The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  “No,” I said and hung up the phone.

  10

  BILL WILEY AND Juan Sololobo were one—or two or as many emotions and identities as could be contained in his cordy body. I’d seen the sober Sololobo and the drunk Sololobo and I’d seen the sober side apologize for the drunk. He’d entered fully into the spirit of each, exactly who he was pretending to be at the moment he was pretending to be it. Had I seen Bill Wiley yet? I wondered.

  Bob Bartel had been a simpler person, a government employee, not an outlaw, a guy who was working to stay in the middle class, give his kids an education and do right by our wildlife, a gentle man who had a sense of humor, too, who had a family and a wife who probably loved him. He’d be an easy man to love. He should have lived to be ninety, died in his sleep, spent his declining years talking to trees, taming birds and playing with his great-grandchildren. I asked myself the question that always comes up when someone dies before their time. How old had Bob Bartel been anyway? Early forties, I guessed, a few years older than me. Smarter in some ways, dumber in others. I, for example, know better than to trust my fellow man, and it was one of them that killed him. Maybe one that he trusted, probably one that he knew anyway; most murderers are known to their victims, at least in rural America.

  If the murderer had been Bill Wiley/Juan Sololobo, we were in deep trouble. Me, because I’d have to defend a man who might have been under the influence of my own tequila when he committed the act. If he’d drunk all he’d stolen that first afternoon, he would have been comatose instead of angry. He must have saved some tequila, but what had he done with it? Drunk it the night Bob Bartel died? Juan was also in trouble, because I’d have to defend him and because trouble seemed to be his middle name. I decided to wait a while before I called March with the worse news.

  I took a look through my desk calendar—nothing there that couldn’t be handled early next week by Brink, although I’d probably have to beat up on him to get him to do it. Then there was the Kid. Getting out of town a lot was easing the transition from almost living together to not, but I would have gone anyway. That’s the kind of woman/lawyer I was. Did the Kid care that we were drifting back to the way things were? Did he prefer it that way? Had he even noticed? He couldn’t complain about last night anyway. If that’s what separation does, who’s to complain? I read in a women’s magazine in a waiting room somewhere that couples who argue have the best sex. There’s a certain creative tension between people who don’t agree about everything, don’t have the same interests and backgrounds. The Kid and I didn’t always agree, didn’t always disagree, but no one would ever accuse us of being locked in place by similar backgrounds. I suppose you could get to a point in life where you could do without that kind of tension, where you’d want a man who was your clone. But a lawyer? I’d been down that boring highway. I called and invited the Kid for dinner.

  “You’re going back to Soledad?” he asked me later.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my client is about to be accused of murder.”

  “Why do this April and his friends always get accused of murder?”

  “Maybe it’s because they care about wildlife and that can be an unpopular cause in this country.”

  “Did he do it?”

  “He says he didn’t.”

  “And you? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  ******

  I went a different route this trip, getting off I-25 at San Antonio. There’s a cafe in San Antonio. I was hungry, but the place had no windows and I don’t go into bars alone that I can’t see the inside of. I was on Route 380 heading for 54 and 70, which pass the White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base, that great football field in the sky where our modern-day gladiators prepare for war. Driving down this lonesome highway was a tribute to Bob Bartel because the Sierra Oscura at White Sands was where he had done his study for the federal government, where he had recommended that the lobo be reintroduced and where he had hoped to hear wild wolves howling before he died. The fact that missiles were tested at White Sands didn’t necessarily make it an unsuitable wolf habitat. It was a vast area, 3,200 square miles, as Jayne had said, and the largest military installation in the country. There was already plenty of wildlife in the mountains: cougars, imported African ibex, antelope, deer and a good prey base for the lobo.

