At Ease with the Dead (24 page)

I thought about Alice Wright and wondered what it was she'd told her murderer. Wondered
why
she'd told him anything.

I thought about William Yazzie and remembered him huddled in that pathetic lifeless heap before the oven. Remembered the suppurating open wounds along his weathered flesh. The knife slashes, the black congealing blood.

I thought about Daniel Begay. On his say-so, a Navajo cop had let us race illegally across the Reservation. After a phone call from his nephew, made on his behalf, a roomful of people were prepared to swear they'd never seen us. At his direction, with no hesitation, a young Navajo had set off to follow two very dangerous men. Asking only of Daniel whether it was okay to kill them.

Some people on the Navajo police, he'd told me, wouldn't mind seeing him in trouble. Why?

Who
was
he anyway?

From time to time, too, I thought about Rita. Remembered her crying, something I'd never seen her do before. Not even when she was shot. Not even when she learned her husband had died.

I wondered if she were all right. Wondered if she were awake right now, staring in the darkened room at the stiff angular silhouette of the wheel chair.

And I thought, quite a lot, about Pablo and Ramon.

Who had turned their key? Who had sent them up here?

If they arrived here before we left, or before Daniel Begay's Navajo-cop-nephew showed, I knew I'd probably have to kill them. Or try to. They likely wouldn't leave me any choice.

I don't care for the idea of taking a life. No one's ever mistaken me for God.

I hoped it wouldn't come to that. I told myself they wouldn't start up the dirt road until dawn. Told myself they'd be coming from the west, the same way Daniel and I had, come. Told myself that in the Ford they'd take at least two or three hours to get here. Told myself that Daniel Begay would be back soon with Peter Yazzie, and that all of us could take off to the east, toward the Wide Ruins road, before Pablo and Ramon turned up. Told myself that if they
did
turn up sooner, Gary Chee's horn would warn us.

I was wrong about almost all of this.

23

R
ita said, “What's the matter, Joshua?”

I said, “I'm getting too old for this shit, Rita.”

We were walking near Diablo Canyon along the bank of the Rio Grande. Wild grasses whispered at our ankles; the river giggled and chortled. To the northeast, beyond the brown expanse of water, beyond the tawny sandbars and the shimmering eddies where sunlight flashed, beyond the green blur of cottonwoods, a single flat white cloud lay impaled on the gray peaks of Bandelier.

My shoulders were hunched, my hands were in my pockets. Rita held onto my arm. She wore a blue silk blouse, a long black skirt.

She smiled. “Too old?”

“You know you're too old,” I said, “when everyone you meet reminds you of someone else. When everything you do, you've done before.”

She laughed lightly, head against my shoulder, sunlight flickering down her hair. “No, Joshua,” she said, and squeezed my arm. She looked up at me. “That's not what it is. You're just starting to recognize some of the themes.”

I turned to her, frowning. “Themes?”

“Themes. Like in a piece of classical music. Don't you see? The movements repeat themselves, sometimes the same and sometimes as a variation, an elaboration. It's the repetition of the parts, and their connection, that helps create the beauty of the whole. Unless you can recognize the themes, you can't understand the music. You can't learn.”

“Learn what?”

“Learn—”

She stumbled then, a rock, a hole, something snatching at her foot. Her mouth opened in surprise and she began to do down, body slumping away from me. I reached for her, frightened, and then I was falling too, and the ground was a long way off and a long time passed before I hit it, and by then Rita was gone.

I opened my eyes with a start. Gray light seeped down through the twisted, crowded arms of the ponderosa. Color had returned to the universe, but reluctantly: drab pale browns and dingy greens. The world seemed washed-out and exhausted, as though the effort of surviving the night had left it drained. The squat log cabin under the huddle of pines looked abandoned, derelict.

I was still lying on my stomach. The pistol was still in my hand; I'd fallen asleep holding it. I scowled: angry with myself.

An instant later I was asking myself what it was that had awakened me.

The quiet was absolute. Nothing moved anywhere. And then I sensed, rather than heard, something behind me.

Flipping away the sleeping bag, I wheeled around, brought up the gun.

Ten feet off, Daniel Begay stood leaning on his cane, watching me.

