by J. M. Hayes
“Yes,” Parker breathed, intrigued. “But what’s this got to do with me?”
Sasaki hoped he already knew. He reached into his Levis, pulled out a thick roll of bills, and peeled off $100. It didn’t make much of a dent.
“We would like to support your efforts in Jujul’s behalf,” Sasaki said, placing the bills on the desk. “Shall we call this a contribution to his defense fund?”
“We can call it whatever you want as long as I don’t have to kill anyone to keep it.”
“We also believe you know, or can learn, Jujul’s whereabouts. We believe you can put me in contact with him, smuggle me into his camp. If you can do that, Mr. Parker, we would also like to make a contribution to your campaign fund, anonymously of course. The amount we had in mind was $500. Additionally, once I’m in place, I shall likely contribute to your campaign’s success in other, even more concrete ways. What do you say, Mr. Parker, are you interested in assisting us in these matters?”
Six hundred dollars came close to equalling John Parker’s total earnings for 1940. He reached out and made the hundred disappear.
“Your timing is impeccable, Mr. Begay. I assume you don’t need a receipt. Honor among thieves, or should that be Indians? Just when would you like to begin your scenic vacation?”
“Now would be fine, Mr. Parker.”
The lawyer smiled, appreciating his client’s sense of humor, until he realized the man didn’t have one.
“I’ll have to make some arrangements.”
“Then make them, Mr. Parker. The moment you and I set foot in Jujul’s village your campaign fund will become richer.”
“I didn’t realize you expected my company,” Parker observed, “but there are good reasons, your cash included, to spend a few days among my future constituents.
“You really aren’t with the government, are you?” He stared hard at Sasaki for a moment. “Nah! The Feds couldn’t afford to pay bribes so large for potatoes so small, especially not when they’re already close. Besides, I guess it doesn’t really matter, not as long as your cash is good and I get to keep it.”
“I assure you, Mr. Parker, it is good and you will keep it.”
“All right, Mr. Begay,” Parker said. “Meet me here at the office first thing in the morning and we’ll go find our guide.”
“I’ll be here, Mr. Parker,” Sasaki replied, “then we’ll see to your future.”
Humming About the Desert Sky
The Army Air Corps didn’t have aerial photographs of the Papago Reservation, but they told J.D. they’d be happy to take some if his office would authorize the necessary funds. He checked petty cash and decided he could maybe afford to send someone with a borrowed Kodak Brownie out to a high spot on the reservation. There was enough for a roll of film, but he wasn’t sure they could manage the price of developing. Scratch one great idea.
Great idea number two held up all the way to Friday when Hank Lewis came back to town. Lewis was thrilled at the excuse to fire up his biplane and go humming about the desert sky in pursuit of the forces opposed to law and order. J.D. promised to pay for the gas, then started worrying just how much an airplane might use. Whatever wasn’t in the petty cash drawer would come out of his pocket.
They took off from Davis-Monthan Airfield about mid-morning and headed west. Things didn’t look the same from the front seat of an open cockpit biplane and it took J.D. longer than he’d expected to locate Bill Burns’ ranch. Hank didn’t care. He was having a ball, buzzing any landmark that might help his passenger decide which way they should be going. Hank’s goal in flying seemed to be to create abject terror in his passengers, reducing them to quivering blobs of jelly who, on landing, must be removed from their seat with a small spoon and a damp cloth. He made a habit of avoiding, by the narrowest of margins, ripping the wings off on occasional peaks or tall saguaros. J.D. gave strong consideration to turning in his seat and vomiting his breakfast in Lewis’ general direction. When he discovered the effort would require him to loosen his seat belt in order to achieve a proper launch angle, he abandoned the idea.
