“Dogs kill cattle, too,” I said.
“Buster?” Perla laughed. “Are you kidding? Buster couldn’t catch a turtle.”
Buster did look more arthritic than fierce as he dragged himself over to the portal and fell down in a heap. Maybe he’d made it to ninety-five too.
“Afternoon,” Don said.
“Afternoon,” I replied.
“What’s for lunch?” he asked Perla.
“Same old baloney,” she said.
“Hey boys.” Jimmy and Donny squirmed with happiness at seeing Daddy again.
Don sat down, poured himself a big glass of milk, bit into his first sandwich. Jimmy’s fingers began inching toward the mayonnaise. Perla saw him this time and gave the hand a slap. “Enough, Jimmy,” she said.
I started on my baloney and cheese, skipped the milk.
“And to what do we owe this visit from a big-city lawyer?” Don said.
“Now, honey, don’t be rude.” Perla acted like she was getting fond of me.
“Just asking,” said Don. “Keep your hand out of there, Jim.”
"Since my client is a suspect in Bob Bartel's murder, I wanted to come out here and see for myself where Bob was the day he got killed, what he was doing."
"Don't trust the wolf man, huh?" Don asked.
"I didn't say that."
"Didn't have to. Heck, I don't blame you. I wouldn't trust that guy either. You want to make sure you're going to get paid."
"That's not what's motivating me," I said.
Don took a look at the aging Nissan, my boring lawyer's clothes, though it over. "Probably not," he said. "If it was money you were after you wouldn't be driving a Japanese import. Never saw a lawyer drive a car that small, even a Soledad County lawyer. Paul Ohweiler's already been ou there and looked at the crime scene."
"I'd hope so. Have the feds been here yet?"
"No. Why would they be? Paul can handle this."
“Bartel was a federal employee. If he was killed in the line of duty it would be a federal crime. If the feds want to get involved, they will.”
“Is that right?” Don asked.
“Damn. We don’t want them poking around here,” said Perla.
"Take care of Jimmy, he's got his hand in the mayonnaise," Don ordered in a dominant male voice, the first time I'd heard him use that tone.
Perla was a homemaker but she was cowgirl, too, who could ride and shoot better than most men. She got ready to answer back, but something in Don's expression stopped her and she reached for Jimmy's hand and wiped it off. Don chewed slowly at his sandwich, gave the matter considerable thought. "Tell you what. I got a water tank I need to check on near where Bartel was. I'll take you up there after I finish my lunch."
"Thanks," I said.
"No problem," said Don.
Don ate three baloney and cheeses on white, I had one. He had three pickles, I had none. The boys stuffed a couple of pieces of baloney in their faces, a few crumbs of bread. I’ve never understood how toddlers end up as teenagers when their food ends up on the floor and the table. When Don was finished he leaned back in his chair, stretched, poked the dog in the ribs with his boot. “Buster, you’re a lazy cuss,” he said. Buster snored back.
“Donny, you want to keep an eye on the kids while I give Granddaddy his lunch,” Perla said.
“You betcha,” said Don.
“You want to meet Granddaddy Phillips?” Perla asked me. “He’s the old West. There aren’t many left like him.”
Did I? A remnant of the old West, a ninety-five-year-old man?
“He still likes good-looking women,” Don said.
“Um,” said I, but it seemed rude to refuse, so I followed Perla to Granddaddy Phillips’s room.
“Don’s mommy and daddy moved into town fifteen years ago,” she told me as we walked through the house, which was curtained to keep out the x-ray sun. The rooms were dark and dim but I did notice some elk horns on the living room wall and the wild, beautiful and dead face of a mountain lion. “But there’s no way anyone’s gonna get Granddaddy off the ranch. He ain’t gonna die in a nursing home with the television set on, he says. He sleeps most of the time now, but he knows where he is.” Perla knocked on the old man’s door.
“That my lunch?” a loud voice answered. The very old are like the very young; the best—if not the only—weapon they have is their voice.
