Leaning Land (11 page)

“Where’d he get killed?”

“Found him about a mile and a half east of Dark Mesa Village. Looked like he was drunk and trying to walk home, maybe, when somebody knifed him.”

“Where’d he get the whiskey?” Wager remembered passing a sign at the entrance to the reservation warning that no alcoholic beverages were allowed in the Ute Nation.

“It’s easy enough to bring it on the reservation.” Ray nodded as much to himself as to Wager. “A lot of people do. And Lawrence’s section’s right on the reservation boundary; when he wanted whiskey badly enough, all he had to do was get on his horse and ride across Narraguinnep Wash. Might take him half a day to ride to a liquor store and back, but he could have gone cross-country to Egnarville or Dry Creek, if he wanted. That still doesn’t tell me he was drinking with someone in the village the night he was killed; in fact, I never found a horse he could’ve ridden to town. And nobody I’ve talked to gave him a ride to town or saw him in the village or knew who he had a feud with.”

They rode in silence again, Wager half listening to the rocks being kicked up that struck the truck’s frame and fenders.

“There’s Luther Del Ponte’s place.” Ray wagged a single finger toward the horizon.

Wager noted the odometer and the miles they had covered since leaving Dark Mesa: twenty-three.

I
T WAS ANOTHER
of the split-level, suburban tract homes whose isolation on a tilted plain between two widely separated mesas looked both lonely and incongruous. Dark-colored, it stood near a spur of red sandstone that rose like a rooster comb. Beyond the house, glimpsed here and there as a deep fissure writhing through the rise of sage and cedars, was Narraguinnep Wash. A corral, made of old rubber tires hung in a line between horizontal poles, penned a pair of horses whose heads were up and turned in the direction of the approaching truck. One of those mud-covered domes could be seen, half hidden behind a screen of shoulder-high sagebrush in back of the house, and on the sand in front of it a television dish was tilted to the sky. A line of anemic, twisted telephone poles brought electricity and telephone wires from somewhere over a rise of brush-dotted land.

“Is that a sweat lodge? That mud hut?”

“A wickiup. Sometimes they’re used for sweat lodges. Other times like a Navajo hogan. They’re made of sticks and limbs and covered with mud. Some of the old people like living in them better than in a white man’s house—cooler, and they have their own space. Kind of an Indian mother-in-law’s apartment, you know?”

Wager nodded and looked over the half-dozen vehicles that sat around in the house’s clearing. Most were trucks that had been more or less stripped for parts; a motorcycle frame lay on its side beside a rusting cab and flatbed that lacked glass and wheels. In front of the house, angled in different directions, were parked two vehicles that apparently still ran: a newer minivan and a pickup truck that didn’t look too much better than the derelicts. From the doorless shade of one of the abandoned vehicles, a lean dog came out and stared at their approaching truck, ears raised intently, tail half lifted between alarm and wag.

Ray slowed to a gently lurching pace and approached to within a hundred yards or so of the house and then shut off his motor.

“We’ll wait a couple of minutes,” he told Wager. “Give them a chance to know we’re here.”

Wager listened to the silence and the faint stir of the wind in the stiff branches of sagebrush and across the sand and shoulders of pale, bare rock. “They didn’t hear us come up?”

“Probably. But it’s their house and they didn’t know we were coming. Pretty soon somebody’ll be out. Won’t be long.”

That’s what happened. After maybe five minutes of listening to their truck’s hot engine tick as it cooled, the front door opened and a bow-legged man wearing a black cowboy hat and denims slowly came down the steps to the grassless dirt of the cluttered yard. The dog started to approach him but the man gestured it away and it turned, tail down, back to its rusting truck. In no hurry, the man strolled toward them. He said something to Ray that Wager didn’t understand, and Ray answered. Then to Wager, “He says he’s glad to see us. Asks us to visit with him.”

“He speak English?”

“When he wants to, sure. Speaks some Ute and some Navajo, too, don’t you, Luther?” Through the cab window he introduced Wager in English as a policeman working for the state of Colorado. “He’s not with the federal government.”

Luther, black eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his teardrop glasses, studied Wager.