J.D. tried suggesting Lewis maintain a steadier course a few times, but he couldn’t be heard over the roar of the engine. So, Hank shut it off. He had so much trouble getting it started again that J.D. avoided further verbal requests and thereafter made do with pointing. When they found Burns’ ranch, Hank took them down between the buildings, close enough that J.D. could have spit on any of them if his mouth hadn’t been so dry. Bill, Edith, and their hands ran outside and watched the plane make a repeat pass while Hank waved grandly as J.D. hung on for dear life. Lewis pulled out of the farm yard and put the plane into a giant loop which must have impressed the hell out of the audience. J.D. almost took a blind shot with breakfast. When they were flying level and he could force himself to let go for just a moment, he pointed again—more or less straight up and with only his middle finger. He thought he heard Hank laughing, even over the howling wind and exhaust.
Even having been there, J.D. had a tough time finding Fat Wolf’s village, but then losing his map somewhere in the middle of a barrel roll didn’t help. They buzzed about the desert in the vicinity of where the place should have been for almost an hour before they found it. They located two other villages as well, and Hank gave each a thrill by roaring through about head high. It didn’t do much for their popularity with the Papagos who then had to retrieve scattered livestock. One of the villages even took a couple of pot shots at them. In another, the children waved happily while their parents stood around looking sullen, or wisely scattered so as to be out of the way of any wreckage.
Finally they were low on gas and Hank took them home. When they landed J.D. thanked him, insincerely, and left to compare the position of the two villages they’d found with that of known villages on reservation maps. He’d considered spreading Hank’s nose as broadly across his face as the pilot’s grin, but when he climbed out of the plane he felt so weak that it was all he could do to walk, rather than crawl, in the direction of his Ford. He decided to save any revenge until he could catch Lewis off guard, and he was certain he would never again have to go up in that fragile framework of cloth and wires.
Great idea number two lost most of the attributes of greatness when he got back to the office and checked the locations of the villages they’d found against those on the BIA map. Nothing matched. He’d known Fat Wolf’s village wouldn’t because he’d checked it after their visit. It wasn’t because they’d moved either. Bill Burns had been visiting them in that location for years. The BIA showed Fat Wolf about twelve miles further southwest. They listed eight villages in the immediate vicinity of where he and Hank had been flying, none in the places they’d discovered from the air. It was nice to know the tradition of carefully avoided infallibility extended to other divisions of the federal bureaucracy, but it made his results doubly negative. First, he had no accurate maps. Second, if they only found three of eight, he’d also proved they couldn’t locate villages from the air with any reliability.
As a sort of double check, he called Jesus and asked him how many villages were probably within twenty miles of Fat Wolf’s. J.D. felt a little better at his guess of six, but that still put him at only about fifty percent. He explained how he’d spent the morning and Jesus made one sound suggestion.
“If you want to go village hunting, try it just after dawn on a cold, still morning when wood smoke will hang in the air and give you an easier target.”
J.D. promised to keep it in mind, but if they couldn’t tell which villages belonged where they were and which didn’t, he wasn’t sure he cared how many he could find. Especially not if it had to be done from the cockpit of Hank Lewis’ biplane.
Jesus had heard further confirmation from his contacts on the reservation. Jujul’s band was almost certainly within a day’s ride of Fat Wolf’s village. His people had been using it for trade and as a listening post recently. The same word came from several other villages in the immediate area.
&
nbsp; And there was one other thing. “Have you gotten any inquiries about a possible Japanese spy?” Jesus asked. “We got a call from the FBI that makes me think they’ve lost track of some potentially dangerous Oriental on the west coast. Nothing real concrete. You know those guys, they want to know what you know, but not if they have to tell you what’s going on first.”
“Not a thing,” J.D. replied. “All I hear are the rumors. Half of Tucson thinks every Jap who’s here is working for the Emperor and secretly preparing to kill their White neighbors as soon as the invasion begins. If the Bureau knows about a real spy, they haven’t seen fit to tell the U.S. Marshal’s Office about it. But then cooperation between our agencies isn’t what it should be. Why? You get some indication they thought he might be coming our way?”
