Maybe it was the wink of early morning sunlight on chrome, maybe the circling crows, but his eyes picked out the car in an instant. A chill hit him when he saw the white roof. Few folks out here had cars, and he knew of only one with a white roof. Bybee slowed and turned onto the dirt trail, and a minute later pulled to a stop behind Deputy Glen Parsons’ patrol car. As he stepped out a cloud of crows lifted off a shape lying in the shade near the front tire, screeching their indignation at being disturbed in their meal, black feathers drifting down from the abrupt departure. Sand and rock crunched under his boots as he approached his fallen deputy, and he felt a blackness surge within him. He crouched beside the twenty-five year old, his eyes welling as he took the pistol from the stiff grip and checked the cylinder. Good boy. He’d gotten off four rounds before being gut shot, and though Bybee hoped he had hit his killer, he could see that someone had stripped Glen naked. It was a depraved defilement which he struggled to understand.
The sheriff sighed deeply, the sound of a much older man, and stood, turning slowly and squinting, trying to make sense of it. An auto stop gone wrong? Why so far down this dirt track, why not the side of the road? Had Glen seen something out here and pulled in? Bybee checked the ground, looking for tire tracks and finding only the Pontiac’s. He saw the broken liquor bottle, saw a confused shuffle of boot prints and bare feet which didn’t add up. Inside the car he found Glen’s uniform trousers wadded up on the front seat. In the back was a long, Navajo skirt with a torn waistband.
As he looked around once more, a scrap of color out among the sage and cactus caught his eye, a flutter of movement. More crows took flight as Bybee approached, and he ached to find a dead man, a stranger who had murdered Glen but then succumbed to his deputy’s bullets. Instead he found himself standing over the body of a girl lying face down. One bullet wound low in her back was exposed, much picked-at by the crows. The other was hidden behind a bloody shred of blouse. What in the world had happened here? He didn’t like the answer which kept coming back to that question.
“I trust in your strength, Lord,” he whispered, and then began the grim task ahead of him.
An hour later he was once more on the road, his heart heavy, his beliefs violently shaken. The Pontiac ran low at the rear, and the tarp covering what was in the trunk couldn’t keep out the rising smell. Bybee drove with all the windows down.
He might have missed the man sleeping in the shade of a rocky outcropping beside the road, had it not been for the coyote. The bone-thin animal, patchy with mange, darted out into the road from the right, making the sheriff stomp the brakes and lock the tires in a smoking skid. The police cruiser came to a stop at an angle on the highway and stalled out, Bybee gripping the wheel so hard it could have cracked. Through the windshield not ten feet away was the sandstone outcropping, a figure stretched out beneath it.
The sheriff left the car in the road and walked over, nudging the sleeper with a boot. He was a Navajo, a farm worker or drifter by the poor condition of his clothes and faded jacket, and as the man snorted and rolled over to face him, Bybee saw the blood on his shirt.
The sheriff gave the man a sharp kick to the leg, his pistol in hand. “Ease up out of there real slow, fella.” He clicked the hammer back. “Real slow.”
Jumping Crow squinted at the harsh daylight and raised a hand to shield his eyes. A white man with a gun. A lawman. He did as he was told and climbed to his feet.
Sheriff Bybee recognized him from around the county. Tom-something? Crow? “Turn around, hands behind your back.” The Navajo turned slowly, and the sheriff rammed the muzzle of the revolver hard against the base of his skull. “Gimme some trouble. I’ll put your brains on the rock.”
Jumping Crow didn’t give him any trouble, just put his wrists together slowly so the white man could lock on handcuffs. Then he was pushed to the back of the police car and shoved inside, the door slamming hard behind him.
“Gimme your name, fella,” Bybee said, getting the Pontiac moving towards Bluff again.
“Thomas Jumping Crow.”
“You kill my deputy?”
A long pause. “Yes, sir.”
Bybee struggled not to take the Lord’s name in vain. “He caught you doing something awful, didn’t he?”
Another pause. “No, sir.”
“Liar!” Bybee pounded the steering wheel. “He caught you raping that girl. Then you killed him and her, and made it up to look like something else. Right? You answer me!”