Perla opened the door and we went in. “Baloney today, Granddaddy.”
“Again?” he squawked. “We had baloney Tuesday.” Granddaddy was sitting in a rocker. He’d probably been a big ole cowboy once, but had shrunk so his cowboy boots didn’t reach the floor. His gnarled hands gripped the arms of the creaking rocker. Maybe he slept with the boots on; his hands appeared too bent to remove them. His eyes were bright and he didn’t wear glasses. “Who’s that?” he squinted in my direction.
“This is Neil Hamel. She’s a lawyer from Albuquerque.”
“A woman lawyer? Well, hang in there and pray for rain. Come on over where I can get a good look at you.” He crooked a wrinkled finger at me. Had he been a day under ninety I never would have gone, but advanced age puts people in some kind of extra human dimension where they get to call the shots. After all, they’ve made it a hell of a lot further than you’re likely to and they know it. I approached the old man’s rocker. Perla began setting up his lunch on an adjacent table, tucking a napkin under his chin. His hand grabbed mine like a hawk’s talon digging deep into the neck of a doomed rabbit. He pressed it to the arm of his rocker. “Come closer.” I leaned forward until I could smell the cavern of his old man’s mouth. “You’re too pretty to be a lawyer.”
“Not that pretty,” I said.
“She thinks they ought to bring back the wolves, Granddaddy,” Perla said.
“Damn varmints,” he snapped.
“I knew he’d have something to say about that,” Perla said.
“They were a grievous tax in the old days and they would be still. They’re smart and they’re wily but I killed one hundred of those varmints. I’ll tell you something that I bet is gonna surprise you. I agree with you,” he squeezed my hand, gave me a wink. “I hope they come back, too. I’d like to hear them howling in the Soledad peaks again.”
Perla was startled. “You would? Why’s that?”
The old man laughed, kicked his feet against the rungs of his rocker. “So I can kill some more,” he said.
******
Don was talking to someone when we got back to the portal, a small, dark man wearing a large cowboy hat that kept the sun out and the shadows in. Don was explaining in rapid-fire Spanish what he wanted the cowboy to do. His Spanish was better than mine, and all I got out of it was ganado (cattle), agua (water) and the finale, “Comprendes?”
“Sí,” the ranch hand replied. He straightened his hat, crossed the portal and sauntered behind the house. Perla began gathering the kids up to take them in for their nap. Esperanza, who seemed to materialize at nap time, came around the corner of the house to help. She wore an embroidered huipil, her braid hung down her back, her work-hardened bare feet padded the ground. When she passed the ranch hand she lowered her eyes, which could mean she’d never seen him before. Could also mean he was her husband.
“Buenas tardes, Señorita,” she said to me.
“Buenas tardes,” I replied.
Don stretched, stood up. “Ready?” he asked me.
“Ready,” I said.
“You come back real soon,” said Perla, “and we’ll visit some more.”
“Thanks,” I replied.
Don and I got in the pickup with the ubiquitous rifle balanced across the window rack like a carpenter’s level. Just like the fuzzy dice you see hanging from low riders’ mirrors in Albuquerque, it made a statement. But the dice are there for looks and the gun was not.
The place where Bob Bartel had parked his truck was several miles of sorry land away. We drove over dry land, desiccated land, eroded land, mesquite-studded land, land
that had been chomped and hooved and cut by cattle.
“Granddaddy’s something ain’t he?” Don asked me.
“Yeah,” I said.
We kept our silence while we bumped along the ranch road, getting closer and closer to the rocky foothills of the Soledad peaks. Suddenly in the medium distance something ran out from behind one boulder and dashed toward another. It was as quick as a shadow, but obviously from the canid family—a dog, coyote, or wolf.
Don Phillips pressed the brake to the floor—hard—and I slammed forward and smashed my shoulder against the dash. Following his example I hadn’t fastened my seat belt. As soon as the truck jounced to a stop, he went for the rifle, yanking it from its window rack. He leapt out of the cab and aimed it at the place where the canid had been. I saw nothing but a boulder and its shadow. The animal had blended into its habitat like dust in a roadbed or water in water.