“He’s come here to find out about somebody,” said Ray. “Might be this somebody is related to you—a half brother, maybe. Might be this half brother had some bad trouble not too long ago. Might be this half brother’s wife said he came out to visit you three or four weeks ago, not too long before he had his trouble. This man,” he nodded to Wager, “wants to know what this half brother maybe said to you.”

Ray had explained that the bad luck, which came from talking about the dead, arose from using their names and thereby calling their spirits back to cause mischief for the living. A lot of Utes believed that what was good about a dead person went on to a good place; what was bad stayed here as an evil spirit, and that explained why there was so much trouble and pain and suffering in this life. Even most nontraditional Utes felt uneasy talking about the dead; many of them still believed in bad spirits that had a lot of power. So what you did was talk around the dead—avoid direct mention of their names, speak conditionally so the listening ghosts couldn’t be certain you meant them.

When someone died they were still buried as quickly as possible. A long time ago, they had been placed in an out-of-the-way crack in the rocks and covered with stones to keep animals from disturbing the corpse and its spirit. Now the BIA made them bury them in a cemetery whether or not they were Christian. It was said that some of the Uinta Utes used to build a platform to lift the corpse closer to heaven, but that information came from white men. What the other tribes did in their traditional burials was something a Ute just didn’t talk about if he had manners.

The place where a person had died was avoided; most Squaw Point Utes didn’t use the community swimming pool at Dark Mesa Village anymore because a boy had drowned there a few years ago, so it must have had evil spirits. They called it
ihupi’arat tubuts
—a place where ghosts waited. If someone died in a house, it was abandoned. That was why some of the bungalows in the Dark Mesa compound were boarded up. Like many Southern Utes, Ray’s parents were Christian and did not fully believe in the traditional ways of the dead. Ray, himself neither Christian nor traditional, had as hard a time believing in all the ghosts and bad spirits that haunted many of the Squaw Point Utes as he did believing that a man from the Jewish tribe rose from the grave, walked around awhile, and then flew up to heaven. “I’m sort of typical of my generation, I guess. Not much faith in any kind of spirits; everything depends on what we do ourselves—no god or ghost is going to help or hurt us. We got to do it ourselves.” He snorted. “If anything, whatever god there is needs our help, not the other way around.” But many of the Squaw Point Utes did believe in spirits and hexes because that was about the only cultural past that had been handed down to them—”It’s the stories their mothers and grandmothers learned from their grandparents and told the kids at bedtimes. And I guess it does support their belief in what happens to the dead: as a culture, the Squaw Point Utes are just about dead, and only the stories of bad ghosts and goblins are left; the good of their spirit world is gone away with their
po’rats
—their medicine men.”

Luther Del Ponte looked to be in his thirties. He had a short nose and a wide upper lip that rose out over his lower one. His jaw tapered to a fragile point. If it had not been for the two thick braids of black hair that hung in front of his shoulders, Wager thought he would look more like a Japanese scholar than an Indian.

“Why do you want to know this?” The man spoke to Ray but the question was to Wager.

“In case it wasn’t an accident,” he answered.

Luther used a scarred thumb to push his glasses up his nose while he thought over what Wager had said. “OK. Let’s go to the shade house.”

He turned and led the way, the heels of his cowboy boots leaving dents in the dry earth. Wager and Ray followed around behind the split-level house with its big fiberglass water tank. A patch of churned sand made the backyard distinct from the unfenced brush and weeds that surrounded it. Well-used toys littered the sand and a few half-buried tires made kid-sized seats. At the vague outer edge of the yard, a path wound between clumps of sage and leafless scrub oak for about fifty yards, to what looked like a six-foot-high table whose four legs were made of heavy sticks and whose top was a roughly woven mat of cottonwood branches with the dead leaves still on. In the shade beneath it, two children played in the sand, a boy around seven and a girl a year or two younger. When they noticed Wager, they froze like rabbits and stared at him with wide, black eyes.

“I would thank you if you kids went to play somewhere else so we could use the shade house now. These men have come a long way to talk to me.”

Wordless, they grabbed their toy trucks and plastic dinosaurs and ran off through the brush.

Luther led them under the low roof and then settled himself in the shade. Ray and Wager followed.