Jumping Crow began to weep. “I…I did such a bad thing.”
“You’re flippin’ right you did, fella!”
Jumping Crow was crying harder, his head down. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t give a gol-durn for your sorry. You just shut up back there before I decide I’m not a decent man.” Bybee was flushed and his hands trembled on the steering wheel, his mind filled with the images from the deputy’s car, the crows rising from the girl’s corpse, wondering how he would explain it all to Glen’s folks, to his own wife. And there were darker thoughts, ones which he forced away.
The morning desert rolled by. The sheriff spoke in a quieter voice. “You’re gonna swing for this, Navajo. Gonna tie the knot myself.” Utah had two approved forms of death penalty for aggravated murder; hanging and firing squad, though there hadn’t been a hanging since 1912. The most recent murder of a police officer was in 1923, a Salt Lake City patrolman named David Crowther, shot down by a man with a concealed .32 revolver. It took three years before the shooter was tracked down in California, returned to Utah and convicted. Bybee was a young deputy himself then, and accompanied his sheriff on the long drive to Salt Lake to show rural law enforcement’s support of the execution by firing squad. They waited outside the county courthouse with a large contingent of lawmen from across the state, while sentence was carried out in a fenced lot out behind the building.
For a time, from 1851 to 1888, Utah had a third method of execution; beheading. In theory it was to be carried out by the sheriff of the county in which the condemned was convicted, but there was no record of it actually being used anywhere in the state. No official record, that was. In law enforcement circles there was a well-circulated story – accepted as fact – that in 1887 a man known as Navajo Frank was beheaded by the Kanab County Sheriff after being convicted on a charge of “Raping a white woman.” The weapon of execution was said to be a common axe the sheriff retrieved from his own woodpile.
Bybee glanced up at his mirror to see the man seated behind him. Jumping Crow was quiet, his head down, shoulders slumped. He didn’t even deny the murder. The sheriff had no illusions of how a jury would receive all this, for though the white communities were neighbors with the Navajos, there was no great love between them. In the eyes of San Juan County’s residents, the Indians took their rightful place among the other dusky-skinned folks; people of low moral character, ignorant, dirty and prone to savage abandon. If there was one story which articulated this feeling it was the well-known tale of Latigo Gordon.
In the late 1800’s, Gordon was a cattle company foreman who specialized in harassing farmers by burning hay sheds and barns and even houses. When summoned to the county seat to answer for his offenses, he took a shot at a county commissioner’s son. He missed, and was charged with both mayhem and attempted murder. A jury acquitted him, citing that no one had ever impeached Gordon’s reputation before this one event, and that even though he fired his pistol at a man, he hadn’t meant to do any harm. As far as the mayhem charge, well, they were mostly Navajo farms he burned. Latigo Gordon went free.
Several years later, Gordon courted a young lady in Blanding, and received permission from her father to marry, but not before insisting Gordon have a conversation with the bishop.
“Have you ever killed a man?” the bishop asked.
“I don’t think so,” Latigo replied, “unless you count the nigger I caught bathing in a watering hole, and kept pushing his head under until he didn’t come up again. But that probably would
n’t count.” Apparently it didn’t, because the wedding went ahead as planned with the bishop himself presiding over the ceremony.
No, there would be little sympathy for a Navajo drifter who murdered a well-liked, church-going deputy.
Bybee’s patrol car bumped over railroad tracks, the sign that he was within the Bluff town limits. “When we stop,” the sheriff said, “I’m gonna move you inside to a cell, and you’re gonna be as nice and quiet as you are right now, understand?”
Jumping Crow said nothing, just kept his head down.
In his law enforcement career, this was the worst Edgar Bybee had seen. Twenty years earlier he had been a much younger man, fighting the Kaiser in the trenches of France. The things he had seen still lived within him, though somewhat tempered by time and peace, wife and home and church. Still, they were awful sights, and he had no trouble recalling them. Yet somehow, the sight of that murdered boy and the half-naked girl out in the sagebrush was worse. The carnage of war was to be expected, but this…this violation… It was something beyond sin.
