Theft (23 page)

The cop radioed for help. Raymond sang.

T
HE FALL PLUMAGE OF the aspens with their stark white trunks turned the mountain air even brighter. In the clearing sat Zeb's cabin, small as I'd imagined, but it also looked so domestic, not like the Zeb I knew. Late-blooming pansies still spilled over the sides of old wine casks sitting around the place, and scraps of Zeb's iron and wood projects scattered the land.

The place was dotted with police cars—two painted with silver police badges on the door, two others that were solid black. From what I could tell, they were waiting for me
inside
Zeb's cabin, and it felt like an intrusion to me, though I had no claim to Zeb's property.

I waited in the car, imagining Zeb here, living the day-to-day life he'd built for himself alone throughout the years. I tried to remember my own home out on the mesa. My home, the mesa, it all felt like an illusion to me now, as if while I was driving here, the mesa had transformed into an island too far out to sea for anyone to reach. I felt it drifting farther and farther away from me. I needed to know Cario and Magda were there, that my house still existed, that my life in New Mexico was still real, not something I'd dreamed up.

I grabbed for my phone and dialed Cario and Magda. I redialed three or four times. Then I remembered where they spent their days, even when I was away. I dialed my own home phone number. “Bueno,” Magda said. It was a salve. “Buenos días,” she said again, into my silence.

“Magda.” Her name felt so good to say.

“Willa? Dulce Niño Jesús en un pesebre con burros y la Virgen María ¿dónde estás? ¿Qué cosa loca te has ido y—”

“Magda—”

The cell phone crackled with static, and then her voice came through again. “Estamos esperando por ti aquí con Chile verde y tamales que hice hoy frescas en su casa, estamos esperando por ti y—”

“Magda—”

“Mija, where are you?”

“
Magda
,” I said, loudly. She stopped talking. “I miss you. Te echo de menos.” I waited for her calmer reply. But after a pause, she set off on another string of words about food and fresh roasted green chilies and how my house was falling to shambles, and then Christina's voice came on the line, a surprise not because she was there, but because hearing her voice calmed me even more than Magda's. I heard her, and my home felt like my home again, solid and certain. “It's all okay here,” Christina said. “Magda's just being, you know,
Magda
.” We both laughed.

I could still hear Magda in the background telling Christina to hand over the phone, and then I heard a door closing, and
Magda's voice went away. I heard jays and ravens calling. “Beautiful day here,” Christina said.

I imagined her outside with that New Mexico land and sky wrapped all around her. I wanted to tell her I missed her, that I could not wait to be home, but what came out of my mouth was, “Is my house really falling into a shambles?”

She laughed. “The TV was out. Cable line. That's all. I came up to fix it for them.” She asked me how it was going in Colorado, and I wanted to tell her I wanted to be there, with her. But the words didn't come to me. I sat silent.

“You coming home sometime soon, or what's up?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I told her. “I just needed to hear your voice . . . I mean, Magda and Cario's voices. I needed to know everything's okay with them and my house.”

There was a pause on the phone and then Christina said, “They're fine. Magda and Cario are fine. Your house is fine.”

“And I guess you're fine, too?”

She paused. “I guess so, yeah. I'm fine, too.”

I could hear hurt in her voice, and I wanted to change the way I talked to her, but there was something holding me back. A man in a rugby shirt tucked into his well-pressed black slacks walked out of Zeb's house. He wore a radio receiver on his belt and waved to me officiously, all business.

“Good,” I told her, but when I hung up, I kept staring at the phone, wanting something more.

“Polo,” the man said, extending his hand to me before I could open the door of my truck. I stumbled to greet him, and before I could say my name he said, “And you're Willa Robbins,” not a question. I nodded and tucked the phone away. Polo, a tall, lean man with a round, boylike face that seemed too big for his body, patted my back with his wide palm. “Come in,” he said. “We're glad you're here.”

I tried for a firm handshake and a convincing smile. “This is Zeb's home, right? We're meeting
in
Zeb's house?”

Polo cocked his head as if the answer was self-evident. “It's the investigation site. The place your brother fled from.
Sonofabitch, we had him right here.” He pointed at the cabin and let out a high-pitched chuckle. It disoriented me. I half expected him to know I'd come here because I thought they had something on me. But I saw now that Polo honestly thought I was in on it with them, that I had agreed to help them because I was on his side and wanted to bring my own brother in. He called my brother a sonofabitch to my face. “He's not a sonofabitch,” I told him.

The man stopped short of opening Zeb's front door for me. He was still smiling. “What's that, Miss Robbins?”

“My brother. Zeb. He's not a sonofabitch.”

Polo kept up the chuckle. “Hell, we've been trying to pin something on that guy for one helluva long time. You know that? This or that, here or there, I'm telling you, that sonofabitch gets around, man, steals and lies and never leaves a trace, which is how we know. Where there's damage done and no trace left behind, we know it's Zeb Robbins.”

“You know it's him when there's no proof left behind?”

He nodded.

“That kind of evidence hold up much in court?” I asked.

He shook his head with a twisted kind of admiration. “Can't get the sonofabitch
into
court. He's a slick one, all right,” he said, and then we were inside the cabin.

I could smell part of the story of Zeb's life now: the scent of tobacco, wood, leather, fire, wool, something beneath those earthy smells, too, something sweeter, everything mingling with the distinct sharpness of whiskey. Polo introduced me to three other men, and they shook my hand, but their words were a blur. Here was the kitchen table where my brother had eaten his meals over the years, the tile counter, the window that looked out on the mountains he had always loved. I decided to take a chance and interrupt the blur of sound behind me, the men making plans about how to track Zeb. “Hey, guys, could I maybe have a second? Just a few minutes to look around the place, alone?”