  The question of whether White Sands was the best place for the lobo could be moot anyway. It was the only place that had been offered. The Interior Department liked it, they said, because it was federal land, because there was limited human access and no cattle grazing was allowed, a rare occurrence in New Mexico, where cattle grazed everywhere, and state and federal officials belonged to the cult of the cow. The army didn’t like it, they said, because they didn’t want nonmilitary personnel on their land. Ranchers were opposed because they thought the wolves wouldn’t stay put, and because the missile range was on land that had been taken from their families in the first place and they had never been compensated for the loss. The animal they hated was going to be put on land that had been stolen from them so they felt doubly scorned. Environmentalists weren’t crazy about White Sands but were inclined to think it was the best (if not the only) alternative.

  Route 380 was the northern boundary of the vast expanse of federal land that housed White Sands National Monument, White Sands Space Harbor (the space shuttle alternate landing site) and White Sands Missile Range. Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb exploded, was here, too, in the valley of the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of Death. To the south was the loping gray Sierra Oscura, where the deer and the antelope played, where Bob Bartel had done his studies, reimagined the lobo and done what was right.

  At Carrizozo I turned south on 54 and passed the Stallion Range Center, the Small Missile Range and the Oscuro Bombing and Gunnery Range, an oxymoron. How long could a place that tested bombs and guns remain obscure? And if it wanted to remain obscure, why put a sign on it? I reached Alamogordo, the town that serviced White Sands and Holloman Air Force Base. The streets there were named Saturn Circle, Uranus Place, Neptune Court, New York City. Alamogordo had a fast food strip to rival anyone’s and was the home of the Dare to Dream Space Center, a rare combination of high tech and low food. It appeared that anything could come out of the sky and land here, and a lot of things already had—space shuttles, state-of-the-art warplanes, missile debris. If UFOs want to contact us this would be a good place to do it, I thought. They spoke their language here and the aliens could always pop in for a taste of real earth fat at McDonald’s.

  White Sands National Monument is on the south side of Alamogordo on Route 70. Except during hunting season it’s the only place the government allows public access. It’s also where you find the sands that give the place its name. At sunrise and sunset they turn New Mexico mauve, but in the middle of the day they are blazing white, whiter than snow. I’ve driven the sixteen-mile road into the sands plunging deeper and deeper into the Arctic at the same time that it was getting hotter every minute, the kind of dislocation felt by a person who is freezing to death and starts tearing off her clothes. But even in midday in midsummer the sand remains cool enough to walk on barefoot. Footprints linger long after you’re gone, until the sand drifts and covers them up. It’s a place you can’t get lost in until the wind blows. Then the sands whip around like snow, making dunes that build up, achieve a brief balance (the angle of repose), fall down and start drifting all over again.

  A large sign beside Route 70 said the highway was often closed for missile testing and this happened to be one of those times. The idea was to protect citizens from debris that rained down from the missiles and antimissile missiles that were tested here. Waiting in the hot sun behind a line of automobiles with their engines running made me feel like I was going to the beach. The wind blew, the air smelled of exhaust and brine. There was a thump as a missile hit a drone somewhere in the part of White Sands where
the deer and the antelope did not play. Three sleek gray jets in triangle formation flew low and fast across the road, roared overhead, turned in unison, gained altitude and flew away. I liked to think they were F-16 Fighting Falcons. It had to be an adrenaline rush to be a master of the air flying a Falcon on the cutting edge of the technology envelope, thinking of all the things you could zap with just a push of a finger. It was a seductive fantasy even to me and I don’t play high-tech games. It was thrilling to see what modern technology could do, to watch planes that were fast and powerful and worked, as long as you didn’t think too much about their deadly purpose. The military experimented with these weapons for years before firing them, as they like to say, in anger. But sooner or later weapons that are designed, built and tested are bound to be used, if only because so much thought and effort goes into them, or because billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on them, or just because they are there. One of nature’s laws is that if man studies something, he won’t do it, but if he builds it and holds it in his hand, he’ll use it. White Sands was a monument to one side of man’s curiosity: to experimentation, tinkering, technology. I had to wonder what that kind of mind-set would do to a wolf.

