In The Falling Light (29 page)

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.

Only there was no
might
about it
anymore. Jumping Crow had violated the gravest taboo of all,
committed the ultimate act of evil by killing another man. There
would be no stopping the skinwalker now.

“Journey in peace,” he said to the stink bug
as it turned from the bars and wandered away. Outside the window,
he heard a crunch of gravel and muffled voices. Jumping Crow stood
on the bunk again and looked out.

The sheriff was walking slowly across the
yard, a tall, thin man wearing a white shirt and suspenders walking
beside him, a wide brimmed hat keeping the sun off his fair skin.
They were talking, although the Navajo could not make out the
words. They went to the back of the sheriff’s car and opened the
trunk. The tall man staggered backwards and put his hands to his
face, and then the lid slammed shut once more. They spoke for a
time, leaning in close together like men not wishing to be
overheard, and at one point the sheriff gestured towards the jail
and took several steps, trying to lead the other white man. The
tall man shook his head, glancing at the jail and then looking
quickly away. They talked some more.

Thomas felt a soft tremble course through
his body, felt a tingling in his arms. And so it begins, he
thought, a single tear rolling down one lined cheek.

The sheriff went into the garage and
returned several minutes later with a pair of shovels, putting them
in the back seat of the police car and climbing behind the wheel.
The tall man hesitated, then got in on the other side and they
drove away, leaving a cloud of dust which the desert wind quickly
carried away.

Look out for whites. They have something
on their mind.
The words of his Elder came back to him over the
years. Thomas sat back down on the bunk to await the change.

Sheriff Bybee and Bishop Johnson rode in
silence for a long time, the windows of the cruiser down and air
heated by a noon-day sun rushing in. It helped a little with the
smell. Around them the sand and rock and scrub rose and fell.
Johnson’s hat rested on his lap and he mopped his brow with a
handkerchief.

“This is a terrible thing,” he said at
last.

“That’s why I came to you first,
Bishop.”

“Such a thing…” he shook his head. “Imagine
the trouble it will cause with the Navajo. We’ll have federal
agents, godless bureaucrats poking through our affairs,
second-guessing our business and treating us like backwards Mormon
pioneers.”

The sheriff nodded. He’d had enough contact
with the feds down here to know he didn’t care for them or their
way of looking down on regular people.

“The Parsons boy’s parents are good,
church-going folks. This will destroy them, not to mention the
reputation of the church and the community. It’s the kind of
scandal that people remember forever.” The bishop sighed and looked
out the window.

They were quiet again for a long time, and
as the miles unfolded Sheriff Bybee’s frown deepened. “Can this be
right, Bishop? What we’re doing? I fear what the Lord will think of
this.”

Johnson looked back at him. “A terrible
thing has been done, Edgar, an evil thing. Nothing can bring that
poor girl back, or excuse the Parsons boy’s behavior. Is this the
right thing? I’ve been asking the Lord since you told me, and of
this I’m certain. Allowing this sad incident to cause further harm
to this town is the wrong thing. Do you understand, Edgar?”

The sheriff nodded slowly, not entirely sure
he did.

“We’re shepherds, you and I,” the bishop
continued. “Just because a wolf comes among us, doesn’t relieve us
of our responsibility to protect the rest of the flock.” He gave
the sheriff a long look with his soft blue eyes. “After today,
we’ll never speak of this again. It will be the burden you and I
will carry alone, as good shepherds.”

“And what about Glen?”

“He often spoke about leaving small town
life and heading out to Alaska to look for gold.” The bishop looked
out the window again. “I’m sure he’ll write, eventually.”

The small deputy’s office was close and hot
from the sun beating down on it throughout the day, and Jumping
Crow was suffering from thirst. There was no water in the stained
toilet bowl, or he would have gladly scooped it into his mouth.
Despite the heat, however, he was chilled, and unable to control
the shudders which came over him without warning as the change came
on.

Skinwalker.

Doomed to succumb to the evil within him,
and travel the earth in animal form.

What he was changing into was clear. Already
a loose black feather rested on the cell floor in front of him, a
black shape in the fading red and purple light coming in through
the windows. Thomas only hoped he would not hurt anyone else in the
process.