Hard Twisted (12 page)

Sounds like you'd fit right in.

He gave her a look.

I thought you said we was gonna meet him here.

Palmer stubbed his cigarette. Oh, yeah. He patted his pockets, palming out the pack. That's the other reason we need to head north. Word is that's where your daddy's gone.

She turned away.

Now what?

She shook her head.

He tapped out a cigarette, watching her. Come on, let's have it.

You don't act like you want to find him, that's all.

Ah, hell. He lit the smoke and leaned back in his chair and picked tobacco from his lip. Guess I didn't realize you was so partial to Bible-thumpin and belt-whippins.

She didn't answer.

Well?

He's my daddy, that's all.

Palmer stood from his seat and probed his pocket and sprinkled some coins on the table.

Tell you what. I ain't your daddy, but I ain't your goddamn enemy neither. Now you got yourself a choice to make. Either you stay here where you think he's at, or you come with me to where I know he's at. I'll leave that to you.

He leveled his hat as he pushed through the door and passed in the window before her.

She sat. She watched the cobblestone street and the tilted rood-shadow and the figures passing beneath it. A woman adorned in turquoise. A young priest from the chapel. A trio of stooped crones in black
mantónes
, so alien to her in their language and dress.

She thought about Palmer. Of the night just passed, and of
those without number yet to come. And she thought of her father, alone and hunted and on the run.

She stood and crossed to the door.

They drove through the pueblo towns of Tesuque and Nambé, through a rolling landscape of cedars and piñons and mud hovels and dark and ragged children tending goat strings in the weedy roadside barrancas. They crossed the Rio Grande outside Española, New Mexico, and there the pavement ended and the roadway forked and they stopped to provision at a roadside bodega, its walls of brown mud and its portal stippled by the gnarled and ancient cottonwoods whose seed chaff fell like pixie snow on the Buick where she waited.

By noon they'd crossed the Rio Chama, climbing steeply into a landscape of sandstone bluffs and low mesas where ravens flew and pronghorn antelope rose up and scattered before their rattling dust cloud, and thence into the land-grant village of Abiquiu.

From there the roadway parted a breathtaking tableau of tumbled boulders and red-rock cliffs that glowed in the high desert sun like slag metal in a forge, all of it revealed under a blue sky limned to the east by the darker blue tumescence of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which Palmer told her meant the Blood of Christ and marked the start of the fabled Rockies.

After three more hours of dust and jarring roadway they'd forded the Canjilon and the Cebolla Rivers, where the gravel resumed and the landscape flattened, and by nightfall they'd crossed and recrossed the Old Spanish Trail and glimpsed in the broad valley below them, like the council fires of some nomadic people, the lights of Tierra Amarilla.

They parked the smoking Buick in the last light of sunset with
the jagged dogteeth of the San Juan Mountains glowing pink on the near horizon, their rocky peaks etched with the threads and arrowheads of a late-winter snow.

They stood down and stretched, and Palmer spat, and together they reconnoitered their surroundings. The car sat on a low promontory with an irrigation ditch gurgling and sucking below the grade. Barbed-wire fencelines framed the road course and ran to infinity in both directions.

I reckon this is as good a spot as any, Palmer said.

They built a cookfire of gathered sticks and ate their beans and bacon wrapped in charred tortillas. Palmer sat cross-legged, his face to the mountains, or to the memory of mountains cloaked now in darkness beyond the firelight, and the stars when they emerged in the clear night sky left shadows on the ground around them.

Lottie rinsed their cookpans in the acequia and stowed them in the car while Palmer lugged and spread their bedrolls. He stripped off his jeans and shirt and folded them for a pillow, and she did likewise, and together they lay like truants, drinking in the nighttime sky.

She woke to a slamming of car doors and the twin shadows of men silhouetted in the roadway. She kneed the dozing Palmer, who rolled and clacked his mouth and settled back to sleep.

Well, shit. Would you look at this.

The men descended the embankment in a welter of dust and pebbles as Lottie rose to her elbows with her blanket at her chin.