  11

  WHEN I GOT to Soledad I questioned Juan Sololobo at Jayne’s kitchen table. The kitchen was where he liked to be—it’s one place you can always find water in the desert. He held a large cup of coffee (three sugars) in his W-O-L-F hand. An herb tea and a yellow legal pad sat on the table in front of me, a Marlboro smoldered in a dish (no ashtrays in this house). Jayne had taken one of her horses riding, which was all right with me; I wanted Juan to myself. Jayne had a way of reappearing suddenly so I kept one ear alert for her and began my interrogation. But first there was another issue that had to be dealt with.

  “You’ve had lawyers before,” I said. “Didn’t any of them ever tell you not to talk to the police?”

  “Sure, but I forgot this time, sorry.”

  What can you do with a client who’s sorry but goes on doing the wrong thing anyway? Keep him away from liquor and law enforcement, for starters. Get the case over with as soon as possible. As for his need or compulsion to do the wrong thing, I was a lawyer, not a shrink or a priest.

  “What I told Ohweiler was the truth,” Juan said, peering into his cup’s sugary black depths.

  “It doesn’t matter. Don’t tell the police anything, not even the truth; they’ll find some way to use it against you. Sooner or later Ohweiler’s likely to show up here with a search warrant. If he does, you don’t say anything but hello and good-bye. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Juan said.

  “Okay, now I need to know exactly where you were for the twenty-four hours after I left here at 8:30 on Thursday morning. Your whereabouts is important. You did, after all, threaten the guy.” I picked up a pencil in my lawyer hand.

  “Who knows that but you and Jayne? “

  “Anybody Bartel told. His supervisor, for one.”

  “Probably made it seem a lot worse than it was, too.”

  “Where were you and what did you do?”

  "It was raining so I hung around here in the morning, did some repairs for Jaynie. When teh sun came out about 11:30 she went riding. I had lunch, took a walk."

  "Where?"

  “Not far, up to the falls, maybe three miles from the house. I got back around 4.”

  “Why didn’t you ride?”

  “I don’t like to ride.” A man after my own heart, although I had developed a soft spot for Chili. “I’m not like Jayne; she goes out every day. Loves to ride, always has. She’s been crazy about animals—all of ’em—ever since she was a kid.”

  “What time did Jayne get back?”

  “After I did. Around 4:30.”

  Juan sipped at his sugar, I wrote on my pad.

  “Nobody took the truck or van anywhere?”

  “Nope.”

  “You didn’t talk to or see anybody but Jayne?” I continued.

  “Nobody. I don’t know anybody in Soledad.”

  Unfortunately, he had known Bob Bartel. “What happened after 4:30?’’

  “I cooked. I started a big pot of posole and around 6:30 we ate. We had that, tortillas, beans. I made a jícama salad. The posole was a little on the hot side for Jayne. Ask her. She’ll tell you. We talked about old times. I took a Xanax and went to bed before 10.”

  “You didn’t have anything to drink, did you?”

  “Hell, no, drinking doesn’t put me to sleep.”

  So I’d noticed.

  “Listen.” Juan placed his tattooed hands on the table. “I’m gonna be honest with you. I got into your tequila the day I shook up Bob Bartel.”

  The next question was how had he known where to look, but I didn’t ask.

  “It was a dumb thing to do and I am real sorry, real real sorry. It’s been years since I had a drink. It was only because I was so damn upset about Siri. I love that guy.”

  I’d noticed that, too.

  “I’m gonna pay you back, but I’ll just give you the money and let you buy the stuff if you don’t mind. I don’t want it around the house.”

  “Forget it,” I said. I hadn’t brought any Cuervo Gold this trip so my conscience was clear. “You didn’t drink all you took that day, did you?”

  “No. I was disgusted with myself and Jaynie was pissed, too, so I threw the rest away, flushed it down the john in fact. She always hated my drinking. That was one of the things that broke us up.”

  “So you took your Xanax and slept all night?” One of those things would do it for me.

  “Well, actually.” Juan finished his coffee, cradled the cup in his L-O-V-E hand. “Jaynie woke me around 1. I remember seeing the time on the digital clock. She’d had a dream that turned her on and she wanted to make love. I was kind of dopey from the Xanax and it took me a while to wake up, but I got into it. Sure you don’t want any coffee?”

  “No.”