“Cooler here. Quieter than the house, too.” He tugged a blue stegosaurus from under his leg and set it near one of the roof’s uprights, out of the way. “No damn television here.”

Somewhere behind him, hidden by the gnarled, flaking trunks of the scrub oak, Wager heard the scuffle of small feet.

Ray settled into his cross-legged position. “This is nice. You sleep out here?”

“Sometimes—when the house is too hot. Good place to come when we got family visiting, too. Nice and quiet so a man can think.”

There was a silence and Wager, feeling his knees begin to twinge from the unaccustomed stretch, hoped they weren’t going to sit like this for too long. Luther fished in his shirt pocket for a package of cigarettes and offered them. “Smoke?”

Wager shook his head. “No thanks. I don’t smoke.”

Ray took one but just held it in his hand, not lighting up.

Luther lit his with a paper match and bobbed his head back to pull the smoke into his lungs.

Ray waited until Luther had set the cigarette package and matches on the sand beside him. “How’s the horses this spring?”

“Pretty good. Got two mares coming into foal. Stud by Three-hands. Maybe one of them will be pretty good.”

Ray explained to Wager. “Three-hands is one of the fastest quarter horses on the reservation. Damn good horse.”

“Better be good. Stud fees cost me enough.”

“What about the stock? Get through the winter OK?”

“Real good, a mild winter this time. Grass could be better but there’s lots of spring lambs—enough to make a Navajo jealous.”

Ray laughed. “How’s your mother doing?”

“OK, I guess. She moved to the village to live with Cynthia. She can visit her friends more there. She’s closer to the clinic, too.”

Cynthia, Ray told Wager, was one of Luther’s three sisters. She had a job with the food-stamp agency. “How’s the family? Wife? Kids?”

“They’re OK.”

And apparently less important, if Wager judged by the dismissal in Luther’s voice.

But not without problems: “My daughter Janie wants to get married now. I told her fifteen’s too young.”

Ray nodded and ran some sand between his fingers. It made a small mound like the bottom of an hourglass. “Who’s she want to marry?”

“Parley Red Bird. He just turned eighteen.”

“Well, they’ll have his eighteen money.”

“Yeah, I hope so. Then Janie’s eighteen money, then his twenty-one money, then hers. That’s what they think, anyway. Just like me and Cerise had, they think.” He shook his head. “But I don’t know how much money that’s going to be anymore. Nobody knows, now. Be what the Many Coats don’t take, I guess, and that won’t be much.” Another shake of his head. “Besides, it’s still too young. She’ll drop out of school, have kids, pretty soon even if they get some eighteen and twenty-one money, there won’t be nothing else.”

The two men fell silent. Apparently, it was a familiar story and one they had no answer to.

“Kids do what they want to,” Ray said at last.

Luther nodded. “It’s still too young. Her mother thinks it’s too young, too.” There was another silence, and something inside one of Wager’s knees started to twitch.

Luther offered more cigarettes. Wager shook his head; Ray held up the one he still had. When Luther had taken a few puffs, Ray said, “Maybe you can tell us something about this person. Anything he told you about what he was doing. Why he was where he was.”

A long, meditative draw on the cigarette. “This person was not Squaw Point Ute, only a little. Maybe this person will not get mad if I tell you. But,” and there was a long silence while Luther thought and smoked his cigarette down to a tiny stub before carefully rubbing it out on the arch of his boot, “maybe he would.”

That was the way it went, and Wager lost count of the times he shifted his weight to relieve the numbness in his butt or the stiffening ache in his knees. And when Luther finally started telling his story, it was oblique, removed as far as possible from his half brother, and it teased and irritated Wager with missing facts.

“You know who runs our tribal council.”

“The Many Coats.”

Luther nodded. “Mostly the Many Coats family. They have for a long time. They look out for themselves first. They take the trust money, they pay themselves a big salary and expenses, and if anybody complains they tell the BIA that that person is no good. That person should get his payments cut or he shouldn’t get any more tribal work or he shouldn’t be given a house.” He added in a lower voice, “And they use hexes. I know you don’t believe in these things, Ray, but people who argue with the Many Coats family get sick and die. They commit suicide, they have accidents, they go off by themselves into the canyons and live with their sheep all alone. I know these things.”