The men loomed over her, their hat brims eclipsing the sun. They wore matching boots and khaki pants with blue piping. The shorter man placed a hand on his hip as he stubbed Palmer with his toe.

Hey! Wake up, Nancy.

Palmer rolled and shaded his eyes. He sat upright.

The man backed a step. Get up, he ordered. Nice and easy.

Palmer rose from his bedroll, his blanket sliding away. He wore a yellowed T-shirt and nothing else and he stood pale and dangling with his hands raised in mock surrender.

You too, said the taller man.

Lottie rose with her blanket pressed to her chest, until the man stepped forward and snatched it away.

Ah, hell, he said, half-turning toward the mountains. We thought you was a boy. He held the blanket out to her at arm's length.

They were lawmen in khaki shirts with epaulets and pleated pockets. They wore patches on their shoulders and sidearms high on their hips in flapped leather holsters. The shorter man wore a leather strap across his chest in a vaguely military fashion.

How old are you? the shorter man demanded. His hair was gray and close-cropped in the shadow of his hat brim.

Now hold on, Sheriff, Palmer began, but the man cut him off.

Lottie gripped the blanket with both hands. She looked from the man to Palmer.

Sixteen.

The man jerked his thumb, and the deputy turned and started toward the cars.

Put your pants on, you.

Glad you boys come along when you did, Sheriff. Palmer spoke rapidly as he hopped into his dungarees. The missus and me was just gettin some shut-eye. We come all the way—

Shut it.

Above them, the deputy drew a clipboard from the front seat
of the police car. He tilted his hat and circled to the rear of the Buick.

You get your clothes on, miss. He turned and nodded to Palmer. You come with me.

The man waited while Palmer tugged at his boots and shrugged into his shirt. He placed a hand on Palmer's arm and guided him up the embankment, with Palmer turning to look at Lottie where she stood.

Lottie dressed quickly and carried both bedrolls to the Buick. The police car was angled on the gravel before it, blocking their escape. The black Ford coupe had white doors on which RIO ARRIBA had been stenciled in arching letters over a large gilt star.

The men stood talking at the rear of the Buick. You all must be Mormons, she heard the deputy say as he handed off the clipboard. My great-aunt—

Lester, the sheriff said. Lottie watched him as he flipped pages and glanced from his list to the license plate, the deputy eyeing the sheriff and Palmer eyeing the deputy's holstered gun. Then the sheriff handed off the clipboard and stood with fists on hips, waiting for Lottie to join them.

I don't suppose you've got a driver's license? he asked her. Or some other ID?

About what?

The man looked up the roadway. He sighed.

Look, Sheriff, it ain't like we's tramps or nothin. We come up from Texas on our way to the rodeo in Durango. I was noddin off come nightfall, and I thought it'd be safer to park here than to keep on goin, that's all.

Hot damn, I knew you was a cowboy, the deputy said, grinning.
Ain't that what I said when I seen the saddle? My uncle Jim Thomas was a pickup man up at—

What events you ride? the sheriff interrupted.

Saddle bronc mostly. Some bareback.

The sheriff nodded. He was looking at the girl with the dirty face and the thin and dirty clothes who stood biting her lip as if hoping for a wind that might lift her up and carry her eastward into the Brazos.

I allowed maybe you was a calf roper.

What's that supposed to mean?

It means we got laws in this county about vagrancy, the sheriff told Palmer, still eyeing the girl. Bein from Texas ain't no defense I ever heard of. He leaned and spat in the roadway. You go on and get in your car, and consider yourselves warned. Come on, Lester. Let's get.

The sheriff stayed and watched as they circled their car, and he kept on watching as the doors slammed and the dust jumped and the engine sputtered and caught. Only then did he step up to the Buick and nudge his hat and lean his face into the doorframe.

Mister, it's thirty-five miles straight ahead to the state line. Make sure you don't get lost.

You see 'em? Palmer shouted over the engine sound as they threaded the Chama valley with the Buick yawing on the gravel washboard, bouncing and pinging and trailing great billows of dust.