They all stood up in unison. “Sure, sure,” one man said. “Study the place. Get a sense of the man. Sniff him out. Good idea.”

Sniff him out?
He spoke gibberish, far as I could tell, but I nodded, and the men quieted down, and everyone but Polo headed outdoors. I walked from room to room, looking at signs of my own brother's distant life. There was a full set of dishes in the kitchen, pots and pans for more than one person. Woolen throws hung haphazardly over the sofa. After the living room, I walked into a small workroom jam packed with a table saw, some leather working tools, wood scraps here and there, and a pack of Zig-Zag rolling papers on the handmade workbench. I lifted the Zig-Zags, pressed them to my face, then tucked them into my pocket. Tiny brown curls of tobacco lay next to them. I pressed my fingertip onto the tobacco pieces. They were so fresh that they stuck to the pad of my finger. He'd been there recently. It came clear to me now. I was on the verge of seeing my brother. Whatever obligations I had to Polo and his men, there was also this: I would get to see Zeb again.

I moved on to the bedroom, and I could tell right away that the workmanship of the quilt on the bed was not Zeb's. The edges were not straight, and the stitching was machine done. I looked through a few of the dresser drawers: handmade elk-skin clothes, Lee jeans and flannel shirts. Along with that, Lee jeans for a woman, some cowgirl blouses.

I opened the top dresser drawer and found a sachet of rose petals. They turned me stock-still and silent, my heart sore with memory. There was nothing else in the drawer—no linens or pajamas to be sacheted, just the rose petals in the bare drawer. I lifted the petals in my cupped palms and brought them close to my face. They were dusty reddish-brown, fragile enough to flake in my hands. Even in their aged discoloration, I saw that none of them had any white at the tip. I inhaled their sweet and acrid scent, then lowered them back into the drawer, slid my palms out from under them, scraping the backs of my hands on the rough wood. On the wall there were two photos: one of Mom and Dad when they were young, the other of Raymond surrounded by his greyhounds.

I heard the faint sound of Polo's men talking outside the window. Slowly, I stiffened up and walked back out into the kitchen. Soon as I entered, Polo sat down at the table again, and, like a
sudden blast of instinct had overcome them, all the other men came barreling in from outside to join him. One man offered me his chair. I shook my head no, choosing to stand. “Someone else lives here,” I said. “Along with Zeb.”

Polo chuckled. “You're good,” he said. “They said you were good, and you're good.”

“His wife?” one man said.

“Nah,” Polo said. “They're shacking up is all. Who knows how long. But the damn hippies never tied the knot.”

“But they're
together
?” I asked.

Polo nodded. “The old lady's in on it with him, too.”

I had a hard time putting my memory of Brenda together with the words “old lady,” and an even harder time putting her together with Zeb. “I'm tracking her too, then? Zeb's ‘old lady'?”

“No, no. She's got some kid from town caring for those animals out there,” he said, pointing toward the paddock I'd seen driving in. “She took off, who knows where. We got nothing on her.
Yet
.”

“Aiding and abetting,” one man said, brightly.

Polo shook his head. “Aiding and abetting a bunch of guys not doing their goddamn jobs, letting a guy who
confessed
to murder get away. Not sure we could make that one stick.”

“I don't see what makes you think the charges against Zeb will stick anyway. Hell, anyone could confess.” I took a risk that surprised me, testing to see if they knew about my own past. “I mean,
I
could confess to killing someone. That's not evidence.” I felt the uneasy sound of my own voice pinched in my throat.

Polo's cheery face turned serious. “
Did
you kill someone, Miss Robbins? ” He pretended to wait for an answer, then he laughed. “See, that's the difference. You're innocent. He's not. Look, we pretty much have this sonofabitch bagged. It's just a matter of finding him and taking him in.”

“So.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and waited, stunned into submission by his joke.

“So we get started at the crack of dawn.” Polo reached behind him and tossed me a stuffed duffel bag. “Here's your gear.”

When I told him I had my own gear and preferred to use it, he shook his head. “Nothing but what we issue you goes on the trek with us. You can leave all your high tech shit in the car.”

“High tech shit?”

“You're tough. You don't need that shiny new REI shit.” He tossed his arm around my shoulder. “We share everything, you and me.”

“I prefer to work alone.” I told him “And the bigger footprint we go in with, the less chance we have of actually finding Zeb.”

Polo let out that laugh again, the annoying one that sounded like a flock of starlings. “We already lost your brother. We're not losing you, too. Anyway, I'm looking forward to working with you, myself. Learning tracking from a master tracker.”

“I'm far from a master tracker.”

“Chance of a lifetime!” He patted my shoulder, then peeled his arm off my back. “Crack of dawn. See you then.” I took my police-issue gear and headed out to set up my tent.

I
PASSED BY THE animals, gave them an evening round of hay, and followed the stench of what smelled like death to the far side of the stables, part way up the mountainside. From a distance, I could see the mound of something almost like earth itself. Then the softened shape of a horse came clear, its lose skin folded as if shaped by erosion and weather. As I walked closer, the arc of ribcage and bones protruded like fingers of eroded white rock, somehow making even death seem beautiful on this landscape. I stood next to the carcass of the horse now, covering my nose against the smell. I turned my head, but could not help looking closer.