“Damn,” Don muttered, bringing the rifle down from his shoulder.
“What was it?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “When it comes to predators I shoot first, ask questions later.”
“It might have been a neighbor’s dog.”
“You’re forgetting, aren’t you, that we don’t have any neighbors out here.” He took a long look around before putting the rifle back on its rack. “It doesn’t make much difference what it is to the cattle it kills. It doesn’t make much difference to me either. I’ve spent too much time and money breeding my cattle to lose them to somebody else’s pet. If it was somebody’s dog they can keep it at home.”
Don had been calm as a grazing bull before he saw the animal and pulled the gun and it didn’t take him long to become that calm again. Getting ready to shoot was no big deal for him, not even worth cranking up the adrenaline for. In the best marriages people are attracted to their mental equals, their temperamental opposites. That’s my opinion anyway. In their placidity, however, Don and Perla acted like soul mates, partners in emotion, ranching and what else?
We drove on in silence following the edge of the Soledads. Don didn’t drive and talk at the same time. He focused his attention on what he was doing and that was it. We passed a water tank and windmill to the east with some cattle grazing near them. A few miles later, when we reached the place where the north-south fence line was met by an east-west fence line, Don parked the truck and we both got out.
“I’ve gotten pretty good at cutting sign now that I have smugglers all over my ranch. This is where Bob parked.” He showed me the tracks where the truck had stopped.
Having learned a little about reading tracks myself I recognized the chevron pattern from the tires in the wrecking lot.
“You’re lucky it hasn’t rained since then or these tracks would have washed away. Fortunately Ohweiler came out the next day and took photographs. This,” Don showed me some deep dry ruts, “is where he drove in and this,” he showed me another set of impressions much less deeply embedded than the first, “is where he drove out.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Can tell by the depth of the tread,” he said. “When I called in about ten that morning Bartel told me he’d come out to take a look at the kill and I told him where to find it. He probably got here around eleven when it was still raining.”
“Why would he come out here in the rain?”
“Maybe it was the only time he could come, maybe he figured it would stop by the time he got here. Rain doesn’t last long in Soledad. Now this was a hard rain. The ground was soft and the tires dug in. If he left here in the morning when the ground was still soft his tracks would have cut in, too, but if he left later in the day the ground would have dried out.”
“How much later?” I asked.
“That I can’t say, not exactly anyway. The ground dries pretty fast. It could have been afternoon, could have been the middle of the night. We wouldn’t hear the truck from the house even in the dead of night.”
If he left in the afternoon he could have gone someplace to get killed, someplace not too far away, someplace where no one had seen him on the road, someplace, maybe, where my client happened to be. But if he left then under his own free will why hadn’t he taken the calf with him?
Don pointed with the toe of his boot to the lighter track. “I’ll tell you one thing. That truck was moving a lot faster going out than it was coming in. Now normally Bob wasn’t a fast driver. Either he was excited about something or someone else was driving. Look here.” He showed me a set of footprints that vanished once they reached the rocks. “He didn’t walk back to the truck or he walked back later in the day when the ground was dry. No return prints.”
“What happened to the calf carcass that he came here to look at?” I asked.
“I took it back to the house later and had José bury it.”
“You didn’t come up here with Bartel?”
“I had a fence to mend and I’d already seen all I wanted to of that calf.”
“Why do you think Bartel didn’t take it with him like he planned?”
“I’m gettin’ to that.”
I looked at the fence that continued north beyond the eastern-bound fence. “Is this the end of your property?” I asked.
“One end,” he said. “That’s the Roaring Falls Ranch north of here. Jayne’s property goes up to the top of the Soledad Peaks. I’ve got 10,000 deeded acres southeast of here, but we don’t fence the peaks. Wouldn’t be any point. There’s nothing up there for the cattle. Besides, that’s the smugglers’ favorite path. They’d be cutting the fences every day if I tried to fence it.”