  He got up and poured himself another cup. I heard a car come down the road, a door slam and footsteps crunch the gravel. Juan heard it, too, and his ears picked up. If he’d had any hackles on the back of his neck they’d have gone into piloerection. His pale eyes got the look of a wary wolf, but that’s like saying wary lawyer. What else but wary would a wolf or a lawyer or an ex-con be? There was a knock at the door that had the loud thump of law enforcement.

  “Let me handle this,” I said and walked down the hallway to the door.

  It was Sheriff Ohweiler wearing his cowboy hat and Ray-Bans accompanied by a skinny, blue-eyed deputy. “Howdy, ma’am,” he said as he handed me the anticipated search warrant.

  I took it from his sweaty hand, looked it over and saw it was in order. “Come in,” I said.

  “You guys are wasting your time. You’re not gonna find anything here.” That was Juan, who had followed me down the hallway, breaking his promise already. With willpower like that it was no wonder he, tequila and trouble got together.

  “I think you want another cup of coffee,” said I.

  “No, I…” he tried.

  “Yeah you do,” I said. “It’s in the kitchen.” It was the first and maybe the last time he obeyed me.

  I followed Ohweiler and his deputy around the house while they conducted their search. It was interesting to observe the places they looked, the things they noticed. If nothing else, it made me see Jayne’s place in a new light; we were, in a way, looking at two different houses. I, for example, had been struck by what was absent—the rugs, the furniture, the paintings; they noticed what was there. Their first stop was Jayne’s (and now Juan’s) bedroom. They pushed aside the weights on the closet floor, then flipped through the clothes in the closet—Juan’s Levi’s, Jayne’s pastel running suits. They were looking, I supposed, for a black leather jacket, a motorcycle helmet. The closest thing they found was a pair of heavy black boots, Juan’s with no trace of mud on them. They opened the drawer in the nightstand, picked up a plastic-encased rectangle, looked at the lavender Xa
naxes in their plastic bubbles, put them back. Salesman’s samples, doctor’s freebies. Juan wasn’t the kind of guy to go to a liquor store to get his tequila or to a doctor for a prescription either. He’d come by his abusable substances by more creative means. While Ohweiler and his deputy went through the medicine chest in the bathroom making a note of all Jayne’s drugs—bioflavonoids and vitamins—I gave some thought to substance abuse.

  I’d taken Xanax myself a few times and it relaxed me so well I decided to never take one again; when it comes to abusing substances comatose is not my style. Besides, I had another substance that I could count on—Cuervo Gold. It’s a man’s drink, I know. You could say that was some kind of reverse macho, you could also say that taking a substance that doesn’t come naturally makes it easier to keep a handle on it. The ones that seem to come naturally to women are the ones that knock them out: downers and wine. For men it’s the wake-up, aggression inducers: hard liquor, cocaine, beer. Whether that was a biological imperative or social conditioning, I couldn’t say. I know I don’t want to be a zonked woman; I don’t want to be an aggressive man either. There ought to be a middle ground. I’d rather not represent women on medication (or men on alcohol), but I have had some women clients who took Xanax and Valium, too. When one stops working they switch to the other. When the doctor stops prescribing them, they plug into the underground sleepy drug network. Xanax users have a way of finding each other and they look out for each other, too. Women take Xanax when love is on the horizon, when love has taken a hike, when they have to make love to a husband they don’t love. I’d never met a man who took Xanax before, but Juan was a man in danger of losing his one true love.

  While Ohweiler and his deputy looked under Jayne’s bed, I wondered which side of it she slept on. The nightstand side, most likely, where the Xanax was and where a stuffed teddy bear sat on the pillow. The bed was unmade, with a white quilt tossed carelessly over it, the scene of one night’s lovemaking that I could verify and who knew how many others? Jayne for one, it was her bed. There was a digital clock next to the bed displaying the red number 2:45. A.M. or P.M.? The clock didn’t say. Red numbers were the kind of thing you’d notice if you woke up in the middle of the night, especially if you were clock phobic like me and not used to seeing time staring at you.