Glen Parsons had been a San Juan County deputy for five years, hired by Bybee personally, as much a son as an employee. His parents had a tidy little farm in Blanding, and Glen could have worked the land beside his daddy if he’d wanted to, but he chose the law instead. A single man with good prospects, he lived in a little apartment attached to the Bluff Jail, provided by the county. Glen was a deacon in the church, a scout leader, even pitched in with church-sponsored food and clothing drives for the Navajos. A good boy, a respected boy. A fine deputy.
And a rapist and a murderer. These words had been circling the edges of Bybee’s conscious thought like coyotes watching a sick antelope, waiting for it to weaken before pouncing. Now they burned before him, not to be ignored.
Edgar Bybee was a simple man, but no fool by anyone’s definition. Despite what he had said to Jumping Crow, words spoken in anger and grief, he knew what he had seen. Those bare footprints bore undeniable testimony to the fact that Glen Parsons was bare-assed before being shot. His nakedness, plus the girl’s, the torn clothing, the car out on a remote trail in the middle of the night…bullets fired, and bullets finding their marks. No, Edgar Bybee was no fool, but he was confused. How did the Navajo man entered into all this, and why did he admit to killing the deputy?
Rapist. Murderer. It was all just too horrible to be true. Glen Parsons? He’d sat beside Bybee and his wife in church, taken Sunday meals together. The county had trusted him. Bybee trusted him. Dear Lord.
He needed guidance, and knew he would find it in the little town of Bluff.
If there was a word to describe Bluff, dry was it. The little cluster of brick and tin roof structures, straddling the road with a population of seventy, boasted a single cross street with a four-way stop sign. It baked still and silent under the morning sun, heading for a July high of ninety-five degrees, a pocket of humanity in an expanse of grey-tan monotony. By noon the road would be simmering with a curtain of distorting waves.
Wind blew down the street, making the ESSO sign swing over the town’s only gas station, and kicking up a pair of dust devils which danced across the pavement. In the back of the Pontiac, Thomas Jumping Crow looked at them. He would never name a whirlwind, nor would he throw a rock at one. Both invited evil spirits.
The sheriff pulled behind a low, flat brick building and into a packed dirt yard, easing the car into a stretch of shade cast by a detached garage. He pulled Thomas from the back seat and gripped his upper arm tightly as he walked him inside. The Bluff jail was a single room with a creaky wooden floor, a desk and several well broken-in wooden chairs, a pair of file cabinets and a padlocked rifle locker. One corner of the room was dominated by a large, iron-barred cell with a small barred window. The door to the attached deputy’s apartment was closed.
Bybee produced a big iron key from the desk drawer and unlocked the cell, moving Thomas inside before taking off the handcuffs. The door made a hollow, metal bang when he closed it behind the Navajo. Thomas sat down on a bare cot next to a toilet bowl.
“I’ll be back,” the sheriff said, shoving the cell key into a pants pocket. “Don’t you get up to any foolishness, Tom Jumping Crow. You’re in enough trouble already.” Jumping Crow stood on his cot to look out the window, watching the sheriff as he walked across the hard-packed yard and out of sight, his head down.
He sat back down and looked out at the deputy’s office beyond the bars. A calendar showing a photo of a sleek black car on the street of some big city hung over the desk, JULY 1938 beneath it. On the desk was an empty inbox, a pencil cup and a coffee mug with a blue rim. Dust motes filled the sunbeams falling through a pair of windows, and outside a desert wind buffeted the brick building. Thomas hadn’t whistled, hadn’t looked up at moving clouds or pointed his finger at a rainbow, but the wind had come just the same.
“A wind blows through every man,” the Elder told him long ago. “Your wind is a dark wind, Jumping Crow.” He was eight when that was said to him, and not for the last time. He could still picture the leathery face and dark eyes of the Elder, towering over him and looking as old as a weathered mesa. It was easy to summon up the image, but it was quickly replaced by the running girl falling to the ground, and the face of the boy the moment the pistol went off. He wished he still had his bottle. It was the one magical elixir which could chase away the spirits of his past.
Thomas was born in 1898 at a trading post in Cortez, Colorado. There was much anticipation over the birth, for the tribal medicine man claimed to have seen signs and portents which predicted the child would be special, touched by the spirit world. This was both a source of pride and fear for his parents, for it could mean many things in the Navajo culture, not all of them good. For this reason the medicine man insisted on attending the birth, standing in a corner and chanting throughout the delivery.
