Leaning Land (10 page)

“If you’ll tell me how to get there, yes.”

Again there was a pause, giving Wager as much time as he needed to add anything. “Be better if I show you.” He tilted his head toward the desert on the other side of the office wall. “It’s a long way out there, easy to get lost if you don’t know the country. Be better if we take my truck, too.”

After the first mile or two, after the road had changed from gravel to graded dirt to just a two-rut track through the sagebrush and wind-worn rock, Wager was glad they had the stiff but high-sprung pickup truck instead of his spongy and low sedan. Ray seemed to drive too fast for the road, but he managed somehow to miss the biggest holes and stones and to talk to Wager at the same time. At first he wanted to know about Wager: what kind of assignments he’d had, what the job in Denver was like, what the pay and benefits were, information about the politics and administration of the DPD. It was the kind of stuff cops asked each other when they were trying to make up their minds as to how helpful to be. Wager told as much as the man wanted to know. Finally Ray moved closer to what Wager was interested in.

“Have you touched bases yet with the FBI? Agent Durkin?”

“I met him yesterday.”

“What’s he say about you coming on the reservation?”

“He doesn’t have any trouble with it. In fact, he arranged jurisdiction for me.”

A grunt that didn’t decipher well.

“How does your office get along with his?” Wager asked.

“We get along.” He glanced at Wager. “Most of what the tribal police handle is misdemeanor stuff. A little theft, family violence, search and rescue, rounding up drunks. By charter we don’t handle much in the way of felonies, and never homicides.” If there was any resentment about that, it didn’t show in his voice.

“How do you think Rubin Del Ponte died?”

A snort that was half laugh, half scorn. “You know you’re the first one to ask me that? Sheriff Spurlock does things his way, Agent Durkin’s not too interested in Rubin, and neither one of them thinks the tribal police would be much help anyway.” He braked as the road fell suddenly into a gully whose vertical walls, carved into fluted columns of dark red sand, twisted away, higher than the vehicle. “Some truth to that, I guess. A lot of Indians don’t talk to each other about dead people—bad manners because it brings bad luck.” Shifting into first, he eased the truck up the other side, going slowly so the rear wheels would not kick loose on the stony road. “Tabeguache Wash—leads off into Tabeguache Canyon maybe ten miles that way.” He wagged a hand toward the lowering sun. “All the land around here runs off west that way—’The Leaning Land,’ my people call it. Another hundred and fifty miles, it all drains into the Grand Canyon.” He shifted through the gears as they picked up speed and the bumps came more rapidly again. “That’s air miles. You follow one of the canyons, it could be two, maybe three hundred miles, it winds around so much.” Then, “I think he was maybe killed by somebody.”

“What makes you think that?”

“He was on foot.”

Wager waited for more explanation, but none came. “What about an accident? Hitchhiking and hit by a car, or drunk and passed out?”

“Didn’t drink—hated the stuff, his stepmother says. And no Ute with a car’s going to walk or hitchhike unless it’s broke down. His wasn’t broke down, what I heard.”

Gabe considered that. “Any idea who might want to kill him?”

A flash of white teeth. “Somebody who didn’t like him, I guess.”

Wager didn’t laugh; it was true, not funny. “Why didn’t he live on the reservation with the rest of his family?”

Ray glanced at Wager. “How much do you know about the Utes?”

“Used to haul in my share of drunk Native Americans when I patrolled Larimer Street. Some of them were Utes, I guess.”

Another quick grin, this one with a slightly bitter twist. “I can’t tell a German from a Frenchman, either, and you Native Hispanics all look alike, too.” The truck tilted heavily to Wager’s side as the two-rut track swung across a wide shoulder of slickrock webbed with cracks that held sprouts of tough grass and stunted sagebrush. “Rubin didn’t want to live here. And under the new tribal rules that came in three years ago, he was no longer eligible to even if he’d wanted to; got to be at least half-blood to live on the reservation, now. That was so the government doesn’t have to give money to so many people. Rubin’s dad, Marshall, his father was Mexican and his mother a Squaw Point Ute from here. Mildred Bow. That made Marshall Del Ponte half Ute. The grandfather took Marshall’s mother over to the San Luis Valley, raised cattle on a ranch owned by the Del Ponte side of the family. That’s where Marshall was born. He married a white woman over there and had Rubin—quarter Ute—then he divorced her and left San Luis and moved back here to Squaw Point Reservation, married a Squaw Point girl, Isabel Sena. Marshall died maybe five years ago. Drank himself to death, of course. So Rubin’s brother and sisters are three-quarters Squaw Pointe Ute and they can live here. That’s generally the tribe on this reservation, Squaw Point Utes. Them and a few from the White River and Uncompaghre tribes.” He explained, “Most of the Ute Mountain Utes are down on the Ute Mountain Reservation—down in Four Corners near Cortez and Towaoc. Most of the Uncompaghre and White River tribes are up in Utah—Uintah and Ouray reservations. The Southern Utes—my tribe—are on the Southern Ute reservation over by Ignacio: the Kapu’ute band and my band, the Mowhache. We’re all Utes, but we come from different tribes and different bands. So even if we all look alike, we’re not all like, see what I mean?”

