Apache Country (35 page)

“So you lived with your wife’s people.”

“For about five years. Got a job driving a
truck. Spent a lot of time on the road. Came back one night from
Colorado someplace, and the old folks told me, Irene ran away. That
was a great shame for them, a daughter who had run away from her
husband with another man. And worse still … a white man.”

Easton wondered what kind of shame that would
have been for Ironheel, but decided not to ask. Ironheel looked up
at the sky, and then let out his breath slowly.

“Apache way is to punish the man who steals
your wife,” he said. “Maybe kill him, even. But they were gone,
nobody knew where. And after a while, the anger died.”

Easton nodded. He knew about how anger died.
And how long it took.

“Now I had to look after the sá’yé, the old
people,” Ironheel continued. “It was hard, but that was what was
expected. And then after five, six months, Irene came back. The man
she had run away with ditched her, she had no place else to go. Her
people let her stay. Maybe they were hoping we would patch things
up.”

“And did you?”

Ironheel looked grave. Never interrupt the
storyteller.

“Sorry.”

Ironheel nodded and lapsed into silence, as
if he didn’t know how to continue. Easton waited. Ironheel
sighed.

“No,” he said. “It was over. But her family
were still my responsibility. And now Irene as well. It was like I
was caught in a trap, there was no way of getting ahead, just a
grind to stay in the same place. And not wanting to be there
anyway.”

He looked up at the sky again and Easton
thought he saw lingering regret in his eyes. He waited, relaxing in
the warm sun. Let him tell it his own way. There was no hurry.

“Things started to go wrong. I got a citation
for D&D, then another for petty larceny, then the trucking firm
let me go, my car was repossessed. There was no way to keep things
together. And then … Kuruk.”

He said it as if the word was a curse.

“Figured,” Easton said, as much to himself as
Ironheel.

“Kuruk had a place up in the hills, there was
gambling, some women. He let me stay up there. In those days he
bootlegged hooch on to the Reservation. Tequila, whiskey. When
things got really bad he loaned me money to look after Irene and
her family. And then there was the gambling and the booze. Pretty
soon …” He sighed again.

“You were in deep.”

He nodded. “There was no work, no way to pay
him off. Then one day he said, Maybe there’s a way.”

“Break-ins?” Easton guessed.

Ironheel nodded again. “Kuruk would pick the
place, the time. We’d do two, sometimes three a night, run the
stuff down to this fence he knew in Las Cruces, cellphones, i-Pads,
laptops, TV’s, whatever. One day we got there, the cops were
waiting. While we were awaiting arraignment Kuruk cut a deal, gave
them the fence, told them everything. He was released on
parole.”

“And you went to jail,” Easton said,
remembering the details he had seen on Ironheel’s stats. He
recalled Grita telling him the worst thing anyone could do to an
Apache was lock him up in a cell. He waited as the silence
lengthened again. Ironheel seemed to think about it a long time
before he decided to continue.

“My father believed the old ways were best,
and he had taught us children those ways. He came to the jail to
see me. He told me I was a liar, a thief, a criminal. He said,
nashaa bits’á’yé’, I walk away. You know what that means?”

Easton guessed. “He disowned you.”

Another deeply indrawn breath, released
slowly, full of regret.

“It was like the end of my world, that and
being in jail. When they let me out, my sister let me stay with her
if I promised there would be no more drinking and gambling. That
was tough, but finding work was even tougher. They took me on as a
probationary firefighter, but that only paid peanuts. Then Kuruk
came after me. He called my name, Ironheel. You still owe me. He
wanted me to do a few jobs, pay off the debt.”

“You refused?”

Ironheel nodded. “After all, what could he
do? For me, that was the end of it.”

“But not for him.”

Again the grave nod. “Remember we spoke about
the old man, the one who taught us t’lo kah’dinadi aha’eh?”

“I remember. Horse Holder.”

“He was very proud of that name. It was given
to him by Geronimo when he was a boy. Aren’t you going to eat those
beans?”

“Take them,” Easton said. “What about Horse
Holder?”