“State doesn’t talk much to us county boys either,” Jesus confided. “No, I don’t think the Bureau has the foggiest idea where he’s going or why. He might not even exist. I just think they were fishing for leads. No reason the FBI can’t be as paranoid about the Japanese as the rest of the country. Just can’t remember them ever contacting us about anything like this before. Made me curious so I thought I’d ask.”
J.D. promised he’d let the deputy know if he did hear anything, thanked him and hung up. It was time for great idea number three. Only problem was he didn’t have one. At least not beyond walking down to the end of the hall to see if Tucson’s resident G-man was in the FBI’s office. When he wasn’t, J.D. went back and paced around his office for a few hours, chewed some pencils to death and, finally, gave up.
It was Friday night. Short of declaring some sort of national emergency, he wasn’t going to get any assistance from the other agencies involved in the hunt until after the weekend. Maybe by then he’d have come up with a way to tackle the problem. It didn’t comfort him to realize that combining Jesus’ idea and Hank Lewis’ tortuous form of aviation was the only potentially useful approach he had. He could produce a map of his own. Then he and Jesus could start a tour of those villages. It would give Jujul plenty of warning they were coming and time to arrange not to be found. If he was the sort, he might also arrange to eliminate a couple of the more persistent folks who were looking for him. One of those villages on the new map would probably be Jujul’s. Keeping the operation small gave J.D. a better chance to meet the man without the complications of tribal policemen, federal troops, or bumbling representatives of the BIA. It would likely keep Mary safer and avoid a big, violent confrontation, but it could also put his life, and Jesus’, on the line. His plans were full of little flaws like that. He was willing to take the risk, but he’d have to talk to the deputy sheriff before taking that idea any further. Maybe he’d think of something he liked better in the meantime.
He bit through another pencil and decided it was time to go eat something more wholesome. A concentrated effort to relax and stop worrying for the evening was in order. He let himself out of the office and went across the corner to the Santa Rita Hotel. A couple of drinks, an expensive dinner, and maybe a movie would fill his prescription. With luck he might wake up in the morning with a happy solution firmly in mind. If not, there were plenty of pencils left in the office.
The best steak in the house wasn’t exactly in his budget, but then Hank Lewis had been so delighted at his condition when they landed he’d forgotten to collect the promised gas money.
J.D. had almost finished his meal when Larry Spencer and a spectacular redhead were ushered to a nearby table. When he noticed J.D., Larry turned a few shades brighter than her hair. If he was planning to make a habit of cheating on Mary, he was going to have to learn to be a lot more casual about it.
Larry brought the girl over and introduced her. She was also an archaeology student. They’d just finished reconstructing a delicate Hohokam pot so he was going to buy her supper by way of celebrating. He went on babbling away like that for so long J.D. thought he or the redhead would have to use force to shut Larry up.
J.D. didn’t recognize her. Maybe, if she’d take her clothes off and stand in a light that silhouetted her obviously excellent figure, he could be sure. Maybe not. But her throaty voice was definitely familiar. The last time he’d heard one like it, it had wanted to go swimming.
This time it just said, “Hello, J.D., pleased to meet you.” Her eyes suggested she might enjoy swimming with him too, if only he’d ask nicely. He had the feeling she’d done more than her share of “swimming.” J.D. preferred her in Larry’s company. It improved his chances with Mary, whose mind interested him as much as her body, which interested him a great deal. The redhead probably had a good mind too, but it was pretty clearly focused on self-gratification. J.D. hoped that self would want to continue to gratify on Larry long enough to help him take Mary away.
He suddenly neither liked nor respected Larry Spencer very much. That helped him shed some of the guilt he’d been carrying around.
They went back to their table where Larry continued to look sheepish. J.D. couldn’t take it any more. He denied himself the dessert he’d intended and left. He bought a copy of the evening Citizen in the lobby and looked for a suitably innocuous movie. The fare at the nearby Fox looked like it would fill the bill. He decided to make do with some hot buttered popcorn and a soda for his dessert. Larry’s would be tastier, but much more dangerous.