Wager nodded. “I see.” Some of it, anyway—the general picture, which was all he wanted to have to know right now. The complexity of Rubin’s family ties and the tangle of his cousins sounded even worse than Wager’s own, and if it wasn’t going to bear on the case, Wager wasn’t interested.

“What we got on this reservation is a mixture, people who didn’t want to go to those other reservations for one reason or another: some Paiutes and even a few Apaches. Even a couple Navajo families who bought out some of the Utes and moved in. A real American melting pot, you know?”

“How did you get here?”

“I was hired to come: no tribal ties, no family bias.” A slight hesitation before he added, “They’ve had a lot of trouble here for a long time with a couple of families running the tribal council, stealing the tribal money, taking over the common land, hiring their own relatives, that kind of thing. So after the last election, which was mostly honest, the new tribal council went to BIA and asked to hire an outsider to run the police. So I got the job. It’s better this way, but sometimes it makes things hard.” A mild shrug that dismissed a lot of personal loss. “There’s weird stuff goes on around here sometimes and it’s better I’m not part of it. This way I’m everybody’s enemy.”

Wager could understand the man’s feelings: a lot of cops were outside the communities they were hired to protect and serve. “What kind of weird stuff?”

“Family feuds, one group jealous of another. They’re always maneuvering, you know? Always think some other family’s getting more than they are.”

“Why did Rubin’s father come here?”

“So he could register into the tribe and get his share of the tribal royalties money.” He moved his hand, palm down, over the dash. “Looks like shit out there, don’t it? Sand, rock, sky. Nothing. Except for the oil, gas, coal. Uranium, too, but the market for that’s gone bad. And we finally won some court cases; started getting property settlements for the stolen lands and broken treaties. But only registered tribal members can share it.”

“That means full-bloods, right?”

“Half-bloods.” Another shrug. “Too many people had already married outside their tribes to limit it to full-bloods. Some of the bands didn’t even exist anymore, if you only counted full-bloods. Anyway, after the property settlement of 1952, a lot of people came back to the reservations. Got a house, some money, food stamps and medical care, land for horses. Damn near doubled our populations in a couple of years.

“The Utes were the last Native Americans to be put on reservations—1880—and we filed court claims in 1932 for compensation for lands taken in violation of the treaties. It was finally settled in 1952 and the indemnity distributed in 1961. Hell,” he smiled again, “we only signed a peace treaty with the Comanches in 1977. We’re still pretty much savages, you see.”

“Rubin’s father came here in 1961?” The file Wager had read said Rubin had been born in 1965.

“No. Later, maybe seventy-two or seventy-three. That was when the tribe started getting royalties from gas and oil companies. He missed out on the first disbursal, so he didn’t want to miss the oil money.”

“And he could just move in and get a share?”

“He was half Squaw Point Ute and had his mother’s relations living here—the Box family. And at the time, the tribe was trying to build up its numbers, too; so the council let in about anybody who could come up with any kind of blood claim.” He tugged at a corner of the brim of his baseball cap. “You see, the way it was for a long time, the tribes got welfare per capita—the more people, the more money came into the tribe’s collective account. That’s starting to change, now—Washington found out it’s too expensive. People started having too many babies, some of the tribal councils opened membership to quarter-bloods and even one-eighths. Like on this reservation, where all the I am money still goes into the central account and then gets used for tribal expenses, management costs, disbursal, eighteen money, twenty-one money, so on.” A shrug. “But the government said ‘Enough already.’ Now the government’s got a new idea, the sovereignty policy, they call it. Now only half-bloods and full-bloods are supposed to live on this reservation and collect benefits. But legally, it’s all screwed up—quarter-bloods can’t live here or claim benefits anymore, but they can inherit land allotments if they’re legitimate heirs. That means they can own and even sell reservation land, but they can’t live on it. It’s really screwed up.”