“It was the time of Ghost Face. Winter. He
was found dead in his cabin, murdered. The place had been
ransacked. The Tribal Police came and searched my place, said
they’d had a tip-off. They found a little buckskin bag with twenty
eight dollars in it that belonged to the old man. They arrested me
and handed me over to the Las Cruces cops. A baby in a cradle could
have seen it was a frame-up, but nobody was interested in hearing
my side of it. You know what they said? ‘Long as we got a result,
who cares which fucking Apache goes to jail.’.”

“What did you do?”

“My sister got me a lawyer, a good one. When
he threatened to subpoena Kuruk as a witness, the Doña Ana County
DA decided he didn’t have enough for a conviction and they let me
go. You’re one lucky Indian, they said. That should have been the
end of it.”

“But?”

Ironheel nodded to acknowledge the insight.
“But … awhile later someone asked me to deliver a package to
Kuruk’s place, the one we went to, up in the canyon. He was out in
the yard and he told me to leave it inside. I saw a bow lying on a
chair and recognized it as one Horse Holder had showed me. He made
it just a few days before he was killed.”

Making a hunting bow took many hours of
careful work. A three-foot branch of oak or mulberry was cut and
split, carved down and scraped smooth. Then the ends were tied
together with yucca to give the bow its curve, after which it was
hung up to season. When the wood was ready it was greased with fat,
worked until it was pliable, then laid in hot ashes to harden the
wood, taking care not to scorch it. It would be buried for perhaps
ten days to fully shape it, and then it was decorated. Two or three
sinew strips from the loin of a deer, soaked and rolled together,
would make the bowstring. No Apache would make a bow like that to
sell to tourists.

“If Kuruk had Horse Holder’s bow, there was
only one way he could have got it,” Ironheel said. “Which meant he
had been the one who framed me. My lawyer talked to someone he knew
in the Las Cruces PD. Turned out Kuruk was playing both sides of
the street. He was a police snitch, had been for years, selling the
cops information to work off his own felonies.”

“Did you tell the police?”

Ironheel shook his head. “His having the bow
wasn’t exactly proof. And by that time he had gotten rid of it,
anyway. But knowing about it got me off his hook. My sister told
him if he didn’t let go, she would take the story to the Tribal
Council. It would mean banishment. He couldn’t risk that.”

“Knowledge is power,” Easton said.
“Bigo’dih’ingó.”

Again he saw that quick flash of surprise in
the dark eyes. Ironheel nodded.

“Bigo’dih’ingó. Now we had power over him.
And ever since then Kuruk has hated me because of it. That’s why he
got into this, so he could kill me, end it.”

“So when you saw the bow in that cabin
...”

“It was bigo’dih’ingó be’ígózini. A sign.
Telling me the time had come. I must kill Kuruk using the bow he
stole,” Ironheel said, harshly. “And close the circle.”

He lapsed into silence and this time Easton
did not prompt him to say more. That Ironheel had told him this
much meant that, somewhere along the way, he had come to trust him,
perhaps to accept him as an equal. And maybe even a friend. It was
a good feeling.

After a while Ironheel stood up and
stretched.

“N’zhoo,” he said. “Enough talk. Time to move
on.”

“You’re right,” Easton said, conscious of the
slight awkwardness of the moment. “We’ve still got a long way to
go.”

“Not far,” Ironheel said. “Maybe two
hours.”

“I mean until this is over. Apodaca and
McKittrick aren’t going to quit. When they find out Kuruk is dead,
it’s going to get worse.”

Ironheel looked thoughtful. “Didn’t you say
you had a plan?” he said.

“I do,” Easton said. “But this part of it
still needs work.”

The Casey ranch stood on a low rise
overlooking the river, a wall of cottonwoods and aspens screening
it completely from the highway half a mile away. Standing on the
site of a four room adobe dating back to the Civil War, it was an
imposing two-storey hacienda of great charm. Adjacent to the house
was a two-bedroom guest cottage, a four-car garage, and stabling
for eighteen horses.

From the main house a paved path ran
diagonally between paired magnolia trees across immaculately
maintained lawns to the river bank, where Robert Casey had built a
summer house, a simple wooden structure, its peaked roof decorated
with gingerbread woodwork, a latched door, rattan chairs and a
little table inside. It was there that Easton had asked Ellen Casey
to meet him.