“How do you get over there?”
“Me? I drive over the pass and through Singing Arrow. It takes close to two hours by truck. Perla and the ranch hands ride their horses over the mountain sometimes. She likes to ride.”
I looked across the barbed-wire fence at Jayne’s property. There wasn’t any sign that anybody had been near here on horseback or on foot. “How far is Jayne’s house from here?” I was asking a lot of questions, I knew, but you have to expect that from a lawyer. Don didn’t seem to mind answering. “About eight miles as the crow flies.”
“Whose property is east of Jayne’s?”
“Norm Alexander and the Sanchezes, who go back to the Martinez land grant. Norm’s got a little spread about 5,000 acres over there that the Sanchezes originally sold off in the sixties when they needed the cash. You seen what you wanted to see here?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then, there’s something else I want to show you, something José came across yesterday.” He started walking toward the pickup, a sure, solid, Ford truck cowboy. I followed in my running shoes, noticing that my tracks were as light as birds’ on the hard, dry ground. We drove a mile or so back to the windmill, passing a bunch of white-faced brown cattle that watched us with placid eyes. High above the water trough a raven beat circles in the sky. Don parked and we walked up to the ashes of a campfire beside the trough. He picked up a plastic water bottle and poked the ashes with his boot. They fluttered briefly like the ghost of a campfire.
“Who do you think camped here and drank my water?” he asked. “Parrot smugglers, bull semen smugglers, marijuana smugglers, wetbacks?”
“Beats me,” I said.
“This is what it means to have private property in the boot of America. I’m the sole and the sole has a great big hole in it. I get to share my land with every smuggler and wetback who wants to go from there to here. It used to be the smugglers flew in but now that our federal government has installed their balloon in Deming they’ve gone back to crossing on foot and burro. And now they’ve changed the immigration laws so wetbacks can’t get real work here, so they’ve got to feed their families by smuggling. The feds think their war on drugs and illegal aliens is succeeding, but it’s me who’s paying for it. The Mexicans cut my fences, steal my cattle, bury their drugs on my property, come back at their convenience and dig them up.” Don kicked the ground with a dusty boot. “And there’s n
ot a damn thing I can do about it. My family’s been ranching this land for over a hundred years and there’s never been border traffic like this. I feel like I’m in danger on my own land.”
“Doesn’t this make it dangerous for Perla and the kids?”
“Perla’s not gonna leave. Her family’s already lost one ranch to government blundering. Besides, you’ve only seen Perla with a kid on her lap. She can ride and shoot better than I can. She doesn’t think she’s got anything to fear and she’s grown up with the Mexicans. They’re like family to her. I want to just take a look at the far side of the tank while we’re here.” He began walking around the other side of the trough. The raven squawked, flew away.
“Damn,” Don said. He stopped suddenly, staring at a dead calf at his feet. It wasn’t pretty—bones with a skin tent stretched over them, the insides eaten out. I didn’t look at it for long, but long enough to tell it wasn’t fresh. “Looks like one of my visitors got hungry.”
“Did they shoot it?”
“Possible. They could also have lassoed it, run it down, stabbed or strangled it.”
It could also have been moved here from someplace else by José or Don himself, could even have been the calf that Bob Bartel looked at, but I didn’t say that. “Wouldn’t someone have heard the shot, if there was a shot?”
“Maybe, maybe not. You know it could well be that Bob came upon some smugglers while he was up here and they thought he was la migra or a narc and shot him, drove the truck over to the peaks and pushed it off the embankment in the middle of the night. He kind of looked official in his green outfit, didn’t he? I’m gonna call Ohweiler and get him up here to see this. It could be what you’re looking for to get your client off the hook.”
“If you came across a Mexican while you were out here what would you do?”
“Say buenas tardes and drive away. Too many of them have powerful connections across the border that I can’t afford to anger, and if they think I called in the feds my problems are going to get a whole lot worse than they are now. With Mexicans it’s better just to pretend they are not there.”
The Wolf Path Page 15