Thomas had no sooner been placed in his mother’s arms when a crow flew through an open window and landed on the infant’s head, wings flapping, black feathers dropping onto the bedcover, and one landing on the baby’s chest. The Navajos recoiled, and the medicine man bellowed a string of angry chants, waving his arms. The bird screeched and lifted off, circling the room once and flying back out the window. A moment of silence followed, and then Thomas’s mother burst into tears, thrusting the infant out at arm’s length and shaking her head. The others in the room, even her husband, stepped back, refusing to take the child.
It was the medicine man who named him Nizah Ga’gii, Jumping Crow. Navajo do not point at anything, for it was considered an act of aggression and a serious taboo, choosing instead to make a kissing gesture with the lips in the intended direction. But there in the hot little birthing room the medicine man did point, leveling a bony finger at the crying infant and whispering, “Skinwalker.”
And with that single word, Thomas Jumping Crow was condemned.
He stared out through the bars, watching a stink bug slowly trundle over the plank floor, passing through a patch of sunlight. “Where are you going, brother?” he asked. “Home to your family?”
The beetle chose not to answer, and kept walking.
That young girl in the car must have had a family. He wondered if they would be missing her. Had she run away with her head filled with dreams of California and movie pictures, hitchhiking on a desert road? Her family would be worried, certainly, but even more ashamed of what she had done, and how she had met her end. Navajo were a complex people, easily disgraced.
The stink bug left the sunbeam and wandered towards the bars. Thomas sat and watched.
Shame. It was a concept he understood well. To the Navajo, everything was sacred, and had its place in the world. They believed it was man’s responsibility to respect that balance. Skinwalkers were an abomination, as obscene disruption to that balance, and despite how they might appear on the outside, they could never be trusted. The Navajo avoided and often would not speak with them, and they were not permitted to marry. No one would accept a
skinwalker as a neighbor, and they were not welcome at tribal ceremonies. And yet the Navajo stopped short of completely shunning them, permitting a solitary existence on the fringe of their communities until the skinwalker chose to move on by his own accord.
Skinwalkers, Navajos who held an evil spirit, capable of taking the form of animals in order to do harm to men. Crows were especially reviled, as they were considered the spies and helpers of witches. Not that Jumping Crow had ever changed into an animal, or anything else for that matter. But as the medicine men taught and the Elders maintained, a Navajo so afflicted, who broke the laws and beliefs of the people, was forever in jeopardy of the evil spirit gaining control and pulling him into the Night World. The difference between man and beast was only a broken taboo away, but which taboo and how often broken remained a mystery.
“I have broken taboos,” he whispered to the stink bug, which had stopped at the bars. “I have blown on hot corn, and not lost my teeth. I shook a pinion tree but a bear did not get me, and I put salt on the pinion nuts but it did not snow.” He looked at the floor. Jumping Crow had killed a porcupine and waited for a nosebleed which didn’t come. Once he even came upon a rattlesnake curled up on a nighttime rock, drinking in the heat of the day. Snakes represented the Lightning People, and were to be respected and avoided. Thomas laughed at the snake, but his legs didn’t go crooked. Then he killed it with a rock, which should have triggered a drought, but the rains continued to fall and the rivers continued to flow. In fact, before he was twenty, he tried to break nearly every Navajo taboo he had been taught, hoping to bring about the dreaded change and end his angry, lonely existence. Nothing worked, and in the process he fell away from his beliefs entirely.
Then in 1918 an influenza epidemic swept through the Southwest, wiping away entire Navajo villages and families. Thomas was living in White Mountain at the time, in a shack at the edge of sheep lands, scraping out a living helping with the flock – butchering, mostly. The influenza killed every living soul in the village, leaving Thomas untouched. It was then that he began to believe again, began to understand the powerful darkness waiting silently inside him, strong enough to resist disease and death. He stopped breaking Navajo taboos after that, stopped trying to provoke the skinwalker, turning to drink in order not to think about what he might become.
In The Falling Light Page 21