Leaning Land (25 page)

“OK,” said Ray. “He sees us. Let’s go.”

Wager followed as the tribal policeman picked his way between cactus and yucca spears up the rocky bluff, the sun hot on his shoulders and head.

Luther, face impassive in the shadow of his hat, greeted them.

“Cerise told us you might be here,” said Ray. “Looks like a good place for the sheep.”

“Pretty good.” They stood in silence for a few moments, watching the animals graze, looking at the horse and corral, at the shade house tucked under the trees. The cottonwoods were tall with thick, deeply furrowed bark and stubby limbs. A lot of them had been broken at one time or another, and the ragged gray of dead wood poked out here and there. They were old trees that had stubbornly survived in a harsh climate, but against the towering face of cliff behind them they looked dwarfed and fragile. “You come a long way.”

“Well, we’ve got some things we need to talk to you about. Couldn’t wait.”

“OK.”

He turned and led them into the welcome coolness of the grove. The wind in the new leaves of the underbrush made a sound that matched the steady, bright ripple of the creek. A bird twittered among the reeds down in the wash.

“This is nice,” Wager said.

Luther nodded, his thick glasses reflecting the mottled light. “Peaceful. No kids with the television on all the time.”

“Need one hell of an extension cord if they wanted to have one,” Ray said and laughed.

“Sometimes I bring one or two of them out here, just so they’ll know what it’s like without it,” said Luther. “But after a while they want to go back. Get bored, you know.”

Ray nodded as they squatted on cool, soft sand. A light breeze brought the faint, acrid smell of animal urine from the corral, but Wager welcomed it for drying his sweaty face and neck.

“We have to ask some questions, Luther. We have to know some things about your brother, about some other people.”

“OK. You want a cigarette?”

This time Wager followed Ray’s example and took one, keeping it unlit in his hand while Luther held a match to his own.

“All this is the land your father gave to your brother, right?”

He nodded, his thick glasses sliding a bit down his nose.

“And I hear that Ramey Many Coats wanted to buy this land from your brother. And the land east of here.”

Another nod.

“Why, Luther?”

The man took his time lighting his cigarette. “Ramey wants everything he can get. He’s a Many Coats.”

“I hear the tribal council is thinking of selling him the land east of here—the land that belonged to that man.”

“It don’t surprise me none.”

“It surprises me, Luther. So I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Ramey will buy that man’s land, but he doesn’t run sheep. He will buy that man’s land, but there’s only enough water for sheep and not enough to farm. He will buy that man’s land, but to get here, he has to drive sixty, seventy miles around Siva’atu Mesa and Narraguinnep Wash. He will buy that man’s land, but there’s closer and better land he could buy down near Waini Suuvu Mesa. So I’m surprised: why does he buy that land?”

The man protected his mouth by drawing deeply on the cigarette, then holding the smoke down for a long time. When it came out it was almost colorless. But he said nothing.

Wager listened to the song of a cricket somewhere in the sun-heated grass beyond the trees; an insect zinged between the seated men and was gone. He felt his knees start to tighten from his crossed legs. Ray, not looking at anyone, dribbled sand through his fingers for a long time before going on. “I hear big things may happen on the Flying W ranch over there.” His head nodded toward the far side of the wash. “You hear anything about that?”

Luther’s shoulders rose and fell with a deep sigh. “I heard a little about it. Not much.”

“And I hear the tribal council is thinking of finally putting up that casino for gambling.”

The brim of Luther’s hat tilted slightly. “They been talking about that for a long time.”

“Is this where they’re going to put it up, Luther? Up on the land east of here? The land Ramey Many Coats wants to buy?”

His voice was even quieter and Wager had to strain to hear. “I don’t know. Maybe so. You ask Ramey.”

“Where will they get the water?”

The man’s black eyes flicked up at Ray and then dropped back to the sand somewhere in front of his folded knees.

“Knife Springs is good water. Year-round water. Maybe your brother wanted to sell them his portion because they wanted to put their casino near this water.” Ray waited. When the man remained silent, he went on. “Maybe he was going to sell this land and maybe somebody didn’t want him to.” Another long pause. “Maybe he was killed because of that, Luther.”