Running Out of Time
Mary felt like an idiot. Not inappropriate, since she’d just proved she was, at least in her own eyes. J.D. had spent hours discussing Jujul and his people with her before she began her field work and she’d walked right into his camp without even the ghost of a suspicion. Jujul was an old man, white-haired, very tall and slender for a Papago. He walked with a limp and had a scar on his temple. He was a Siwani Mahkai. There weren’t so very many men of that rank among the O’odham. So he’d grown a sparse beard, big deal. He still fit the description in every other respect, and she’d never even dreamed he might be the man J.D. was looking for.
She should have worked it out, she told herself. Nobody ever visited them. She knew the Papago were a friendly, gregarious people. She’d been mildly surprised that no relatives drifted in and out of the village, but she’d been so involved in what she was learning she dismissed it. It was something to puzzle over later, when she was established and keeping accurate notes.
Idiot, she decided, was too mild a word.
And yet, she couldn’t help feeling sympathy for Jujul, in spite of his having made a fool of her. It had been a clever way to find out what he was up against. Thanks to her, he was better able to make decisions now.
She still felt like a moron. It helped a little when Jujul explained that the initiation ceremony, though it was used to put her off guard and intrigue her enough to stay around while he picked her brain, had still been real. They hadn’t invented games and rituals to keep her amused. The things she’d been shown and involved in were legitimate parts of O’odham culture.
He explained again how a village should be united in its decisions, and how difficult it had been to persuade them to take her in at all. That depriving her of any Anglo artifacts had been their way of assuring themselves she had no means to communicate with the outside world in case she was a spy, or if she began to suspect.
He told her how J.D. had come to their village the first time and left a card and tobacco behind. How J.D. was apparently closing in on them, having worked out that she was with their band. How he and Bill Burns and others had trailed the men Jujul sent to Burns’ ranch a few days before. She’d been begging him to let her send out some sort of message, knowing Larry and J.D. and her friends and family were apt to be concerned, especially when they didn’t even get word from her over the holidays. He told her about the failed ruse of the lost letters.
He had good reasons to mistrust the Anglos, he explained, though he avoided spelling them out. In spite of that, he was coming to believe he had no real choice. He did trust her, and though the village was not yet in agreement with what he was doing, they we
re running out of time. He felt he had to act.
“I want to talk to this J.D. Fitzpatrick, face to face,” he said. “Can you take me to him? Will he talk to me as one free man to another? If I need to carry his words away with me to weigh them, will he let me go?”
“Yes,” Mary said. She guaranteed it. She hoped she was right.
Jujul removed a pack from one of the horses and unrolled it. It contained the clothing she’d worn to hike into the desert so long ago, as well as the notebooks and personal items she’d carried in her knapsack.
“I thought you might have difficulty moving freely among your people without arousing curiosity if you had to wear O’odham clothing. We shall probably cause enough consternation because of me, but I am an old man, too set in my ways to try to hide them.”
“If we’re lucky, nobody but J.D. will see us,” she told him, “but, just in case.”
Mary changed behind some rocks. Her retrieved wardrobe felt strange, alien and confining. When she was ready Jujul produced a packet of letters his men had brought back from Burns’ ranch. She thumbed through them. There were several from Larry, some official communications from the Department of Anthropology, a few from her family, but none from J.D. That disappointed her. She wondered if she’d misjudged his interest. Was she spending half her time wrestling with her conscience over something she’d only imagined? Of course she hadn’t told him goodbye, nor even sent him a farewell note. It wasn’t the best way to encourage a man. Why should he have written? And he’d apparently learned she was in Jujul’s camp. If he didn’t expect word to get through to her he wouldn’t write. At least he was looking for her. Or was he? Was he only looking for Jujul and she just happened to be in the same place? She stuffed the letters, unread, in a jacket pocket, and they mounted and set out.