Wager shook his head. “You lost me somewhere in there. What’s I am money and eighteen money?”

“‘I am,’ that’s what the government pays you when you say ‘I am a Squaw Point Ute’ or ‘I am a Southern Ute.’ Those payments start when you’re born. When a child turns eighteen, they get a lump sum from their trust fund of I am money, which the tribal council manages. Eight, ten thousand dollars. Then more when they turn twenty-one: eighteen and twenty-one money. Unless some of the council members steal it. That’s what happened here, a while back. It’s supposed to give kids a stake to get started with. Buy a house, get married, start a business, go to college, whatever.” He shook his head. “Most of the kids here, if they have any eighteen money, they go down to Cortez, buy a new car, party it up, and end up back on the reservation with nothing.” Another shake of the head. “We do better: my tribe, the Southern Utes. A lot of these Squaw Point people, they just don’t care.”

“Why not?”

Ray took a while to answer, the silver of his mirrored sunglasses staring somewhere down the twisting ruts ahead. When he spoke again, the brittle irony of his voice had been replaced by a kind of weariness. “They’ve been broken, I guess. Their great-grandparents were broken when they were pushed out of the mountains and over into the desert. That was when almost all of the tribal leaders—adults and old folks—died: TB, whiskey, suicide. For thirty years, just about no death on this reservation was from natural causes; they were all caused by whiskey. Suicide, accident, overdose, homicide. All caused by whiskey. And nothing had been written down, none of the stories, none of the chants and songs—it was all oral. So when the old ones died off, most of that went with them. There’s not even any more Ute medicine men on this reservation—somebody wants a traditional cure, they have to hire a Navajo medicine man. A Navajo! They charge, too; a thousand, two thousand dollars—more than they charge their own people. So what happened, those first kids, the first ones born on the reservation had to just about raise themselves. Then they had their own kids and grand-kids who did the same. And,” his voice grew ironic again, “the only people to teach them were the white men and the BIA; so they learned what a dollar was worth and how to steal from people who trusted them and that Jesus loved them. It broke their spirit.”

Wager said nothing. He had nothing to say.

“But it happened a long time ago. Now it’s time they changed. It’s goddamn hard, but other tribes have done it.” His hand slapped the steering wheel for emphasis. “It’s time, man!”

They rode in silence for a long while. Wager felt as if he ought to have a hard time imagining the fragmented and bewildered lives of those reservation kids, but he didn’t; it sounded depressingly similar to life in the Denver projects, like the things he saw as a cop in the inner city, like the throwaway kids who drifted through the alleys and dimly lit parks of nighttime Denver. It sounded depressingly like the forgotten corners of the rest of America, like the lost lives that the nation’s business and government leaders said were worth nothing and deserved the punishment they got because to do something might cut their own profits or reduce their own tax breaks.

“Did you help Durkin investigate Walter Lawrence’s death?”

Ray nodded. “A little bit—rounded up some witnesses so Durkin could question them. That’s all I was asked to do.”

“How’d he die?”

“Knife in the back. Blood test showed plenty of alcohol, so Durkin decided it was a fight between a couple of drunks.”

“Do you agree?”

“I’m not as sure as Durkin is.”

“Why?”

“No other signs of a fight. And Lawrence mostly stayed by himself: no kids, no close relatives living on the rez, his wife died a long time ago, and he never visited his wife’s relatives. A real loner—just him and his sheep. Who would he fight with?”

Wager didn’t have an answer to that. “Any ties to the deaths of the federal agents? Holtzer and Kershaw?”

“Doesn’t look that way. Far as I know, Lawrence had as little to do with them as he did with anybody else. Maybe less, since he made no secret about not trusting any white men. He ran a few sheep on some land on Narraguinnep Wash, a couple of miles above Luther Del Ponte’s place. Came into Dark Mesa maybe once a month or so for salt and tobacco.” Ray shifted into a higher gear as the track pulled out of a rock-choked valley and onto a sandy flat covered thinly by sagebrush and yucca spikes. “If he hadn’t been stabbed in the back, there wouldn’t be any reason to think anybody killed him; he hardly ever saw anybody, didn’t have anything anybody would want. And nobody’s talking about it that I’ve heard of. But like I said, they think it’s real bad luck to talk about the dead.”