The enveloping landscape was a patchwork of pine forest and rolling grassland, green against darker green through which creekbeds ran and cattle moved in slow and beaded strings. They bore west onto State Road 17 near the village of Chama, New
Mexico, where they crossed the Continental Divide and glimpsed the distant La Platas, lilac dark and snow-veined in their upper rincons. Then north again at Lumberton, through brakes of scrub and cedar framed by low and rolling hills.

It was coming noon when they crossed the state line, then the Navajo and Blanco Rivers. There they met Highway 450, and they followed it westward into the resort town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

The main street was a western-town set of wooden falsefronts and covered sidewalks, of Victorian homes and sandstone emporiums before which flags fluttered and cars and trucks were angled. They stopped for gasoline, and then for lunch at a small café on whose rear deck they sat at a painted table to watch the San Juan River tumble and eddy in a sulfurous haze that enveloped the near-naked bathers who waded and basked on the gravel bars amid huge and steaming boulders.

You done good back there, Palmer told her. It ain't me I'm worried about so much as your pa. They probly got a warrant out by now. We got to be careful who we talk to.

What's a Mormon? she asked him.

A Mormon is kindly like a Catholic, only from Utah.

Where's Utah?

West of here. The Utes is Indians, and the Mormons is white settlers.

How come that deputy thought we was Mormons?

I don't rightly know. We must look Utah somehows, and I guess he figured we wasn't Indians.

Below them, boys were running and splashing. Palmer rose and crossed to the railing and called down to them. The boys stopped and looked up, and one of them waved. Then they were off
again, sleek river otters in cutoff denims chasing and roughhousing in the vaporous shallows.

Damn, that looks like fun, he said, returning to his seat.

They ate sandwiches with lemonade, and Palmer ordered a beer. When they'd finished their dinners, they climbed down to the riverbank and Palmer rolled his pantlegs and waded into the steaming shoals while Lottie held his boots.

He talked to the boys. He fished coins from his pocket and tossed them, and the boys ran jostling and diving to claim them. When the coins were gone, he splashed at the boys and they at him, and he ran laughing and dripping back to where she waited on the gravel bank.

We'd best be movin on, he told her.

The high country through which they next passed was to Lottie like a veil uplifted to expose the glowing face of God.

Verdant grasslands joined with towering ponderosa pine and blue spruce interwoven with stands of quaking aspen. Ice-melt streams coursed and crashed on granite cobbles. Blue escarpments glowed with sunlit snow. Elk and mule deer grazed in tall blue-grass flecked with iris and lupine and mountain columbine. They rode with windows lowered, all the world's colors passing in a slow parade across the dusty glass of their windscreen.

They drove through Nutria and Grandview, across the Piedra and the Florida Rivers, and below the granite tower of Chimney Rock. The sun hung high before them, and they followed it for miles, topping out at last on a precipice high above the wide and mighty Animas, swift and boulder-studded in the canyon below.

There she is, Palmer told her. The river of souls.

They traced the river northward, descending on a cliff face
that switched back and deposited them at last amid smokestacks and warehouses, and then onto the ordered street grid of Durango, Colorado.

Lottie straightened. The main street when they found it was a canyon of corniced buildings of red brick and quoining sandstone built by Easterners as though in effigy of some grander place.

There was scarcely any traffic. Some parked cars, a few pedestrians. A single rider on horseback. They turned south onto the main street and drove its empty length until the pavement ended at the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad depot, where the train cars, massive and inert, sat slumbering on their tracks.

Even there, all was eerily quiet. As though the city, once alive and vibrant, now held its sooted breath.

They parked the Buick in the railyard plaza where the clip-clop of the shod horse was the only sound they heard. The rider when he reached them touched his hat brim and continued on until horse and rider and sound all vanished together around a corner.

What day is this? Palmer asked her.

Day of the week or day of the month?

Either one.

I don't know.

They started up the sidewalk. The storefronts they passed were mostly dark and mostly vacant. In one, a sign read CLOSED UNTIL SILVER = A DOLLAR, the paper curled and yellowed, the writing all but faded. It was a grim procession of padlocked doors and empty windows, or of sun-bleached displays of notions and dry goods rimed with spidery dust.

How will we find him?

What?

My pa. How are we gonna find him?