“I don’t know. I have to go to my sheep now.” He pressed the half-smoked cigarette in the sand and stood to shove his glasses up on his nose with his thumb. It was a gesture that for some reason made Wager think of what Luther must have looked like as a little boy wearing glasses.

Ray stood, too. “OK. Sheep have to be taken care of. But if that’s what happened, I think Rubin Del Ponte’s ghost is very unhappy. If that’s what happened to Rubin Del Ponte, I think his ghost will bring bad luck to whoever killed him.”

“You leave!” Fear at the sound of the dead man’s name made Luther’s voice squeaky. “I don’t want you here no more—you leave now!”

On the way back, Wager asked, “When did you learn about the council selling Walter Lawrence’s land to Ramey?”

Ray’s smile was not one of humor. “I haven’t.” He tossed away the cigarette Luther had given him. “It was just a guess from what you told me. But I think I better find out.”

A
MILE OR
so after climbing the north bank of Narraguinnep Wash, they topped the crest of a low bridge and swung left to jolt down into a wide, shallow bowl that tipped gently toward the west. It was thirty miles, perhaps, from horizon to horizon. Inside the bowl, the scrub desert sloped toward its lowest point, where a cluster of tiny buildings marked a distant ranch. A fringe of leafless trees made a little square smudge at one spot, hiding the main house from view, but most of the outbuildings sat shadeless in the sun and unguarded from any direction against the wind. It struck Wager that this place was similar to some of those isolated ranches he had flown over on his way from Denver to Cortez—a collection of forlorn buildings surrounded by a patch of hoof-worn dirt and the focus of wavering cattle trails that converged from out of the surrounding miles of empty sagebrush.

Dotting the vast depression and scattered widely apart were grazing cows, their dark-red backs showing above the gray-blue sage. To Wager’s right, on the northwest horizon, the tips of the La Sal mountain range in Utah showed snow-covered and sharp above the flat rim of the bowl. Ahead, beyond the ranch, the world seemed to drop away into a distance that was unbroken by anything except heat waves. At other points of the compass, mesas and buttes formed distant landmarks, and on their left, looking even bigger than it had when they were at its base, stood the split and weathered wall of Siva’atu Mesa.

“Where is Knife Springs from here?” Wager asked.

Ray glanced toward the rock face. “Over there, two, maybe three miles. It’s down there, under that point.”

Wager wasn’t sure which point Ray meant—there seemed to be a dozen of them rippling along the palisade of rock, all looking about the same—but that wasn’t what was important. “It’s not that far away, is it?”

“Not if they can put a bridge over the wash. If the tribal casino went in at Knife Springs, and the condos were on that high ground on this side of the wash, they’d be even closer together—four, five hundred yards, with a bridge.”

Wager watched the red-and-orange spires and ledges swing slowly past on the other side of the now invisible Narraguinnep Wash. The only eye-catching features on this side of the wash were the ranch and a string of skinny telephone poles that strode across the desert and out of sight over the eastern ridge behind them.

“I guess I’m just not a visionary kind of guy,” said Wager. “I can’t see condos, a golf course, and five thousand people filling up this place.”

Ray shook his head, mirrored glasses reflecting the line of the horizon and the empty blue sky above it. “This is high desert, all right. Good for nothing but cows, and not more than two or three of them on a square mile.” As he guided the truck along the dips and bumps of the two-rut road, he told Wager about the ranch manager, a bachelor named Archibeque who, with an occasional ranch hand or two, had been working the place for almost thirty years. “They call him ‘Happy,’ but I don’t know if that’s because he is or because he’s lived by himself for too long.” And about the founding of the ranch in the last century by a Mormon who settled it and died struggling against the empty land. His descendants hung on until they could take it no more, then sold out to an absentee owner, an Englishman, in the early 1900s. “It’s changed hands three or four times since then: never has made much money, I figure. The only reason the place is here is because the Mormon wanted to be left alone with his wives, and he found enough water to allow that.” He lifted a finger from the steering wheel to point toward the tiny windmill whose spinning vanes winked with sunlight. “I’ll bet this whole bowl drains into some aquifer or underground pool. See how the ranch sits in the lowest spot? Maybe there used to be a spring or a sink in there.” The man’s cap brim bobbed to his left and he intently studied something in that distance. “But there’s another windmill a few miles down that way on higher land. Along with a stock tank.” He slowed the truck to a halt and stared more closely at something that Wager could not see. “And those cedars—look how they make a kind of wide strip coming across the bowl from the southwest.”

