of someone else. When everything you do, you’ve done before.”
She laughed lightly, head against my shoulder, sunlight flickering down her hair. “No, Joshua,” she said, and squeezed my arm. She looked up at me. “That’s not what it is. You’re just starting to recognize some of the themes.”
I turned to her, frowning. “Themes?”
“Themes. Like in a piece of classical music. Don’t you see? The movements repeat themselves, sometimes the same and sometimes as a variation, an elaboratio
n. It’s the repetition of the parts, and their connection, that helps create the beauty of the whole. Unless you can recognize the themes, you can’t understand the music. You can’t learn.”
“Learn what?”
“Learn—”
She stumbled then, a rock, a hole, something snatching at her foot. Her mouth opened in surprise and she began to do down, body slumping away from me. I reached for her, frightened, and then I was falling too, and the ground was a long way off and a long time passed before I hit it, and by then Rita was gone.
I opened my eyes with a start. Gray light seeped down through the twisted, crowded arms of the ponderosa. Color had returned to the universe, but reluctantly: drab pale browns and dingy greens. The world seemed washed-out and exhausted, as though the effort of surviving the night had left it drained. The squat log cabin under the huddle of pines looked abandoned, derelict.
I was still lying on my stomach. The pistol was still in my hand; I’d fallen asleep holding it. I scowled: angry with myself.
An instant later I was asking myself what it was that had awakened me.
The quiet was absolute. Nothing moved anywhere. And then I sensed, rather than heard, something behind me.
Flipping away the sleeping bag, I wheeled around, brought up the gun.
Ten feet off, Daniel Begay stood leaning on his cane, watching me.
I let out my breath in a rush. “Jesus Christ, Daniel.” I lowered the pistol. I wasn’t nervous. My heart always started slamming against my ribs about this time every morning.
He made his small faint smile. “He’s in the house. Peter Yazzie.” The words made little puffs of vapor in the cold.
I sat up more slowly than I would’ve liked; the muscles of my back had locked together. “The two of you came back,” I said, “and he went inside, without me hearing it?”
He shrugged. “We didn’t want to wake you up.”
“You knew where I was?”
Another shrug. “It was the only good place to be.”
Given enough time, I might possibly learn to resent Daniel Begay.
At Ease with the Dead Page 18