I let out my breath in a rush. “
Jesus Christ
, Daniel.” I lowered the pistol. I wasn't nervous. My heart always started slamming against my ribs about this time every morning.

He made his small faint smile. “He's in the house. Peter Yazzie.” The words made little puffs of vapor in the cold.

I sat up more slowly than I would've liked; the muscles of my back had locked together. “The two of you came back,” I said, “and he went inside, without me hearing it?”

He shrugged. “We didn't want to wake you up.”

“You knew where I was?”

Another shrug. “It was the only good place to be.”

Given enough time, I might possibly learn to resent Daniel Begay.

I slipped the pistol into my windbreaker pocket. Grainy-jointed and stiff, I pulled myself to my feet. I looked at my watch. Six-thirty. “You've talked to him?” I said.

“Some.”

“I think we should get out of here, all of us, before we talk some more.”

He nodded.

As I rolled up the sleeping bag, Daniel collected the canteen and the bag of sandwiches. We walked to the cabin and Daniel knocked on the door.

Peter Yazzie opened it. He was an old man, thin, tall but stooped now, moving slowly, cautiously, as though his spine had fused and any suddenness might shatter it. He wore scuffed boots, faded jeans, a black shirt spotted with pale blue polka dots, and a threadbare navy-blue peacoat, opened. His white hair was drawn back in a bun and circled by a plain black headband. His face was lined and slack, the leathery brown skin hanging loose from the bone. His eyes were rimmed with red and completely desolate. I don't think I've ever seen anyone who looked so stricken, so defeated.

Perhaps it was his cousin's death; perhaps Daniel Begay had told him. But I sensed that this was something more, something that penetrated to the core, a grief so total and final that it could never be expunged.

He nodded to me as Daniel introduced us, and then, looking down, stood back to let us in. He shut the door behind us.

I looked around. Everything neat and functional, no clutter anywhere along the wooden floor. Two more windows flanking the stone chimney. A small fireplace, swept clean. In one corner, a swaybacked army cot, an olive drab blanket pulled taut over the mattress, and a red wooden dresser. An upturned wooden box serving as a nightstand, and atop it a kerosene lamp. In the opposite corner, a kitchen area: sink, cupboards, a card table. Cans of food, a loaf of bread on the table. To my right, crowded like an afterthought into the northwest corner, a boxy partition with a door; the bathroom, probably.

I turned to Peter Yazzie. His glance danced away. “You want coffee?” he asked me, the gruffness making his voice sound as though he hadn't used it lately, or had perhaps used it too much.

“We should leave,” I said. “We can get coffee later.”

He nodded, still not looking at me. Beside the door stood an unpainted wooden table, slightly lopsided, that held an old blue canvas carry-all. Without another word he picked up the bag, wrapped his left arm around it, and opened the door.

The rifle bullet hit him in his left side and tore a ragged red hole in the back of his coat. The sound of the shot, a flat brutal
crack
, came only an instant later, even before the carry-all began to tumble to the floor.

Daniel Begay was faster than I would've thought possible. He dropped the canteen and the sandwiches, scuttled to the entrance, slammed his cane at the door. The door banged shut. A second later, another bullet plowed through it, popping splinters off the wood.

Daniel bent over and grabbed Yazzie's arm and pulled. I darted to his side and grabbed the other arm, and together we towed the man away from the door, out of the line of fire.

Peter Yazzie was still alive. His eyes were open wide, moving slowly back and forth, and he was breathing. With every breath, a thin whistling noise trilled from his chest. The lung was punctured.

We had to close off that wound, and soon.

Daniel Begay had the same thought, and acted on it before I could. He glanced around, then quickly limped over to the canteen and the plastic bag of sandwiches, grabbed the bag, dumped the sandwiches to the floor. He hurried back to Yazzie and unbuttoned the man's wet shirt.

The entry wound was half an inch wide, circled by a ridge of meat pushed up from beneath the frayed skin. Blood was sputtering, pink and frothy, from the hole. I didn't want to think what the exit wound would look like.

Daniel Begay folded the plastic bag and pressed it against the wound.

“The blanket,” he snapped.