With the tribal policeman pointing it out, Wager could note a pattern in the almost black dots of round, stubby trees. They grew hundreds of yards apart, as Ray said, separated by the clumps of gray sage. The cedars started below the western ridge that the truck faced and made a wide band that curved across the site of the ranch house. Then, even farther apart and somewhere on the southeast rise behind them, the growth of trees ended. “I see it. But I’m not sure what I’m looking at.”

“Maybe there’s an underground river runs through here. Or a water table. Something holding enough water, anyway, to keep feeding those trees over a couple of hundred years.” He put the truck in gear and started rolling again. “If there is, you might see a golf course out here, Gabe.”

It took another half hour of driving—ten, twelve miles—to reach the ranch gate, a pair of tall poles capped with a crossbar. A Flying W welded in rusty iron dangled from the middle of the bar. The tires rumbled briefly on a cattle guard of rails, and Ray pulled to a halt in the shade from the line of the ill-tended and naked Lombardies that surrounded the ranch house.

It was square, built of large blocks of sandstone that lifted to a second story. A shallow roof capped it, and flat dormers with small windows showed a third level cramped under the rusting sheets of galvanized tin. A deep veranda, shaded by its own unpainted and rust-scarred tin roof, ran around the three sides they could see. A yellow dog, leaning back on its haunches with its tail between its legs, barked excitedly from a corner of the steps. Ray got out of the truck, slamming its door loudly, and Wager followed. “White folks expect you to knock on the door,” Ray said. “They pretend they don’t hear anything until you knock.”

Barking even more frantically, the dog retreated into the shadow under the veranda, darting forward with a growl toward their ankles as they went up the porch stairs. Ray feinted an arm at it and it ran off to hide behind the TV dish angled in a corner of the yard. “Sneaky one. Not as bad as some Indian dogs I know, but sneaky enough.” He rapped loudly on the frame, the rusty screen door chattering a reply.

After a minute or two, they heard the thud of heels and a tall stoop-shouldered man whose whiskery face seemed to sag with worry appeared out of the dimness of the room. “Do for you folks?”

“Hello, Happy. Remember me? Ray, the Indian cop?”

The man squinted. “Sure! You ever find them rustlers?”

Ray had told Wager about last year’s excitement: a cattle truck that had made three trips and stolen about thirty head from open range on the BLM land—some from the reservation, some from the Flying W. “Not a thing; probably never will.”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, thinking it over. “Bastards.” His eyes widened suddenly. “They doing it again? That why you’re here?”

“Nope.” He introduced Wager. “We’d like to ask some questions about the new owners. If they’ve told you anything about their plans for the place.”

“Not much, they ain’t. But come on in, anyway.” He held open the screen door and wagged a hand at the sagging couch and two worn armchairs placed in a semicircle to face a blank television set. The room was generally clean but, except for the beat-up furniture showing occasional spurts of stuffing, almost bare. It didn’t have much color, either, and the feel of the space was brown. Against the front wall and under a curtainless window leaned a small, scarred bookcase holding two shelves of worn and splayed paperback books; Wager could see part of the title on one curling cover: “—ers of the —rple Sage.” Set out from an interior wall stood a large oil stove, cold now, on a square of cracked and faded linoleum. Its chimney pipe disappeared into an asbestos grommet set into what looked like a bricked-up fireplace. “I got some coffee on. Folks want some coffee?”

Both men declined and Happy looked even sadder. “It’s good coffee. I make real good coffee.”

“Well, I guess I could use a cup,” said Ray. Wager shook his head again; if he’d wanted coffee he’d have accepted it the first time.

The stoop-shouldered man came back with a heavy mug for Ray and one for himself. “Sure I can’t get you one?”

“No. Thanks. I’m fine.”

Ray sipped at his cup and Wager saw the muscle of his jaw tighten as he swallowed. “That’s … real coffee all right, Happy.”

The sad face lightened a bit. “The boys likes it. Says it gets them up and going in the mornings.”