Bypassing the main entrance, an ornate,
electrically-operated wrought iron gate, he led the way across the
Hondo bridge, negotiated a fence and turned east. Here the river
ran shallow across long flats of smoothed stone, making it easy to
ford. To Easton’s surprise it was not Ellen, but Kit Twitchell who
was waiting in the summer house. Seeing her sitting there kindled
memories of long ago. Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far
away.

She looked up as they came toward her and he
was saddened by the way grief had marked her face. She was still
slim, her once shoulder-length bright blonde hair now dull gold,
cut Cameron Diaz style. The same person, but somehow much more
vulnerable, with lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth he had
never seen before.

“Oh, David, David,” she said, embracing him
and laying her head against his chest. “I’m so glad you’re
here.”

Her hair smelled of shampoo and he felt
acutely conscious of his own sweaty body and grimy clothes, but
after a moment she stepped back, drying her eyes with a tiny
handkerchief.

“This is James Ironheel, Kit,” he said.

“Ma’am,” Ironheel said.

“We’ve been so worried,” she said. “It was on
the news that you shot down a helicopter,” she said, looking
directly at him as she spoke. “And that you murdered one of the
trackers in cold blood.”

Ironheel made an angry sound. Easton laid a
hand on his arm.

“It wasn’t like that at all, Kit,” Easton
said. “We’ll tell you what happened later. Where’s Ellen? How is
she?”

Kit shook her head. “You’ll see a
difference.”

“And you?”

She gave a rueful little smile and spread her
hands, look at me. “I don’t know how I am,” she said. “Trying to
get past all this … to understand.”

“I know that feeling,” he said. “Look, you go
on back inside. Tell Ellen we’re here. Give her a few minutes to
get ready.”

As she walked back up to the house, Easton
glanced at Ironheel. His face was expressionless, but his empathy
was almost tangible.

“Ask you something?” Ironheel said.

“Sure.”

“What happened? Between you and her?”

“You really want to know?”

Ironheel waited. Up to you, his silence
said.

“We were just kids,” Easton told him.
“Probably would have died its own death, but Casey said she could
do better. And I thought at first he meant better than marrying a
young cop. But it wasn’t that.”

“Because of your Mexican blood.”

He didn’t dress it up with political
correctness, Easton noted. Grita would approve.

“My grandfather was married to a Mexican
woman. Everyone called her Doña Clara. She was hidalga,
beautiful.”

“But still a Mexican, right?” Ironheel said.
“When was that, 1880s?”

“1890s.”

“Lot of white people thought Mexicans didn’t
qualify as human back then.”

“Your people, too,” Easton said. “Even
today.”

Ironheel nodded, looking right into his eyes.
“I had that problem when I first talked to you.”

“That why you were so hostile?”

“One of the jailors told me you were okay …
for a half breed – Basso, is that his name?”

It would be Basso, Easton thought. “There are
still plenty like him,” he said. “But not as many as when I was a
kid.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty eight,” Easton said. Ironheel
nodded.

“So you’d have been in grade school in the
early Eighties. Not much political correctness back then, right?
Being even a quarter Mexican can’t have been easy.”

“There was always ... something,” Easton
replied. “But it was insidious. Things people said, jokes. But by
the time I was twenty I could put it out of my mind. Until Casey …
reminded me.”

Ironheel’s face remained impassive.
“Sometimes it’s easier not to fight. Apache do that, let the pinda’
lick’ oye exploit our fear that somehow our race makes us
inferior.”

“You think that’s how I felt?”

“You tell me,” Ironheel said.

It came out reluctantly, but it came out. “I
don’t think I ever hated anyone the way I hated Robert Casey that
day,” Easton said. “For trying to make me ashamed of what I
was.”

Ironheel nodded thoughtfully. The silence
lengthened. It wasn’t uncomfortable.

“You trust her?” Ironheel asked. The question
took Easton by surprise.

“Kit?” he said. “Yes, I do. Why?”

Ironheel made no answer but it wasn’t
difficult to guess what he was thinking. She sold you out once
before.

“Answer me this,” Easton said. “Who else have
we got?”

Ironheel shrugged. “Your call,” he said.