In a crouch, I dashed across the room, yanked the blanket from the cot, and dashed back. The man with the rifle must've seen the movement, because the nearest front window exploded, bits of glass scattering through the cabin, rattling against the floor.

“Hold this,” Daniel Begay said to me, and nodded to the patch of plastic.

I handed him the blanket, put my gloved right hand against the bag. Through the plastic, through the leather of my glove, I could feel the heart moving down below the ribs like an anxious bird.

Daniel reached into his pocket, plucked out the switchblade, snapped it open. He slashed the blade through the blanket, tore a strip away, folded it, and slipped it under Yazzie's peacoat, searching for the wound in his back. Daniel Begay's eyes and mouth showed nothing as he worked.

“Okay,” he said, and took over the plastic bag. His right hand was red now, as though he'd dipped it in paint. He used his left to arrange the blanket over Yazzie's shoulder and down his front. Without looking at me, he said, “The other one will be coming to the back, in a circle. Through the trees.”

If he wasn't there already.

“Mr. Yazzie,” I said.

He looked at me, his face pale and damp. Shock.

“Mr. Yazzie, do you have a gun here? A rifle, anything?”

He looked at Daniel Begay. His eyes were loose in their sockets, confused and dazed.

Daniel Begay spoke Navajo to him, spoke it again, and after a moment Yazzie whispered something.

“The dresser,” Daniel Begay said, and nodded to the far corner. “His nephew's gun, he says.”

I duckwalked over to the dresser, checked that it couldn't be seen from the window, and then stood and jerked open the top drawer. Empty.

The second drawer. Clothes: shirts, jeans, underwear. Nothing else.

I found it in the third drawer, wrapped in an oily cotton rag. It was a U.S. Army Walker Colt, one of the heaviest handguns ever made. This was an original, not a replica, and it was well over a hundred years old.

An antique. A relic.

But the gun was in good shape. I could see the gleam of oil at the base of the hammer. And everything I needed to get it working was lying there beside it: a small can of powder, a powder measure, a buckskin pouch filled with lead balls, a tin of caps, a can of Crisco, a small funnel.

It wasn't a rifle, but it was a weapon, and right now we needed all the weapons we could get.

I'd played with an Italian copy of a similar gun once. A friend in Santa Fe owned it, a black powder fan, and he'd dragged me out into the country one Saturday to put it through its paces. It was noisy when it went off, and it produced as much smoke as a locomotive, but its heavy eight-inch barrel, despite the smooth bore, made it more accurate than my stubby thirty-eight.

The other front window exploded, glass spinning through the air. The bullet slammed against the fireplace, whined off the stone and into the floor.

No one inside here had moved; the man with the rifle was only giving us something to think about.

I scooped up everything and brought it with me to the floor. I ripped off my gloves. I opened the can of powder first, smelled it. It smelled fine to me, but I had no idea how it was supposed to smell.

“Daniel.”

He looked at me.

“Matches.”

He frowned but said nothing. With his left hand he reached into his coat pocket, found the matches, tossed them over.

I pinched out a few grains of powder, put them on the floor, struck a match, held it to the powder.
Foosh:
a flare of flame, a puff of white smoke.

Okay.

I used the funnel to fill the brass measuring tube. The knurled knob at the tube's bottom was drawn down, exposing the calibrations on the inset tube. It was set to forty grains. Forty grains was what Jorge had used, back in the arroyo north of Santa Fe.

I upended the pistol, poured powder from the tube into the first chamber in the cylinder. I opened the buckskin pouch, shook out a ball, seated it atop the powder. I clicked the cylinder forward until the chamber was beneath the loading lever, and pushed the lever down against the ball.

“Two things you must be careful with,” Jorge had said. “You must leave no air space between the ball and the powder. If you do, the charge may explode back on you, and perhaps take off your hand. And you must make certain that the top of the ball is flush with the top of the chamber. If it protrudes too far, it will jam the cylinder.”

I clicked the cylinder forward. The top of the ball was where it was supposed to be. There was a fine shaving of lead around the lip of the chamber. I flicked this off, opened the Crisco, scooped out a dollop with my finger, slopped it over the ball. Waterproofing.